Library Day in the Life #libday8 Day 3
6:10am - Ugh, too early. Dog steals the pillow as I roll out of bed. I brighten slightly knowing I have a breakfast meeting where the host usually feeds us. Ugh. Morning. Grunt. Hrmp. Mrf.
7:30 - walk into the library. Greeted by my day circ super who asks knowingly, "Early meeting?" I am not known to be a kind morning person, so he is not offended by my grunted response. This is about the time I wish I could stand the taste of coffee. I check the emails, grab my notebook and the list of items the Faculty Senate president noted that she wanted to bring up at the meeting. And an umbrella - it's misting, but with my luck by the end of the meeting it will be pouring.
8:10 - I'm in the Chancellor's conference room waiting on our 8:30 meeting; the faculty Senate Exec members usually arrive a little early, so I always feel like a latecomer if I get there at 8:30. I'm scanning through a case study on flu vaccinations that I'll need to write a paper on after work. The past president of Senate who serves as ex-officio comes in, so I move to the table with him and we chat over breakfast about his teaching award that was just announced.
8:30 - Senate Exec is present, but the Chancellor will be out (his assistant is on her way after a stop at HR), and the Provost is running late. We eat breakfast (thank you Aramark!) and go over the points we want to make sure get the Provost's attention.
8:45 - 10:15 - The meat of the meeting with the Provost is spent talking about initiatives for student success and retention, with some other current projects and issues thrown in the mix. And it is indeed raining on my walk back to the library, I'm grateful I remembered the umbrella.
10:55 - Circ super ducks in to see if I can cover some desk time due to someone being yanked from the desk for another assignment; no can do, off to a meeting. Laird makes it work, as he always does, because he is made of magic, Laird the Lord of Circulation.
11:00-12:00 - Meeting about ACRL statistics. Good discussion of whether previous assignments of who has the data for what question still hold. Really interesting discussion about what they count and what they don't. Why does ACRL not count hits to the library web page originating from inside the library? (It's not like we have any other good way for you to access the resources, including our catalog. No idea why in-library researchers don't count as users for this statistic.) What is a web site hit? Should we count hits at our LibGuides and Facebook and blog pages, especially if the user uses them as a point of origin as opposed to reaching them through our main web page? ACRL asks you to remove all reserves and any in-library circulating equipment, but those now make up the bulk of our circulation; the survey appears to be completely uninterested in those numbers, which is bizarre since I know other academic libraries see similar trends to ours. Brain asplode over thinking about how long it takes these library surveys to change to reflect what we actually do. (I'm sure if you suck out the reserves, study room, and laptop circs, you'd think that my circ staff had nothing to do all day. Gah. Happy we collect these for the in-library and campus annual report so we can show how important those services are.) The meeting also puts document delivery and some other ILL issues back on my radar, such as how we direct students to items we have access to that they've requested through ILL.
12:10-12:30 - Send off a bio and a headshot (which sounds professional, but it's really a taken-by-be-with-cameraphone-shot) to the editor of The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, who has asked me to be the guest poetry editor for issue XVI, which will come out in July. Wish there was a way to make my bio more interesting, with superpowers instead of publications. Quick chat with our Stacks maintenance guru, who is reporting that the students moving tables around so they can plug in laptops, and the dangling cords, are making things difficult for him and his students when they are working in the collection on the 3rd floor. I'm not sure how much we can influence the kids to not plug in, given the battery life of our circing laptops and the need for MOAR POWER given that we live in a gadgeted future, but I agree to see what I can do on the circ side during our evening rounds to encourage them to clear the aisles.
12:30-1:00 - Look at next week's calendar to see what I need to be prepared for, and to carve out some time for . Pop into some social networks and see what's flying about - one librarian discussion is on CVs, which reminds me that I need to update mine and standardize my darn citations. I'm out on Monday, but Senate exec is meeting with Graduate Council, there are interviews for the university's new distance learning position that I want to attend, there's a "Building Our House for Diversity" workshop I've been invited to by the Office few Equity and Diversity, and as a member of Senate exec I'm invited to lunch with the presenter. A rheum doc appointment - must remember to bring my notes and questions. My monthly meeting with my dean, and a meeting about supplemental pay (which we call MocsBucks) and what it can and can't be used for - an important topic, since quite a few of the librarians teach the freshman seminar courses where you can earn it. The usual circulation and reference desk blocks. Ooh, and Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the US is coming to UTC to speak on Tuesday night, must remember that.
1:00-1:25 - Remember I have to find two people to list as references for an artist's residency I want to apply for. Decide to back-burner since the application isn't due until March 1, and because I can't think of a single person to ask. I have lots of libraryland contacts, very few poet-y ones. Bah and humbug. Must try to hang out and connect with more arty folks. Also put the EdD study groups on Saturdays and Sundays into my calendar for spring.
1:30-2:00 - More email. (These posts are a crazy reminder of how much of my worklife is run through an electronic inbox.) Email the English department head back - nope, can't make Friday's faculty meeting since I'll be out of town, but I can be at the one on March 9th to peddle the library services and wares (or, as I put it in my initial email to him, to give "the 2-minute mini spiel on Why You Are Awesome, Why We Are Awesome, And How We Can Help You Be Even More Awesome"). Email came in asking that some curriculum proposals be put on the docket for tomorrow's Senate meeting; I email back that these were due last Friday to be on the agenda and members will likely vote to table them since they won't have had time to review them properly. President emails back that she agrees, they move to the meeting on the 16th, so I toss them on the agenda for that future meeting. Our Special Collections librarian reports back on his hunt for named professorships requested by the Senate exec team - that was fast. Steve is also made of magic. Grab my notebook for the next meeting. Remind self to waylay Griffey with sushi at some point to show me how to use the iPad for productivity instead of just doing jigsaw puzzles.
2:00-3:00 - Meeting with my dean, the Dean of Lifelong Learning, and the Head of Reference and Instruction about distance learning. Really interesting discussion about tuition and fee structures, about trying to identify students who are wholly-online versus those who take online courses with a mix of on campus courses, in-state and out-of-state, how to identify all these nuances, implications for library services (particularly interlibrary loan and document delivery but also instruction). Leave this meeting with head full. Also - ouch, my sinus. Damn rain.
3:00-3:05 - Opened mail, which included one of my student loan statements. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Okay, back to work.
3:05-3:15 This is my last day in the office until next Tuesday, and because I prefer to read things in print so I can scribble on them (my staff jokingly refer to me as Treekiller Harris), now is the time where I make a list and PRINT ALL THE THINGS. Those things include: my flight information, a book manuscript I've been invited to edit on the relationship between poetry and medicine/health, an article I'm hammering at, the papers I need to revise for a conference in May, the book proposal for an edited collection...you know what? Who am I kidding? I'm not getting anything done on the plane ride to and from California but some trashy fiction reading and reading through that manuscript. Everything else will just have to wait, this isn't a working weekend.
3:15-3:55 - Receive email from the head of the Curriculum Committee asking for more proposals to be posted for Senate approval at the meeting tomorrow; president and I note that members will not have had time to review, which is why all materials were due the Friday before the meeting. Learn from Associate Provost that the approvals have to happen for the Fall catalog to be accurate. I post the materials to the site and send out an email via the Senate's Blackboard list notifying members of the late posting and that they should review them. Emergency averted, but selfishly happy that I won't be at tomorrow's meeting to hear the groaning about the last-minute posting. Registrar emails to say thanks for the fast work. That's right--my superpower is my superfast response time. Booyah.
4:00-4:53 - Email. Accepting new meetings for next week (darn, it had looked so easy just this morning!), things to add to Senate agenda for the meeting on the 16th, webinar invitations,
4:53pm - AUGH. The petitions for the Monday meeting of the petitions committee that I will miss just got posted. I can be a good person and come in tomorrow before the flight and get that done and my vote recorded by email, or not. Sigh. So much for running errands tomorrow morning before travel. *shakes fist at sky*
4:58 - start to pack up. lament that I did not get around to cleaning my omg-absolute-disaster of an office. Ugh. And next week's schedule says I can't tackle it until Wednesday. I do some defensive calendaring, block out some time on Wednesday morning to deal with this. Augh. Ooh, my cane. I'm going to need that for traveling. Yes, definitely clean office. You know what? The dean will grab me on her way out of the building, I can tidy a little bit now.
5:14- Here she is. Dinner at a this-looks-like-shady-business Mexican place that I haven't tried yet. The waitress is sweet but gets multiple things wrong with the order. But she checks on us regularly. There are only two or three other occupied tables in the restaurant. It's nice to be able to have a night out for dinner; this is the first week I've been healthy enough to go out after work in a long time. We have a grand old time. I feel like Old Me, the Before-I-Got-This-Stupid-Arthritis Me. This is awesome.
8:00pm - Oh, crap. I still have a paper to write, and I have to pack for California. Sigh.
7:30 - walk into the library. Greeted by my day circ super who asks knowingly, "Early meeting?" I am not known to be a kind morning person, so he is not offended by my grunted response. This is about the time I wish I could stand the taste of coffee. I check the emails, grab my notebook and the list of items the Faculty Senate president noted that she wanted to bring up at the meeting. And an umbrella - it's misting, but with my luck by the end of the meeting it will be pouring.
8:10 - I'm in the Chancellor's conference room waiting on our 8:30 meeting; the faculty Senate Exec members usually arrive a little early, so I always feel like a latecomer if I get there at 8:30. I'm scanning through a case study on flu vaccinations that I'll need to write a paper on after work. The past president of Senate who serves as ex-officio comes in, so I move to the table with him and we chat over breakfast about his teaching award that was just announced.
8:30 - Senate Exec is present, but the Chancellor will be out (his assistant is on her way after a stop at HR), and the Provost is running late. We eat breakfast (thank you Aramark!) and go over the points we want to make sure get the Provost's attention.
8:45 - 10:15 - The meat of the meeting with the Provost is spent talking about initiatives for student success and retention, with some other current projects and issues thrown in the mix. And it is indeed raining on my walk back to the library, I'm grateful I remembered the umbrella.
10:55 - Circ super ducks in to see if I can cover some desk time due to someone being yanked from the desk for another assignment; no can do, off to a meeting. Laird makes it work, as he always does, because he is made of magic, Laird the Lord of Circulation.
11:00-12:00 - Meeting about ACRL statistics. Good discussion of whether previous assignments of who has the data for what question still hold. Really interesting discussion about what they count and what they don't. Why does ACRL not count hits to the library web page originating from inside the library? (It's not like we have any other good way for you to access the resources, including our catalog. No idea why in-library researchers don't count as users for this statistic.) What is a web site hit? Should we count hits at our LibGuides and Facebook and blog pages, especially if the user uses them as a point of origin as opposed to reaching them through our main web page? ACRL asks you to remove all reserves and any in-library circulating equipment, but those now make up the bulk of our circulation; the survey appears to be completely uninterested in those numbers, which is bizarre since I know other academic libraries see similar trends to ours. Brain asplode over thinking about how long it takes these library surveys to change to reflect what we actually do. (I'm sure if you suck out the reserves, study room, and laptop circs, you'd think that my circ staff had nothing to do all day. Gah. Happy we collect these for the in-library and campus annual report so we can show how important those services are.) The meeting also puts document delivery and some other ILL issues back on my radar, such as how we direct students to items we have access to that they've requested through ILL.
12:10-12:30 - Send off a bio and a headshot (which sounds professional, but it's really a taken-by-be-with-cameraphone-shot) to the editor of The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, who has asked me to be the guest poetry editor for issue XVI, which will come out in July. Wish there was a way to make my bio more interesting, with superpowers instead of publications. Quick chat with our Stacks maintenance guru, who is reporting that the students moving tables around so they can plug in laptops, and the dangling cords, are making things difficult for him and his students when they are working in the collection on the 3rd floor. I'm not sure how much we can influence the kids to not plug in, given the battery life of our circing laptops and the need for MOAR POWER given that we live in a gadgeted future, but I agree to see what I can do on the circ side during our evening rounds to encourage them to clear the aisles.
12:30-1:00 - Look at next week's calendar to see what I need to be prepared for, and to carve out some time for . Pop into some social networks and see what's flying about - one librarian discussion is on CVs, which reminds me that I need to update mine and standardize my darn citations. I'm out on Monday, but Senate exec is meeting with Graduate Council, there are interviews for the university's new distance learning position that I want to attend, there's a "Building Our House for Diversity" workshop I've been invited to by the Office few Equity and Diversity, and as a member of Senate exec I'm invited to lunch with the presenter. A rheum doc appointment - must remember to bring my notes and questions. My monthly meeting with my dean, and a meeting about supplemental pay (which we call MocsBucks) and what it can and can't be used for - an important topic, since quite a few of the librarians teach the freshman seminar courses where you can earn it. The usual circulation and reference desk blocks. Ooh, and Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the US is coming to UTC to speak on Tuesday night, must remember that.
1:00-1:25 - Remember I have to find two people to list as references for an artist's residency I want to apply for. Decide to back-burner since the application isn't due until March 1, and because I can't think of a single person to ask. I have lots of libraryland contacts, very few poet-y ones. Bah and humbug. Must try to hang out and connect with more arty folks. Also put the EdD study groups on Saturdays and Sundays into my calendar for spring.
1:30-2:00 - More email. (These posts are a crazy reminder of how much of my worklife is run through an electronic inbox.) Email the English department head back - nope, can't make Friday's faculty meeting since I'll be out of town, but I can be at the one on March 9th to peddle the library services and wares (or, as I put it in my initial email to him, to give "the 2-minute mini spiel on Why You Are Awesome, Why We Are Awesome, And How We Can Help You Be Even More Awesome"). Email came in asking that some curriculum proposals be put on the docket for tomorrow's Senate meeting; I email back that these were due last Friday to be on the agenda and members will likely vote to table them since they won't have had time to review them properly. President emails back that she agrees, they move to the meeting on the 16th, so I toss them on the agenda for that future meeting. Our Special Collections librarian reports back on his hunt for named professorships requested by the Senate exec team - that was fast. Steve is also made of magic. Grab my notebook for the next meeting. Remind self to waylay Griffey with sushi at some point to show me how to use the iPad for productivity instead of just doing jigsaw puzzles.
2:00-3:00 - Meeting with my dean, the Dean of Lifelong Learning, and the Head of Reference and Instruction about distance learning. Really interesting discussion about tuition and fee structures, about trying to identify students who are wholly-online versus those who take online courses with a mix of on campus courses, in-state and out-of-state, how to identify all these nuances, implications for library services (particularly interlibrary loan and document delivery but also instruction). Leave this meeting with head full. Also - ouch, my sinus. Damn rain.
3:00-3:05 - Opened mail, which included one of my student loan statements. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Okay, back to work.
3:05-3:15 This is my last day in the office until next Tuesday, and because I prefer to read things in print so I can scribble on them (my staff jokingly refer to me as Treekiller Harris), now is the time where I make a list and PRINT ALL THE THINGS. Those things include: my flight information, a book manuscript I've been invited to edit on the relationship between poetry and medicine/health, an article I'm hammering at, the papers I need to revise for a conference in May, the book proposal for an edited collection...you know what? Who am I kidding? I'm not getting anything done on the plane ride to and from California but some trashy fiction reading and reading through that manuscript. Everything else will just have to wait, this isn't a working weekend.
3:15-3:55 - Receive email from the head of the Curriculum Committee asking for more proposals to be posted for Senate approval at the meeting tomorrow; president and I note that members will not have had time to review, which is why all materials were due the Friday before the meeting. Learn from Associate Provost that the approvals have to happen for the Fall catalog to be accurate. I post the materials to the site and send out an email via the Senate's Blackboard list notifying members of the late posting and that they should review them. Emergency averted, but selfishly happy that I won't be at tomorrow's meeting to hear the groaning about the last-minute posting. Registrar emails to say thanks for the fast work. That's right--my superpower is my superfast response time. Booyah.
4:00-4:53 - Email. Accepting new meetings for next week (darn, it had looked so easy just this morning!), things to add to Senate agenda for the meeting on the 16th, webinar invitations,
4:53pm - AUGH. The petitions for the Monday meeting of the petitions committee that I will miss just got posted. I can be a good person and come in tomorrow before the flight and get that done and my vote recorded by email, or not. Sigh. So much for running errands tomorrow morning before travel. *shakes fist at sky*
4:58 - start to pack up. lament that I did not get around to cleaning my omg-absolute-disaster of an office. Ugh. And next week's schedule says I can't tackle it until Wednesday. I do some defensive calendaring, block out some time on Wednesday morning to deal with this. Augh. Ooh, my cane. I'm going to need that for traveling. Yes, definitely clean office. You know what? The dean will grab me on her way out of the building, I can tidy a little bit now.
5:14- Here she is. Dinner at a this-looks-like-shady-business Mexican place that I haven't tried yet. The waitress is sweet but gets multiple things wrong with the order. But she checks on us regularly. There are only two or three other occupied tables in the restaurant. It's nice to be able to have a night out for dinner; this is the first week I've been healthy enough to go out after work in a long time. We have a grand old time. I feel like Old Me, the Before-I-Got-This-Stupid-Arthritis Me. This is awesome.
8:00pm - Oh, crap. I still have a paper to write, and I have to pack for California. Sigh.
Comments
(b) I am glad you are tree killer- at work I have become notorious for throwing things out. When something can't be found- like paper work... or a bicycle... someone will say "maybe Meaghen threw it out..."
She would be a good "poet-tey" reference for you.....