Started off the day by going through the email that accumulated over the weekend and while I was out yesterday. Most of it was junk or informational only, but a few actionable items included some renewals and a renewal that the overseas publisher did not appear to receive from our subscription agent.
This was followed by writing up my libday7 summary for yesterday, and starting this post. Then I began to tackle the to-do list.
We keep track of eresource renewals both in our ILS and in a spreadsheet that includes last year’s price, the anticipated increase, and the actual amount paid as the invoices come in throughout the year. This helps us know if we will be on target for the budget or if we need to make adjustments. I’m not concerned about doing the same for serials, in part because that would be insanely cumbersome to manually update, as we have to do with this tool. However, I am interested in keeping track of our continuations, particularly as they tend to be standing orders with no rhyme or reason to when issues will be published/delivered/invoiced.
So, that being said, I spent some time figuring out how to query our ILS to create a report of continuations paid this fiscal year with their amounts and invoice dates, as well as generating a list of continuations and their fund codes. My skills with Access queries are limited, so this involved crashing the program several times, but eventually I got something that may be useful.
Over the middle part of the day, web services librarians from around the area met here to share projects, and I got a few ideas of things I need to take care of here. It’s always good to share with colleagues.
In the afternoon, I spent some time doing some things that I really don’t like about my job, but they’re necessary. I tell myself that it’s not perfect, but it’s better than it could be (and has been), so like a wise woman once told me, “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.”
With that done, I moved on to more pleasant things, like finding a list of Oxford Digital Reference Shelf URLs to make sure they’re properly set up in EZproxy. This list either does not exist, does not exist in an Excel-friendly format, or I couldn’t find it. Luckily, I found a work-around by sending folks to the titles in the Oxford Reference Online, which has proxy-friendly URLs.
With the day almost done, I assessed the items on my to-do list and bumped several to tomorrow. Finished this post and called it a day.
