So, Tom Ipri recently wrote a “week in the life” post for the What is a librarian’s day like? meme. I happened to read that post today, and it just so happens that today is a good day to write about.
Now, one of the projects I’ve been working on recently is basically government documents collection development. Government documents are kind of like serials – you basically subscribe to (gov docs lingo: select) items you want. Items themselves, however, tend to be very general. You can, for example, select General Publications of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Now one of the quirky things about government documents is that you can only select new items in June and July. I wanted to get my selections done last week, but that didn’t happen, so I wanted to get them done today. (I’ve got a lot of things to get done before the end of the month, but since I’ll be in DC next week for a government documents seminar, that means I have a lot to get done this week.)
So, I came in to work early today – about 8. (I usually arrive around 9.) After saying hello to my surprised employees, I settled in and worked diligently on item selection for a little over two hours. When I finished, I headed downstairs to the reference desk to chat with my predecessor and get his opinion on the items I’d like to add.
When we finished with that, I went back upstairs and sat in on training for my employees. We just switched our integrated library system from Voyager to Millennium, and they’d been eagerly awaiting training on the cataloging module. I’m not sure how useful it was to them that I was there, but it was useful to me. From our discussion, I realized that I wanted us to have a separate location code for government documents that are housed at our downtown library.
That lasted for over two hours. I realized, shortly after 1, that I was late for “LibGuide-O-Rama.” This was the last of three “work sessions” I set up. Since we’re aiming to have all our old guides switched over to LibGuides by August 1, I figured it would be good to have some times set aside during the month of July for people to simply work on their guides, and ask questions if they had any. As the primary question-answerer, it is not surprising that I didn’t get very much work done on my guides during these sessions. However, today wasn’t too bad – I did manage to nearly finish my computer science guide.
By the time that wound down, it was about 3:40, so I went back upstairs to my office, chatted briefly with my employee about the training, and answered an e-mail or two. I left at 4, figuring that my lack of lunch break warranted leaving a little early.