A Day in the Life 1/30/09

Shew!  This day is done!  For a Friday, it was not bad.

I started the day by participating in the interview for our candidate for our Research and Development position.  They did a nice presentation, focusing on wide reaching technologies and tools for service, location, communication, and collaboration, instead of a summary of tools.  I enjoyed the theoretical approach.

Then, off to a meeting.  I’m chairing the Student Conversations group, and we needed to update and outline future work.  Like many libraries, we are in massive flux, reorganizing departments and units, and raising money for a new building.   Like many organizations, we want input on what our users think and want from us as we plan our change.  It’s a quick meeting, and then we’re off to the next event.

I head off to the second part of the R&D interview, the small group questions specific to instruction and reference.  It’s a pleasant gathering and the candidate does well.  We dont delve too far off topic too many times, which is good.

After that, I’ve got 20 minutes till I’m on the desk, and I’m STARVING.  I drop my bag at the desk, run across the street to the cafe on the graduate school campus, and look at the dismal offerings that weren’t snatched up by the lunch rush.  I’m left with an egg sandwich and chips… I dont have time to order anything from the grill, unfortunately, because this place makes a mean burger.  Ah, well… I settle on my egg sandwich (which turned out to be quite disappointing; onions and red peppers have no business in egg salad, btw), stuffing half of it in my maw while bolting back across the street.  I loiter outside the door in the sun, stuffing my face, making it to the desk with only moments to spare.

The desk is typically busy, and pass the two hours very quickly.  I should mention that at my library we have no reference desk; when I’m there my office door is open, and when I am not there, students and staff find me on IM or by phone.  So when I work the desk, I’m on the main library desk… and that’s always a challenge. Today, I help some young Japanese girls locate some articles for a paper on elementary education.  The language barrier is nearly impossible to work around, until I ask them to write out the keywords they’re thinking about.  Once I figure out what they want, I find them a few things, and send them a detailed email linking to ERIC and Google Uncle Sam, with some suggestions on keyword searching.  I also try to help a senior working on her thesis who returned “that book” that had all the crucial information on a particular painting… and she cant remember what the title of it was… we look and look and look for information on this painting, but I Fail at this sort of thing, so after 40 minutes I refer her to the Art librarian.  In between, I get some easy questions and a lot of circulation action.

Finally, I bolt from the desk and go hide out in my BFF’s office.  She’s giving me a lift since I am car free, and while she works I hammer out the last bits of my presentation for UIUC’s Science Refernce class next week.  Of course I’m using LOL cats.  : )

So now I’m home… and reflecting back on the week.  It’s been busy, but good, and although I’m looking forward to my down time this weekend, I know next week is going to be just as awesome.  : )

A Day in the Life 1/30/09

Heh.  So on Wednesday it felt almost like Friday because I had no meetings, no classes, no scheduled obligations for Thursday.  I was looking forward to getting my To Do list nearly killed… Did that happen?  No.  This image best typlifies how my life’s been lately.

Yesterday I got to the library, and ended up helping a coworker fix his printing.  For those of you who know me, you know that, for whatever reason, printing is the hardest thing I do every day.  Yea, I dont get it, either.  Anyways, it’s contagious and was even worse for my friend. Problem solved, then off to a relaxing picnic lunch with my BFF.

While I was at lunch, our director put out a call for 30 mins of coverage on the main service desk.  I agreed, and headed over there for the next two hours, because they were slammed!  I’m not even sure if I made all the ticks on our ref stats sheets, since it was one afer an other after another  times a bazillion.

I escape in a moment of calm, and manage to address my inbox before leaving for the day, and at least hash out the outline and rough points for next week’s UIUC guest lecture at Linda Smith’s Science Reference class.  I need to turn in my ppt and links by Monday, so today I need to get crackin if I dont want to work on that over the weekend.

When I got home, I checked in with my chemists for a few minutes, then turned everything off and made a doily.  Oh, and if you havent heard from me lately… check that image above.  : )

A Day in the Life 1/28/09

Today is a very busy day for me.  I’ve got a killer To Do list that’s pages long, plus I’m teaching two classes and have two meetings.  I was supposed to go volunteer at my daughter’s school library (she is in 2nd grade) but I bailed on that today as I just have too much work to do.  I love to volunteer at her school, though, as it is a totally different kind of librarianship.  I read them fun stories, we talk about what we read, and then I get to mingle with 20 7 year olds helping them find books on ponies, fairies, Star Wars, skateboarding, puppies, and a bunch of juvie lit I have no idea about.  It’s chaotic, it’s a madhouse, it’s barely constrained pandemonium, but boy, it’s fun.

So first off, I get in and make sure that all of last night’s emails are addressed, requested books are ordered, and that everything is in order for the day.  Now, time to settle in and make sure I’m ready for the first of my two instruction sessions for the day.

The first instruction is for a bioengineering class, and it went really well.  It’s hard to tell if students are engaged or if they’re totally bored, but I know the professor enjoyed the class and thanked me for the reminder about Web of Science.  I did my intro ppt (full of LOL cats, which I still think is amusing), Web of Science, Engineering Village, PubMed, and Google Scholar.

When I’m done with that, I head down to Honnold (the main library) to meet with my boss.  We meet weekly to share ideas about current projects, share news, and to express where each of us might need help achieving our objectives.  It’s a good meeting – short – and I’m on the road back to Sprague.

I next meet with a math candidate for Claremont McKenna College.  We meet for a little over a half an hour, and I tour him through the library, showing off the collections and talking about our services and what we do.  We also sit down and I show him our indexing tools and electronic journal holdings.  He is from Germany and is astonished at the warm “winter” weather we have here, so I agree to walk him down to see the jewel of the Claremont libraries, Denison.  Denison is the women and gender studies and art library, and it is absolutely lovely, full of wood furniture, antiques, and stained glass.  The candidate is amazed and pleased with our libraries.

Finally, the last instruction class.  This one is also engineering – heat transfer.  I pretty much show the same things as the AM class, swapping out SciFinder Scholar for PubMed, and also a quick display of RefWork’s ability to create a bibliography, and more impressively, format in text citations AND the bibliography.  I get awe struck gasps for that.   One student fessed up to taking both classes, so I had him answer some of my audience participation questions.

Today was fun.  : )

A Day in the Life 01/27/09

Today begins with the typical check email/answer midnight questions/prioritize the To Do list, mixed in with a few IM chats.

We went live with Libraryh3lp last week, and it is SO COOL! We’ve got a widget on our website that looks just like a Meebo Widget.

Libraryh3lp uses the jabber protocol, so you can use any IM aggregator like Trillian, Pidgin, or Adium (I use Adium) to handle the incoming chats. When a chat comes in, the chat window comes up on everyone’s computer who is logged in to the Libraryh3lp.  You can even see if someone answers the chat.  This is what the window looks like to the librarian.

As you can see from the image, you can also transfer chats to others who are logged into the system.  Clicking on the ‘transfer’ link will take you to a webpage that shows who is online and lets you send chats to them.  It’s great if, say, the music librarian is online and the question you’ve got is just out of your depth.

And, unlike Meebo, you can easily tell when the user has left the conversation.

I REALLY like Libraryh3lp!  I’m impressed with it, how easy it is, and it’s awesome seeing all the chats that come in, not just when you’re logged it.  I totally recommed this for ANY library who does chat reference for their communities.

So after I got done with a few ref questions that came in, I had to wander down to the main library.  Once of my tasks was to follow up on one of the IM ref questions I got, that I could  not handle at my homebase of Sprague.  I also had a few other things I needed to take care of, and then a few meetings anyways.  I walk in, and the service desk at the main library is SLAMMED.  I jump in, start answering questions, checking stuff out, answering phones, and looking for books.  I easily killed an hour before my first meeting with my VIPEr chemists, and although I didnt get done what I wanted/needed to get done, I did help out and people were appreciative.

I next attend my web meeting with my VIPEr chemists and we talk about usability testing.  We are going to create a survey for registered users to see what they like, dont like, use, wish we had, &c, as well as plan some screen/video/voice capturing of specific tasks at the up coming CAS symposium in Salt Lake in March.

Then, I’ve got my managers meeting, where the director sits down with his direct reports to share any relevant news with us, and for us to share news with each other.  It is a quiet, quick meeting, for which I am thankful.

I finish up my day by preparing a ppt for an upcoming guest lecture at UIUC’s Science Reference class, which is next week.  The ppt is very simple, as I plan to talk most of the time, but will at least outline my major day to day responsibilities and provide contact info for future follow up, should anyone want to do that.

A busy day, but I didnt get as much done as I had hoped.  Ah, well… Tomorrow is another day!

A Day in the Life of a Librarian 01-26-2009

So today begins the second round of A Day in the Life of a Librarian, where librarians from all over and all walks of librarianship blog about their daily activities.  This exersize serves two important purposes – to share what daily life as a librarian is like for those coming into the profession, and to share what we actually do with the general public.  There are a lot of misperceptions of what librarians actually do, and what we really do varies greatly from library to library, and from job type to job type.  To see more of these Day in the Life posts, check out the list of librarians participating here http://librarydayinthelife.pbwiki.com/.

This morning I have a meeting with HR’s disability office, in an attempt to address the ongoing pain in my right arm from moving books last summer and a sketchy at best work set up.  Oh, and lugging about 500 pounds of junk around the 7 campuses and 3 library buildings in which I work.  As an outreach and embedded librarian, I travel quite a bit and am only in my office for about 50% of my on campus work time.  My users typically find me on chat or by email, setting up an appointment if they actually need to meet face to face with me about something, and my work peers typically call my phone, which forwards to my cell.

Anyways, once I get the paperwork to be seen for the physical therapy for my ailing right arm, I handle a call from my car insurance company.  On friday, I was in an accident, and my poor little Apple Car is in the Car Hospital for 2 weeks.  I am so very blessed, in that one of my chemistry faculty members loaned me his car for the days I must shuttle my Miss7 around.  I do not have words to express to the man how much this helps me out.

But, back to work.  So the first thing I do when I get to my office is chat with a coworking science librarian down at the other science library (mine is math, computer science, and engineering, on Harvey Mudd College’s campus, and his is all the other sciences on Pomona’s campus).  We catch up on a few logistics details for the next few weeks and I send him a list of the passworded journals and answer a question about Sakai.  I’m totally going to count that as a ref question!

about an hour later, as I’m settling into killing my To Dos and have sorted my email, a student comes into my office.  Apparently there should have been some books on reserve for his class, but they’re no where to be found.  Come to find out, the professor forgot to place them on reserve, and they’re checked out.  So, in the interest of letting students do their homework, I take a field trip down to the bookstore to acquire said books.  Of course nothing is easy, so I find the books, wait in line, get my purchase card declined, necessitating a quick trip to financial services to remedy the situation.  They’re full of awesomesauce, so shortly I’m back over at the bookstore solving the world’s (or at least HMC CSCI 154’s) problems.  Technically, I dont have to do this, but I dont mind a quick trip to the campus bookstore to make things easier for the students and faculty.

Next I sat down and tracked several other firm order requests.  I get a lot at the beginning of each semester as faculty place things on reserve for courses.  This is when they realize they’re using new editions or new books, and we need copies in the libraries.  We do not have a process in place that allows for us to immediately add a hold or any notes to indicate the purpose of the order, so I still have to track the evil things in excel and check the catalog each day to see if they come in.  When they do, I have to manually place them on hold in the system, fill out paperwork, and hand them off to the reserves coordinator.  I’d love for a formal workflow to be put in place, but part of our problem is political… So n So cant add holds, that is a circulation person’s job… So n So cant input information, that’s acquisition’s job… note – I am neither of these things, but alas.  This can be a real pain, because if I am at another building or on another campus, I have to make a special trip to manage these things.

Then, I get an unexpected reference question.  I am science, I dont do much with government stuff or IRS stuff, but this time of year, a few people will surface asking about forms or guidelines.  I look up the guidelines from the IRS for this particular faculty member, print them out, and send him on his way with a firm, “You need to talk to a real tax person about this.”  I hate having to look that stuff up; I just dont feel like I know enough to make sure they’re getting what they need.

I then settle in to work on the IONIC VIPEr site (https://www.ionicviper.org), which is this cool teaching website for inorganic chemistry.  The group of chemists is located all over the world, and they’re collaborating to create a teaching resource site full of learning objects on inorganic chemistry.  I know zip about inorganic chemistry, but I can certainly help them out by creating documentation on using the site, suggesting 2.0 technologies they can use, and helping out with usability studies.

I actually really enjoy this project, even if the chemistry is challenging, because it is a window into the faculty world I dont see.  I see how they struggle to create classes and activities for an entire semester, handle requests for letters of recommendation from students, deal with grants, data requests, finances, and how to best present chemical information for teaching and learning.  They impress me every day with how hard they work, and it’s really opened my eyes on the life of a chemistry faculty member.

I rounded out my day by killing a few more To Dos, following up with a few dropped, unimportant balls, and polished a bit more on my instruction outlines for my classes next week.  Overall, it was a very busy day, but I got a lot done.

Now time for Pizza and Mommy-hood.  : )

Wrecktastic

Wrecktastic, originally uploaded by jezmynne.

Well, this pretty much sums up my day. It went from Print Fail to Long Meeting w/ Side of Backache, to the Ultimate Teaching Room Disaster. Let me elaborate there.

Like many libraries, we have a teaching room where we provide library instruction. Our rooms are not on par with good rooms. For example, the room I was in today. The coolest part about the room is the obnoxiously pink chairs with some rotating Star Trek like tables. The coolness ends there.

I worked VERY hard to get a professor who has not ever had a library session for his students to come into the library. I booked our learning room, which should have been ready for a full teaching load for fall semester. However…. of the 16 laptops, only 11 were there. Of the 11, only 10 would work. Of the 10, 5 needed to be restarted, and 2 wouldn’t connect properly to the wireless dedicated to that room for those machines. Students, and the professor, who brought their own laptops could not connect to the wireless because, presumably, their MAC addresses were not registered with the all campus wireless.  So although I’d sold this professor on our teaching rooms with active learning, after messing around with laptops for 15 minutes trying to get access and probably doing unrecoverable ‘perception of idiot’ damage with the students, I move forward with my now lecture session.  Fail, Fail, Fail.

Ah, I’ll enjoy a nice lunch at my favorite campus hangout, I think.  Where they absolutely FAIL at providing a cream cheese bagel with sprouts and bacon.  And not having the yogurt I paid for.  And not having any friggin tea.

Oh, and then more meetings, one with a consultant that I am unsure really understood exactly what I was trying to communicate about what we need to be doing, more FAIL at printing attempts, a spontaneous meeting regarding the updating of bibliographic records after the sudden removal of 1000 boxes from my library, all capped off with another instruction session that was not exactly stellar.

Have I mentioned that today was my 6 year anniversary for work?  Yea.   6 years.

Closure

Today is Closure day for me… Today is the day we inaugurate the third floor… the collaborative math space I went absolutely crazy trying to come up with all summer.  The summer of 1000 boxes.  The summer I had to remove the math journals for online access.  The summer I did what I never wanted to do… dissolve the ability to browse the physical over access to the virtual.  The trade off?  Useful space.  Space to teach. Space to work.  Space for learning and sharing.  Was it worth it?  I think so – I sure hope so.  We’ll see how useful it is.  Already I need to put in a work order for a few things – like how to turn off the environmentally sensory motion lights?  Yea.  It was kinda hard to view my flickr stream of all the third floor changes in the bright light.

So the third floor looks lovely, the party was awesome, and I got to hang with my favorite set of faculty -  My Mathematicians.  But the fifth floor was heartbreaking… chaos, dirt, used furniture, crappy carpet, junk everywhere.  I spent an hour, now that the boxes are finally gone, moving furniture around and cleaning up today.  It was so hard, to see how loved the third floor is but how neglected the fifth floor is.  My heart broke a little more today as I wandered around the traditional library – ranges of books, crappy furniture, no fresh carpet, dust everywhere, and around the new library – couches, bright walls, tables and chairs, technology, fresh paint and carpet, wireless for online access to journals, and thankfully, our books. To me, the fifth floor felt so raw and abused… storage, ranges, dust, hand me down furniture… it made me hurt for libraries all over the world suffering from the misperception of irrelevance and therefore administrative neglect.

But back to the happy.   : )  Mathematicians are delighted with the space!  They are so pleased, and are thinking about what to do, how to use, what to plan.  And me, too.  This space means I can teach my own classes up here, whenever I like.  And the party was awesome.  : )

Math Colloquium Party, originally uploaded by jezmynne.

A Day (week) in the Life

Back today…. I enjoyed some wonderful time away from work and mostly away from the Intarwebz for the past week.  My family, Dad, Stepmom, and Gramma, came in to visit from New Mexico.  They stayed the weekend and we ate, hung out, watched my kid be a very poor loser at checkers, and generally had a great time visiting.  It sucks having immediate family a few states over.

Monday I took my little one to see Wall-E, which has got to be the best damned kid movie I’ve ever seen.  It was really powerful… I felt the full range of emotions one would expect from a grown up movie, and I was amazed at how much they could communicate without languague.  Quite profound, the image of fat humans plugged into a chair with a screen in front of their face, and the subsequent lack of interaction.  The dismal image of Earth, cluttered and filthy with trash and advertisements is a shocking reminder where we’re going if we dont change our ways.  Bravo, Pixar.  Bravo.

In addition to the movie, my kid and I wandered around the local hot spots, walking, hitting the bookstore, lunch, and all that fun stuff.  I bought a set of jacks at a local toy store, and quickly learned that my Lila doesn’t do that ‘bounce/catch’ thing so well.  She wanted to modify the rules so that I bounced the ball while she picked up the jacks, but I stood firm on her need to master hand/eye coordination on a teeny superbounce ball.  She elected to go find bugs after that.

It was great to have some time away from it all.  I generally ignored work email, only surfing for reference questions or queries from users, stayed offline, limiting my internet fun to games and my crochet groups.   But, back now, and the time away refreshed me to get motivated and ready for fall.

So today I taught my first class of the year, for HMC’s summer institute program.  27 newbie frosh brought in for leadership training asked brilliant questions and were generally engaged in my session.  I forgive the poor girl who napped through the hour, because everyone else was on the ball.  I continued my new trend of using LOL cats, GraphJam, and images from Fail Blog, which was a whopping success. I’ve never seen students so interested in a ppt about library research before.  And of course I dazzled them with a few Google goodies, like Scholar and Uncle Sam.

After that, back to my desk and finish those Sakai videos.  I finished two, and I am pleased with how they turned out.  I also exported the vids for iPod/iPhone, and boy, that was hella cool.

So it was a good day.  I got a lot done, and I’m about as near as ready as I’ll ever be for fall.  Tomorrow, I’ll log into RTM and see what else I need to take care of.   : )

A Day in the Life – Work

Work, originally uploaded by jezmynne.

A pic of my work environment; notes @ flickr

I’ve been really busy lately, mounting a semi revolution and generally attempting to take a stand ’round these parts.  I was motivated to re-think things at that math meeting a few weeks back.  One of the mathematicians stated frustration that no one stands up and says, “THIS is what we are going to do” about the library.  I’ve had my ideas nixed by coworkers, I’ve waited for my admin to make a move or a decision, I’ve waited for HMC to do something, so I am just as guilty as anyone else in this mix.  But, I can change that.  And I have.

A few days ago I decided we’d do three major things here that I want for our new collaborative work space.

1.  The third floor will be a designated Food and Beverage Okay area.  That means people can have pizza or thai delivered for all I care.

2.  That floor will be accessible to the math community 24 hours a day.  ‘Safety’ of the books be damned; I’ll buy another one if I need to.

3.  The downstairs kitchen will remain unlocked and therefore open to users.

This was all prompted by the math department’s request to have the Math Club use the new space.  So, I gave them an always locked study room (dont ask – I could never get the staff here to just LEAVE THE  THING UNLOCKED (the staff here do not report to me, hence, no authority to make them do anything)).  I wrote up this pretty little document indicating what I wanted to happen.  I then immediately emailed it to our brilliant director soliciting approval.  And I got it.  And I then told my boss what I’d decided, with a ‘put on your tough pants, this is happening’ stance.  If my users need someone to be stronger about advocating the library, well, so be it.  Change is happening around here, and I am going to make sure I instigate as much as I can that will benefit the users and the library.  I am not afraid to take risks, and see what works, and change what doesnt.

So, I feel much better about work than I did say, 2 weeks ago.

Other projects… making videos for the Sakai Administration Team and a few for math or whatever else strikes my fancy.  I am using Screenflow, which is so freakishly easy… except that I cant automatically make a big, giant arrow and text box about something.  There’s this ‘insert media’ feature, that I am going to try to monkey with next.  I gather I can make ‘media’ that is an arrow and text box and insert it somehow.

So I guess I should quit messing around with blogging, pictures, flickr, and whatever else I’ve done for the last hour (which, I guess can technically count as lunch.  I *was* eating while doing most of this) and get back to work.

A Day in the Life # somethingiforget…

So I know that technically the A Day in the Life project concluded on Friday, but I think I’ll try to continue the trend.  I realized over the last week that I am pretty down about my job right now.  That sucks, because I’ve liked it in the past.  But… change is inevitable.  I’m sure I’ll go back to liking it at some point.  And even if not, well, it’s still not the end all be all of my existence and I’ll make do because it does have its benefits.  Like a paycheck.

Anyways, I digress. I hope that maybe I can emphasize positive highlights in my A Day in the Life entries from here on out. I dont want my place of work to look like a horror movie for y’all or for me.

So…. what did I do today….

First, I stopped in on the Mothership and killed a half dozen Rats (Rats, for those of you havent heard me use that phrase before, are those things that rapidly pile up, breed like, well, Rats, if not tended to, and vary in degrees of importance.  I typically have an inbox full of them).  I needed to talk to some coworkers about the charity ventures that Ruth’s fiber friends are coordinating, so that the library’s donations in Ruth’s name can go towards those events.  I also needed to pop into BAS, AKA Bibliographic Access Services, and follow up about that CS linguistic database purchase.  We’d send in the licensing agreement last week, already!  Sure enough, they’d received it and had even charged our credit card, but failed to email us the download info.  Anyways, after negotiating with them on the phone I was up to IT to arrange for that being downloaded and hosted on the network, and proxied appropriately and all that.  Took a bit of time, but that Rat is killed.  Well, I still have to have it cataloged, so let’s say it’s in its death throes.

A quick lunch, then back to Sprague to negotiate with another science librarian, and the third via IM, about everybody’s favorite moving project.  After much heated discussion, I think we have an idea about how to go about putting the library back in order (at least, I *think* I got my way).  I then spent the rest of the afternoon moving books cubbyholed in the journals out of the way and to their new, permanent home.

Tomorrow I am taking my daughter to the beach.  I am leaving my phone in the car and my laptop at home.  We’re bringing sunscreen, towels, water, and a couple of pb&js. And that’s it.

Dont call me, I’ll call you.  : )

A Day in the Life #8

Oh…. lemme tellya.  This was one of the worse-er days I’ve had in a wee bit.

On the bright side, my trash was finally taken out.  Because I made a huge pile of it in the middle of the hallway in the library.

Now, back to our day.  So today I met with Math about the move in the library. The meeting was exhausting, with me as the target.  It went on for about 2 hours, and I felt rather pummeled within about 5 minutes into the discussion.  Math is angry about the lack of communication.  Lesson learned for me – dont trust other people when they say they’ll communicate things.  But when is the right time to trust someone that they’ll follow through with what they say they’ll do?

Math is angry that we live in this weird limbo.  See, we rent the building we use to house my library, and there’s always this tug of war game between the college that owns the building and the library regarding who is responsible for what goes on there.  Math is angry that no one entity, be it the library, the college, the council of presidents, or whoever, is stepping up to make a decision one way or the other about what is going on.  Math, like me, also feels out of the communication loop, and I tried to explain that in many ways I’ve been blocked from the Adminisphere, and in some cases, told out right “that I do not belong at that meeting.”  The last 4 years has been so frustrating for me because I have no power over the building in which my collections and services live, and no support for any decisions I make.  I’ve been a pawn.  And I was totally sandbagged at that meeting.  I am frustrated with the lack of leadership I have.  I’m frustrated with the level of responsibility yet lack of authority to do my job.

What’s the resolution?  I’m not sure.  Hopefully my Math peeps will resurrect the former math library committee that was dissolved before I was hired 6 years ago.  Hopefully I’ll get more face time at their department meetings.  Maybe I’ll even get some clout with their administration (and maybe even my own) that I know what I’m doing, and that I can put together a good library.

As it is right now, I’m disgusted with my job.

So, when that disaster was done, and I still havent talked to my Director about it, and how I may or may not have screwed things up and made things worse, I had a cup of coffee and tried to do something fun.

Yesterday, I obligated the library to create brief intro videos about Sakai for the colleges.  I’m happy to do this, as my Sakai cohort has Camtasia on her computer, and I’m down for finding something that will work on my Mac.  Thanks to the Twitterverse, I tried Jing, and immediately wanted to scream.  I cant get it to do anything longer than a minute, max, as it crashes rather unexpectedly.  If the damn thing would work, I think it would be pretty cool.

So, today was a total bucket of FAIL.  I think I’ll go play some solitare.

A Day in the Life #7

Boy, this day flew by.  I had to be there bright and early to open the library as everyone else is off.  I spent the first hour of my day having a few conversations with various staff members about Ruth’s passing, and how shocked we all are.  She and I were friends, so it is natural people would reach out to me.  Around 10:30 I settled in and began my presentation for the math faculty tomorrow.  I need to bring them up to speed on our giant moving project, what we’ve done so far and what our intended next steps should be.  See, there are a lot of faculty that are totally in the dark about what is going on.  The initial project began with the former department chair, who is on sabbatical, taken over by the current chair, who is also now on sabbatical, and currently headed up by the interim department chair.  Thus, there’s been a lot of, “uh, what’s going on?” going on.

I am totally Microsoft free, so I started my preso using NeoOffice, which I love, for non-Microsoft.  (I do have to give mad props to MS 2007; that handy ribbon bar and annoying mini menu pop up are most handy, actually, and I must say I miss that simplicity after using it for 4 months when I argue with NeoOffice about  doing something I think it should do.)  Based on a conversation I had with cool librarian Colleen Harris at ALA, I peppered my preso with LoLCatz. You know, to lighten the mood as I tell Math the library has been hit by a tornado of boxes and the likelihood of your print only titles coming back are slim.   My director loved it, so we are Go For Launch.  I’ll, of course, post about it tomorrow.

I worked on that steady till it was time to go to the Mothership, where I attend the IACC and chair the SAT meetings.  IACC is Inter-Academic Computing Committee and SAT is the Sakai Administration Team.  I love SAT; it is the epitome of what a productive team should be.  Imagine… things get done.  People say they’ll do something, and they do it.  That appointment is the high point of my work responsibilities.

After the meeting, where we talked about rolling out version 2.5, version 2.5 testing, and the tech and policy issues of photos in the Roster and Membership tools, I stayed to finish the minutes, post the action items, and take care of all that errata.  I prefer to do it right away instead of procrastinating and then forgetting all about it.

After that, I took a quick jaunt up to IT, where I had a conversation about MT/WordPress.  I figured out last night that although WordPress imported all my exported posts and comments, all my pictures are still on the MT server at work, and WordPress is pointing to them.  FAIL.  After looking at tools, we decided that the best/only course of action was for me to go through my 200 posts and change the links to Flickr pics or upload them to WordPress itself.  Oh, funness.

So now I am home, spinach and cheese quiche is in the oven, and it’s time to find some pjs and a thing of yarn.

A Day in the Life #6 – Ruth Schooley, Librarian, Knitter, and Kind Hearted Soul

Boy, this day was a shocking reminder to just how short life is.

Today, we learned we lost a beloved librarian, Ruth Schooley.  Ruth was our poly sci/California gov docs librarian.  She worked on our collections team, gathering use stats every year for databases and tools.  She loved to staff the reference desk, and she would drop everything to help a student or a faculty member.  She networked successfully with our government and poly sci seniors, meeting with many of them individually, helping them gather the materials they needed for their senior thesis.  She was dedicated, above all else, to the library user.  There was many a Friday I would go to relieve her on the ref desk, where I would loiter uselessly as she worked diligently to finish out the reference transaction she began before I came on shift.  Never would she say, “This is what I did and this is where I am.”  No, not Ruth – she’d see it through to the end, she was that dedicated.  The user always mattered most, and they always came first.

Beyond her academic endeavors, she was our knitter and spinner on staff.  Every friday she would bring her spinning wheel and we would sit together at a local dining hall talking to students about fiber, arts, crocheting and knitting, and what the library can do to help them.  Her enthusiasm for outreach and her kind, happy demeanor brought a down to earth perspective to the library.  She was always so happy and willing to help, to do what needed to be done.  Her obligation and level of responsibility to the library and its users set a high bar for all of us.

Ruth and I would go to local crafting events, and she was so kind hearted, always surprising me with neat crochet gems she’d find during her travels through LA.  It was she that gave me that awesome Japanese motif book that I now use to create awesome motif doilies, bookmarks, edgings, and more.

Ruth, I’ll miss you.  We’ll all miss you.