I decided to take the plunge and participate in Library Day in the Life . This semi-annual event allows librarians and library workers to share their workday in the form of pictures, video, blog entries and tweets. Check out the wiki or follow along with the hashtag #libday7.
I work for a library consortium in Massachusetts. As the head of Access Services, a department of three people, I work on the public catalogs, OverDrive digital catalog, reference databases, digital repository, and our websites (public and staff intranet) and Facebook page.
I had been off last week on vacation, which in central MA with temperatures in the 90s meant trying to hide in the coolest spot of my house (it was the basement, and laundry got done!). I am also one of those people who tends to check work email if I am gone from the office for a period of time, so I was already prepared for the news that our academic libraries migration had been delayed from our projected July launch. My consortia is moving over to Evergreen, and with 150+ libraries to move, our split of academics from public libraries during migration is just not as advantageous as we believed.
So, arriving at work at 8AM I spoke quickly with my manager about the revised plan, but my morning was taken up by a meeting of the Digital Commonwealth. Being the first meeting of the new fiscal year, we had new Board members to introduce and review our mission and goals with along with project statuses to update. This year I am also serving as President. It is the first time I am leading a committee, much less one that has an impact in such a large way on digitization and access in the Commonwealth. While there is a lot of work to be done, I am really excited for the projects we have for the next fiscal year.
It was after 12:30 by the time the meeting was over. I spent the next hour cleaning up the emails that had gathered in my inbox over the previous week. There was a lot of hitting the delete button. I am signed up for mailing lists throughout the state and many of the emails do not need my personal attention. I did have reviews to approve through our LibraryThing for Libraries installation on the catalog, plus some requests for staff accounts on our intranet site. I checked in with both of my staff to follow up on projects: we had one new library add a digital collection to our repository, Digital Treasures. We are also getting ready to add Open EPUB to our OverDrive digital catalog.
The rest of my afternoon was spent doing webpage edits in the catalog, updating migration news and tips, along with working on our testing server for workarounds to link to the Massachusetts Virtual Catalog. Our system currently has three catalogs: one for each region and one to let people request from the opposite region. We are shutting down the Union Catalog next week so that cross-region transactions can clear before migrating the data. Once we come up on Evergreen, it will be one system - one catalog. Huzzah!
With kids in camp, my day ends at 4PM during the summer. I made a quick to-do list for Tuesday (more web edits, meeting follow ups, collection development for OverDrive) and was out the door. Not a bad day's work after a week's vacation!
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