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!