Tag: Library reference desk

library day in the life – round 4

Hello. I’m the electronic resources librarian at the University of Richmond, a small private liberal arts university nestled on the edge of suburbia in a medium-sized mid-Atlantic city. Today I am participating in the Library Day in the Life Project for its fourth round. Enjoy!

8:30am Arrive, turn on computer, and go get a cup of coffee from the coffee shop attached to the library. By the time I return, the login screen is displayed, and thus begins the 5 minute long process of logging in and then opening Outlook, Firefox, and TweetDeck. Pidgin starts on its own, thankfully. Update location on FourSquare. (Gotta keep my mayorship!)

8:40am Check schedule on Outlook, note the day’s meeting times, and then check the tasks for the day. At this point, I see that it’s time for a DILO, so I start this entry.

8:50am Weed through the new emails that arrived over the weekend. Note that there is more spam than normal. In the middle of this, my boss cancels one of two meetings today. (w00t!)

9:15am Email processed and sorted into folders and labels. Time to dig into the day’s tasks and action items. Chatty coworkers in the cube farm prompt me to load Songbird and don headphones.

9:25am Send a reminder to the LIB 101 students registered for my seminar on Friday. Work out switching reference desk shifts because my Wednesday LIB 101 seminar conflicts with my regular Wednesday shift. Also send out a note requesting trades for next week’s shifts, since I’ll be away at ER&L.

9:40am Cleared all action items and to-do items, so now it’s time to dig into my current project — gathering 2009 use statistics.

10:30am Electronic resources workflow planning meeting for the next year with an eye towards the next five years.

11:00am Back to gathering use stats. I’ve been working on this for over two weeks, and I’m a little over half-way through. I’d be further along if I could dedicate all my time to it, but unfortunately, meetings, desk schedules, and other action items get in the way.

12:15pm Hunger overrides my obsessive hunt for stats. I brought my lunch with me today, but often I end up grabbing something on the go while I run errands.

1:10pm Process the email that has come in over the past two hours. Only two action items added (yay!) and both are responses to request for information from this morning (yay!), so I’m happy to see them.

1:15pm Back to the side-yet-related project that I started on shortly before lunch. We have a bunch of journals in the “Multiple Vendors :: Single Journals” category in our ERMS, and I’m moving them over to their specific publisher listings if I can, checking to see if we have use stats for them, and requesting admin info when we don’t. There are only about 55 titles, so I’m hoping to get most of this done before my reference desk shift at 3.

3:00pm I’m only half-way through the side-yet-related project, but I have to set it down and go to my reference desk shift now. Answering many technology questions from a retired woman who is attempting to take a class that requires her to use Blackboard and view PowerPoints and things that are highly confusing to her. Checking out netbooks to students and showing them how to scan documents to PDF using the copiers rather than making a bunch of copies. Also, catching up on RSS feeds between the questions.

5:00pm Desk shift over. I have just enough time to wrap up my projects for the day and prep for tomorrow, grab a quick bite to eat, and then I’m off to the other side of campus where I have choir rehearsal until 7pm.

Thank you for reading!

day in the life of an electronic resources librarian

9:00 Arrive at my cubicle, turn on the computer, and go get an iced coffee from the cafe and a spoon for my yogurt.

9:15 Log into the network. Open email, browser, and Twhirl. Do a quick read of the 20+ new email messages that arrived over the weekend (don’t you people take a break‽), replying to the ones that can be done quickly and sorting the rest into appropriate to-do lists.

9:55 Look over task list for today, see the note about DILO librarian, and start this post.

10:00 Tweaked the new “article finder” page per the suggestion of the head of research & instruction. Dug around EBSCOnet and Ulrich’s to determine which variation on a similar journal title is the right one and why our subscription may have lapsed last year.

10:20 Realized that my calendar didn’t alert me to my 10am bi-weekly meeting with the department head. Chatted with him for a few minutes about the status of projects and came away with a few more to-do items.

10:30 Began clearing out the to-read list, which currently dominates the inbox to-do lists. Aghast to discover that it contains messages from as far back as March. Got through the March & April backlog, but then deleted most of the rest. Resolved to either read or delete the links to interesting articles my colleagues send me, rather than shuffling them off to be read later.

11:10 Massaged some non-COUNTER use reports to appear to be COUNTER-like in order to upload and archive them in our ERMS. Sorted through a backlog of emails from publishers regarding use data and reports.

11:55 Left for lunch and running errands. Need to be back in time for my 1pm reference desk shift.

1:00 Covered the reference/circulation desk, mainly answering directional questions and checking out books. Used the downtime to catch up on RSS feeds (I’ve been doing well with maintaining Google Reader Zero). Also answered some questions from colleagues regarding online availability for journal titles we are considering moving to online only or canceling. Also found a possible solution to the EZproxy host error problem.

3:00 Processed new email. Checked Twitter.

3:10 Pulled a report of current subscriptions from SerialsSolutions, massaged it in Excel, and used it to generate a Hosts and Domains configuration file for our EZProxy setup, an idea that I shamelessly stole from someone else.

3:55 Cleared up some confusion regarding an invoice for a resource that has a new publisher and will be changing its name in September, but it invoiced with the current and soon to be former name on the line item.

4:00 Wrote up a report for the library director regarding the SerialsSoutions eBook Enhancement offer.

4:30 Hunted down some chocolate.

4:35 Processed new email. Checked Twitter. (Sensing a theme here?)

4:50 More use statistics. I’m pulling together numbers for a report due next month, but it’s slow going.

5:35 Waiting on one last COUNTER report to be emailed to me, and that portion of the report will be finished. w00t! Spent the rest of the day pulling acquisitions data out of the catalog and checking for licenses.

6:05 Saved work on the project. Published this. Time to go home.

refgrunt

This is from yesterday afternoon’s two hours at the reference desk. I was too irritated by some of the patrons and a circulation staff member to want to revisit the list until I’d had some time away from work and a good night’s sleep.

This is from yesterday afternoon’s two hours at the reference desk. I was too irritated by some of the patrons and a circulation staff member to want to revisit the list until I’d had some time away from work and a good night’s sleep.

Graduate student needs help finding articles cited by professor in an chapter article from a book.
Where is the Learning Resources Center?
Graduate student back for more help.
Three students each need to find four books on obesity.
Students return – can’t locate books – some checked out, some not in main collection.
Former non-trad student (last semester) wants to know how to gain proxy access to library resources.
Staff member who’s building is without power wants to know how to check email from library computers.
Where is room 207A? – 4 times

refgrunt

This is my first attempt at refgrunting. I only work 2 hours per week at the reference desk, so it will be brief.

This is my first attempt at refgrunting. I only work 2 hours per week at the reference desk, so it will be brief.

Looking for Oedipus Rex – the play, not the score
Can’t open Word document in Blackboard from home
Where is interlibrary loan?
Borrow scissors
Borrow stapler
Where are the atlases?
Need help setting up Yahoo account
Where are the world atlases?
Where are bound journals? Can I check them out?
Where is interlibrary loan?

dark enough for you?

I received this amusing forward in my email this morning: NEW YORK (Aug. 14) – A huge power blackout hit U.S. cities spreading from New York to Cleveland and Detroit and north into Canada Thursday afternoon. In New York City, the blackout had a significant effect on the public library. None of the Internet terminals … Continue reading “dark enough for you?”

I received this amusing forward in my email this morning:

NEW YORK (Aug. 14) – A huge power blackout hit U.S. cities spreading from New York to Cleveland and Detroit and north into Canada Thursday afternoon. In New York City, the blackout had a significant effect on the public library. None of the Internet terminals or other computers in the New York Library system were functioning, but the novels and non-fiction books somehow remained operational, according to patrons on the scene. Older reference librarians were able to switch to print sources in order to maintain services, preventing any disruption. Seekers of pornography crowded the reference desks asking for help and were referred to a list of bawdy novels and assorted men’s magazines.

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