Remaining Relevant » librarydayinthelife

Friday – Library Day in the Life

Lichen Rancourt — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:49:19 +0000

7:30a: Staff meeting. I warn them about an upgrade to XP that I’m working on (The city is currently running Win2000, believe it or not).
8:30a: Add instructions to the staff support wiki about how to find Remote Desktop if someone has erased the shortcuts.
8:45a: Discussed complaint with two staff members. (Our circ staff are awesome.)
9a: Emailed staff regarding patron troubles logging into Userful.
9:05a: Setup laptops for staff webinar on downloadable.
10:30a: Work with Mark to do a quick n’ dirty digitization of some historic slides to illustrate a blog post.
12:30p: Covered the Information Desk.
1:30p: Lunch.
2:30p: Processed photos taken from slides, uploaded them to flickr, and scheduled the blog post.
3:30p: Work on the Art Room Information desk.
5:30p: Home!

Tuesday – Library Day in the Life

Lichen Rancourt — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:33:01 +0000

I’m on the night shift tonight, but I ran across two interesting links in my morning ramblings. Looking for a cocktail to serve at your lawn party this weekend? Try the Darien Librarian. Yumm, whiskey. Chris pointed out Bibliotherapy to me – ‘just what I’ve been looking for’ – but don’t librarians do this for free? It does look deeper than simple reader’s advisory… maybe we should do it?

12:30p: Arrive.
- Review emails and voice mails. Review final draft of the City’s web site content policy and requests for Library exemptions.
- Check on a public computer that didn’t come back up after yesterday’s stormy power flicker. Report dead computer to city IT.
- Report another software problem to Userful.
1:20p: Tackle the stimulus application. [I had been hoping to do something more exciting for my readers, but boss lady wants to review my progress on Thursday. Better have something to show!] Deal with interruptions:
- Contacted Leslie Poston [@geechee_girl] to invite her to come talk about Twittering for Dummies.
- Fax invoice for new monitors to City IT.
- Make copies of the class materials for tonight’s Intro to the Internet.
- Make plans to celebrate Brian’s birthday tomorrow.
4:15p: Break before dinner to write piece for the newsletter about Twitter program.
4:30p: Home for dinner – cuke salad and curried eggplant.
5:30p: Greet our volunteer and help her set up the laptops for tonight’s class.
5:40p: Have to leave the volunteer to help a patron connect to our wireless network.
6:30p: Flip that the wireless thing took a whole hour. Send a trouble file to vendor for bug investigations.
6:40p: Go back down to the computer class to replace the cable on the projector. Then return to trouble shooting the file for a vendor.
7:15p: Send file and hang my neato computer hardware chart poster.
7:20p: Return to the stimulus… for five minutes. Then comfort a staff member whose cat died today.
7:45p: Another attempt at the stimulus.
8:30p: Collect money from registers and close the building.

Monday – Library Day in the Life Project

Lichen Rancourt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:45:10 +0000

I am a little slow on the uptake here, not sure how it got away from me. But I’m always up for some navel-gazing and I have a fairly decent memory so I’ll participate in the Library Day in the Life Project 2009. If I understand correctly I’m supposed to live blog every day this week.

8:15a: Say a brief hello to my VISTA who is spending the year organizing a staff training program.
8:25a: Leave almost immediately to go to a City IT department meeting.
9am: Meet briefly with the Director regarding our stimulus application.
9:30a: Escorted technician to a sick computer.
9:15a: Crack open the tome that is the stimulus application. Spend the next three hours filling out the first three pages.
12:30p: Rush home for lunch and spend 20 minutes reading Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare (good stuff).
1:30p: Back to work and begin the executive summary for the stimulus application.
3p: Can’t write more. Start reviewing the technology inventory my Page has been doing and begin making a list of tasks for him for Wednesday.
3:30p: Start worrying about my presentation to the Board of Trustees. Months ago they asked how many publicly accessible workstations we ‘should’ have, the information didn’t exist so I did an informal benchmarking study.
4p: Join the Trustee meeting and present the results. Conclusion: we are at the low end of the range of the appropriate number of computers.
5:15p: Leave the meeting just in time for the power to flicker in the middle of a fantastic thunderstorm. Canvas the building to be sure the computers come back up.
5:30p: Head home.