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.

ERMS implementation woes

Ever since vendors started selling electronic resource management systems (ERMS), there has been a session or a round table at NASIG that discussed various libraries’ implementations of their ERMS. A few more hands were raised this year when the room was asked to indicate if they feel like they’ve finished implementing their ERMS, but it’s still a very small minority of librarians. When I did my conference report for NASIG 2009 yesterday (we have a bit of a backlog on monthly conference report meetings since there are so many conferences held in the spring and early summer), I created this using ProjectCartoon to illustrate some of the reasons why ERMS have been so difficult and time-consuming to implement:

ERMS woes

i like it!

Earlier today, my friend Kaia posted a comment on FriendFeed about wanting to “like” an email she’d received, and it got me thinking.

Due to regular use of FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter, I’m getting used to using the “like” or “favorite” options to give my friends a pat on the back without having to say anything witty. There are many instances now when I find myself wishing I could “like” something that doesn’t have the option to do so, particularly when it’s a physical object or person and not some thing on a social-aware site.

So, I set up my first CafePress store, created a design, and now I have “like” buttons and stickers at my disposal, ready to be used whenever they are needed. As I told some friends, I’m thinking of ordering a bunch to hand out at conferences and such. Feel free to do the same.

pay off that debt!

Lifehacker turned me on to the Federal Reserve Bank Credit Card Repayment Calculator today. If you haven’t already, do take a look. With just a few keystrokes, you can find out how long it will take to pay off your consumer debt, how much interest you will pay over that time period, and what your monthly payments should be to do so. You can tweak the numbers by changing the monthly payment or changing the pay-off time.

I was able to get a personal loan earlier this year that allowed me to free up some of my budget and pay off most of my consumer debt in 36 months, but it wasn’t enough to cover everything. The balance on my remaining credit card is rather steep, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever pay it off, but now I know that if I keep plugging away at the monthly payment I’ve been sending, I’ll have it paid off in a little over a year. Whew!

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