Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 5 & 6

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Friday, July 29, 2011 and Saturday, July 30, 2011

My Friday ended up being an unplanned vacation day courtesy of my cat. I didn't get any sleep at all on Thursday night due to multiple, um, hairball incidents. Every time I'd start to drift off there was another one. So Friday started with a phone call to the vet to discuss preventative measures. I spent most of the day alternating between napping, checking email, and watching the cat like a hawk for another hairball incident. Yes, I was pretty much useless. That's what happens when I don't get any sleep.

What that also means is that I have some work to do this weekend that didn't happen yesterday and so I'm prepared for Monday. So after my Saturday morning trip to the local farmers' market, I settled down with iced coffee and my laptop for a few hours starting around 11:30am to get some much needed work done via remote desktop.

First things first, edit the notes from the PCC hybrid bib records task group. I get them cleaned up and post them in Google Docs for the group to review. We all have our assignments for next week. My job is to start work on the introduction and background sections of our report.

I also answer several emails regarding local 856 practices (that's the MARC field for URLs for you non-catalogers) and other miscellaneous emails. I also deal with comments on a proposed task force the PCC Standing Committee on Automation sent to the PCC Policy Committee. The feedback has been completely supportive, with a request to clarify at least one of the bullet points in the charge to prevent confusion as to the task force's purpose. Easy. Done.

I finish up work on a couple of record sets. First I verify the corrections to that pesky set of errored records. I comb through the file one more time, checking for any additional non-MARC-8 characters. I think (key word: *think*) I got them all. I upload the file to the shared drive and put in the request to load the corrected file.

Next record set problem is a file that got corrupted. I play around with it, changing the extension to see if that works. Voila! The file is usable again! I run a few validation processes on the file, and then re-compile it back into MARC so it can be loaded into our system. I can't believe it was that easy but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth so to speak.

Finally I copy our monthly statistics. An automatically generated report uploads to a website each month, including both daily activity and a monthly summary of the activities of everyone in my unit, including myself. It's a way to ensure nothing slips through the cracks when it comes to stats reporting. I have to submit a yearly report to our data librarian so he can submit statistics to the ARL and other groups. Between the automatic report on system activity plus the stats my staff submit (covering things the automatic report doesn't include, such as deletions), my numbers are about as accurate as possible.

1:45pm And done. I clean out the email listservs and make sure everything is saved and disconnect/log off from remote desktop. And I still have most of my Saturday afternoon to go play (read: run errands).

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 4

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Arrive at my desk 8:15am. Running late today. Took me three tries to leave the house as I had to keep going back for things I forgot. I'm just happy I didn't lock myself out. Also, there's a crane lift blocking the staff entrance this morning to lift materials into the construction space up on the sixth floor. I know we received an email about it yesterday, but of course I forgot until I arrived and had to backtrack to get to the alternate entrance opened instead. Sigh. I'm sure some of my absent mindedness this morning can be blamed on the 2am epic! battle! between my cat and a fly that somehow got into my apartment. Yes, I am tired.

Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Today is a mix of back to back meetings and then a lot of non-meeting time. Sometimes it's nice to have things divided into clear chunks so the day is less choppy.

I spent much of my time before my first meeting preparing for my meetings, especially the one I'm "hosting" at noon.

10:00am-11:00am Meeting of my staff working on barcoding the bound serial volumes and the staff that process things being sent to storage, which also involves a lot of barcoding. We follow the same procedures and policies for the barcoding piece of things, so everyone is getting together to compare notes and have a round robin type discussion.

11:00am-noon Roger Schoenfeld from ITHAKA gave a talk/presentation on the activities of ITHAKA for supporting teaching and learning. Unfortunately I had to leave early to open the online "room" for my noon meeting.

I inhale a quick snack before my meeting so my stomach growling doesn't get recorded.

Noon-1pm Online meeting of my PCC task group on RDA hybrid bib records. We've been meeting once a week using Adobe Connect to discuss things. As chair of the task group, I'm also the "host" in Adobe Connect so I monitor the chat, take notes, turn the recording function on/off, etc. We record our meetings so anyone that has to miss a meeting can catch up on the discussions. We're also using GoogleDocs to share meeting minutes/notes and drafts and communally comment on and edit them. Just communicating via email and document comments can be tricky, as threads get complicated and split and merge and you end up with multiple versions of documents floating around. Having a conversation once a week definitely helps us stay on track so we can meet our tight deadline of having a report ready by Sept. 1st. We have an outline for our report now, so I'm breathing a bit easier. :) Tomorrow morning I'll clean up the minutes and post them.

Once my meeting is over, I chat briefly with a colleague via GoogleTalk about editing a record to reflect changes in ownership and therefore, access. URLs are removed from the record. Done.

Now to eat lunch. Even with my snack I'm *starving* since it's after 1pm. Take some time during lunch to catch up on email and listservs. My RDA-L listserv folder is hitting critical mass on number of unread messages (over 1,500!). I think I'm going to have to spend some time tomorrow afternoon cleaning it out. Listserv folder cleaning is a good Friday afternoon activity.

Of course, since I'm eating lunch later than normal, my lunch involves multiple interruptions from my staff and colleagues. One of the hazards of eating lunch at my desk.

I manage to slip away from my desk for a break to see a friend that's stopped by with her baby girl. Squee baby break!

[Caution: MARC/tech speak ahead!] I return to the problem I started work on a few days ago: the records that errored when we loaded a record set. I identified and fixed the simple MARC error, and identified another possible culprit for the error rejection by our system: non-MARC diacritics. My colleague (rare books cataloger) let me know how to enter the superscript character directly in our system, so I know the diacritic exists, I just have to find the numeric equivalent so I can replace the errant character (or rather replace non-valid diacritic with the character followed by the valid the diacritic code or code sequence). I find the document that lists all the diacritics available and the keystrokes, but no numeric codes.

After a good hour of digging around online and through other records in our system, I finally find the code sequence used to represent a superscript (strangely: {esc}p#{esc}s is the exact sequence where # is replaced with the numeral you want as the superscript). Now comes the fun part, running through all the permutations to do a find/replace on the record file. It takes me the rest of the afternoon to find/replace all the errant characters in the file, even with MarcEdit's fantastic tools. In addition to the superscript issue, I find a few other non-MARC characters in the process (such as the infamous "curly" quotes that cause copy/paste issues in so many different situations). I really really hope this fixes the issues and when we try a re-load we don't get and more errored records back from the system. I'll check the file again in the morning when my eyes are fresh.

Sometimes I'm convinced systems/databases for libraries are specifically designed to drive catalogers nuts. I like logic and bulk editing and reports for clean up projects. These things are not easily accomplished with our current system. Sigh.

4:15pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:25pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Off to my much needed acupuncture appointment!

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 3

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Arrive at my desk 8am.. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

I return to my troubleshooting for the newly loaded records that are throwing up a proxy error. It appears an errant extra character ended up between our proxy prepend and the URL somehow. I'm not sure what happened. So I send a request off to our tech/systems people to check the handle server tables to see where the extra character (quote mark) is being introduced (is it in the proxy end? or is it before the URL in the table? is it a set of quotes embedded in the URL?). After a brief email exchange, it appears there's a random number of URLs from the collection with errant quotes embedded in them. It's not systematic or predictable. I'll have to fix them by hand and then have our tech/systems folks replace the URLs in the underlying handle server table. Good times.

I also submit a request to load a new update to a collection that's ready.

Next I submit a request to run a new set of records through a script of standard edits that all our MARC record sets get before I make any additional edits/additions to the records. All of our records have a standard note added about our license as well as a unique modifier added to the 035 (system number) to make the set easy to identify for maintenance once it's in the catalog. Other modifications the script can make is to convert a set of records for the print versions in to records for the online versions. These record sets are for local use only. Frequently the use is restricted by our license agreement when we get the records direct from the vendor, so they aren't sent to any utility, which is why we can do this "quick and dirty" conversion.

9:30am Weekly meeting with my supervisor and Dept. head to talk about what's going on. I have a short list of topics to discuss with her, and she usually has updates on things for me as well.

Back from my meeting and back to email. Feedback request on proposed PCC task force gets sent off to the Policy Committee.

The report on the URLs that need editing from the handle server table is waiting for me. Less than 15 minutes later they're fixed, checked, and sent back to be replaced in the table.

I finish updating the spreadsheet we use to track MARC record sets and FTP it to the library's website server.

And suddenly it's 5 minutes to noon and time for lunch. It's Wednesday, which means the guys from Beechwood Orchards are on campus with lots of fresh, local, and delicious fruit! It's stone fruit season, and the options are overwhelming. I opted for nectarines and a pint of fantastic heirloom cherry tomatoes. They taste like summer!

After lunch I spend some time doing some CONSER cataloging. My intern (who unfortunately departed the end of June) did a lot of of work prepping a large number of records that need updating. I'm slowly working my way through the massive pile she left me. It's a mix of print serials, online databases, online books, and some other weird stuff.

I also finish up a couple of serial records for print Bengali serials on cinema. Fortunately we have a number of language and subject area specialists that work in my library. When a resource is in a language I can't read (Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, etc.), I start the serial record, and then pass it off to the language specialist who fills in the information for me from the resource and adds any fields in non-Roman scripts. I finish up the coding on the record once all the data has been transcribed (or described), and done! One record for a serial in a language I can't read. It's a very effective workflow.

2:30-4:00pm Monthly meeting for the supervisors' group that I coordinate/moderate/chair. Lots of discussion.

Back to my desk to address/answer the deluge of email messages that arrived in the previous 90 minutes. Seriously. A deluge of email. Some days I swear my inbox is made of bunnies that are spawning more bunnies faster than the speed of light.

4:45pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:50pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. A friend and I have post work plans for dinner (it's the University City Dining Days so great deals at fantastic local restaurants) and the Harry Potter movie! A lovely mid-week break in my routine.

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 2

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Arrive at my desk about 8:05am. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Surprisingly, I have no meetings, appointments, etc. on my calendar today. Quick! Hide me!

I spend some time investigating the server reference in a local handle URL (aka local PURL) that I had never seen before. [caution: MARC speak ahead!] This came up due to an email asking questions about what to do if there's no subfield in the 856 to mask the URL in the public display. The example in the email included a handle with the new-to-me handle server reference in the address. Ultimately, after asking a few additional questions, I have two new things on my to-do list that spawned from the email: what to do with things that have no indicators present in the 856 field, and I need to further investigate what things have the new-to-me server reference and whether they should even be visible to the public. If so, then we'll need to do some metadata cleanup to add some subfields to mask the URL and tell the public where the link takes them. Time to request a report from our system (all report queries to to the system server are made by our tech/systems folks - I don't have access to the report functionality).

I reply to the email, indicating the changes on the ingest/display specs for our OPAC (we're still in the development/testing phase) to answer the original question about display when there's no subfield to mask the URL. Ultimately I end up on the phone with the team leader for the user interface design team I'm on to nail down the specific language we need to use. Lots of [] statements and OR and AND boolean statements mashed together. All of this will have to be confirmed at a meeting next week, but we think our proposal will be approved with no objections.

I then return to the ebook cataloging records I started yesterday and finally finish them. I import the new records into our system and email my staff person to complete the local processing.

I remember I need to send email reminder to all librarians about a meeting tomorrow afternoon. I send it promptly before I forget again.

And all of that happened before 10:20am.

The rest of the morning is spent on work with MARC record sets. I have two sets ready for editing. [caution: more MARC speak ahead!] We usually do minor modifications on all of our record sets to add additional access points (at the request of the bibliographer), delete 9xx fields that conflict with local use, and normalize specific MARC fields so limits work properly in our OPAC. Once my additional edits are complete, I have to amend the ticket with our tech/systems folks so they know they files are ready for loading into our catalog.

11:45am A colleague stops by. Her computer crashed and when she got her new one, all her OCLC authorizations and settings were gone. This happens with surprising regularity (the loss of settings). I am the keeper of the master list of OCLC authorizations for our libraries, so after finding out what she needs to do and what her staff need to do, I write down the authos she needs.

12:15pm Time for lunch! And a walk over to the Philadelphia Runner store in search of a pair of long-ish running shorts. The shorts I've been using aren't designed for running, and well, that can be uncomfortable when they get twisted. Unfortunately, they only have the super-short summer styles in. Looks like I'll have to order a pair with a longer inseam from REI instead (bonus! I have a 20% off coupon for one full-price item at REI!).

During lunch I get notification that the URLs in the most recent collection set of MARC records we loaded are throwing up a proxy error page. Damn. Forward the email to the appropriate colleagues for proxy troubleshooting. I also get the error file from the load sent to me. In good news 1,010 records DID load. But 76 records didn't load for reasons unknown. Only 2 records have an easily identifiable MARC error...the rest are mystery errors. Now to attempt to troubleshoot/fix the errors and load the records again.

I do eventually figure out that some of the records errored because they have a non-Unicode/non-MARC8 character in a note field: a superscript. Now I just have to figure out how to fix those and figure out why the rest of the records errored. I email my colleague that's a rare books cataloger to find out how they enter superscript characters for signatures.

I spend the rest of the afternoon alternating error fixes with Program for Cooperative Cataloging committee and task group work. The PCC Policy Committee (I'm a member since I'm current chair of the Standing Committee on Automation) has a document for review. My Standing Committee has a proposal in for a task group and we need to respond to comments from the PCC Steering Committee so it can move forward ASAP. The PCC RDA hybrid bib record task group I'm chairing has several documents I need to review and comment on. It's a busy time for the PCC.

4:00pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:10pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Today I *have* to leave on time as I have to get somewhere in Center City before 5pm.

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 1

I realize this blog has been silent for quite some time, but it's time for another round of Library Day in the Life posts which is an excellent reason to revive it. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Obligatory background: I'm a cataloger at a rather large academic library. Specifically a cataloger of electronic resources (anything online, in any format), and continuing resources (serials, etc.). I participate in the PCC program, doing NACO and both CONSER and BIBCO work depending on what I'm dealing with at the time. I also participate in committee work for the PCC, ALA ALCTS, and NASIG.

I am head of a unit that handles the cataloging, maintenance and inventory control of continuing resources (both serials and integrating resources) and electronic resources (online resources) for all units of the Libraries by updating and maintaining bibliographic, holdings and item records. I have four para-professional (or support) staff in my unit. Two that work an early shift, and two that work a later shift. In an attempt to cover the most ground, my schedule says I work from 8am to 4pm, although I usually don't actually get out of the office until 4:30 or 5pm.

The majority of time spent on the cataloging for continuing resources and many online resources is maintenance work and updating of the bibliographic records to reflect current information. Changes can be anything from the frequency, to a change in publisher, to a title variation or title change. Cataloging these types of materials is like trying to hit a moving target or nailing jello to the wall. There's also the ongoing inventory maintenance on our holdings records to deal with keeping our holdings current, including withdrawn/lost/missing volumes, general edits to fix accuracy issues, etc. I also spend a large amount of time managing the bulk loads of MARC records for ebooks and managing the cataloging of individual ebooks and ebooks series that aren't available in sets but require regular maintenance and updating.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Arrive at work a little after 8am. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

First order of business: review minutes from my committee's meeting at ALA Annual. I unfortunately missed the meeting, so I need to read the minutes closely to catch up on what we're doing. I'm currently the Continuing Resources Section representative to the ALCTS Division-level Organization & Bylaws Committee. I agreed to serve because this committee has nothing to do with cataloging or continuing resources, so I get to interact with colleagues from other divisions and who do completely different work than I do. It's refreshing and requires me to think differently (which is a good thing).

Next I work on ebook sets. I'm tracking in Evernote what stage each collection is in; which have open tickets; which need tickets opened for bulk loading process by our technology/systems folks.

During my ebook sets work, I'm interrupted by a rush ebook cataloging request (2 individual titles), required updates to several serial records as a result of the ebook cataloging request, and multiple questions from my staff about a current transfer and barcoding project. I log into the secondary ebooks general email account to see the rush request emails and reply/forward to the appropriate individuals.

10:00am and 10:30am - Bi-weekly check-in meetings with 2 of my 4 staff. Next week I'll have my meeting with my remaining two staff. This is something new I'm trying. Management I've learned over the past 2 years is an ever evolving process. I try different things, some work, some don't. I'm constantly having to learn and improve as a manager. These bi-weekly meetings are to try to improve/increase communication with my staff by having regular face-to-face conversations. Hopefully it will help address problems before they become crises. It also presents more opportunities to get solutions for things directly from them. I don't have to solve the problems, I just have to support the solution and the process.

Back to ebook sets work.

Interrupted again by the arrival of the two grant staff that will be guests in our Unit's space. We happened to have two empty cubicles with the departure of my intern the end of June. So until December, the grant staff will be using the intern cubicle and the student cubicle in my Unit's space. I introduce myself and make sure they know where the essentials (bathroom, water cooler, refrigerator) are and find out when they will be around the next few weeks. My staff had requested an informal meet and greet since we're sharing space. While the grant staff are not part of my unit or even under the umbrella of my department or in the tech services division (they're part of a completely different department and division in the library), we do want to ensure that things aren't awkward and that the space sharing goes smoothly. So I reserve a room for a mid-morning meet and greet with everyone early next week after our guest have settled in a bit.

12:30 - Brownbag lunch discussion for librarians. This is also something new. An informal discussion on a different topic suggested by ourselves each week. Essentially informal professional development. Unfortunately, I arrived late due to the moving in of our guests.

After the brownbag, stopped to chat with a few colleagues to answer questions and get an answer to a question about what these rush ebooks actually are in the bibliographic cataloging world. Turns out the 2 new ebooks we received a rush cataloging request for this morning are actually separately published "enhanced" versions of a serial issue. So they need original cataloging and I can't piggyback on the existing serial record. Good times.

Return to my desk and deal with more email. Questions, cataloging issues, and committee work. I didn't get a chance to eat before the brownbag, and I forgot to take my lunch with me, so I end up eating lunch at my desk around 2:20pm. Oof.

I end up working on the ebook original records while eating lunch. One of the benefits of working with mainly online materials is I don't have to worry about spilling food or beverages on them. Also, multitasking at it's finest!

I complete one ebook record and my lunch, and am promptly interrupted by my staff with a few questions about item record strangeness. The also let me know they need more work and more dusting/cleaning supplies. I call and leave a message for a colleague that we need more volumes for our barcoding project (we're trying to systematically barcode all the bound serial volumes in the stacks...this is a long-term project). I then email our business office staff person to order more dusting cloths. Many of the volumes we are barcoding haven't been moved, or even touched, for years so they have a nice coating of dust on them. By now it's 3:30pm.

I check my email, and find a message from our systems/technology staff asking me about the profile for a bulk load. I have no idea what this profile means. What's worse, I have no idea where to look to find the bulk import rule profiles for our system. Time to make a phone call. Apparently they are in the system admin client, which I don't have access to. Fortunately one of my colleagues who's office is conveniently next door does have access and was able to print out the specs for each possible rule profile. Emailed the systems person back and I think we've figured it out. We'll see when the load log arrives.

I think I'm going to talk to my boss about putting in a request for access to the System Admin profile at least on a "read only" status when I meet with her this week. It would simplify things.

I realize I'm not going to finish the ebook cataloging today, so I save the records make a note to finish them both first thing in the morning tomorrow. I also didn't get to any CONSER work today and my shelf/stack to be completed is starting to lean dangerously. I'm going to have to schedule time in my calendar for that, aren't I? [Rhetorical question...the correct answer is "of course if I want it to actually happen.] Sigh.

Final email check. Clean out email listservs, skipping AUTOCAT (I'll deal with that one later...I don't have the patience or time right now). Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:35pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Pray rain holds off until I get home. Really looking forward to my "Tranquil Vinyasa" yoga class tonight. It's the perfect way to start the week and end the day on Mondays.