Librarian’s Day in the Life- round 4, day 1

This blog has been super quiet of late, but I’ve decided to resurrect it for Librarian’s Day in the Life

Library Day in the Life 4

Today, I got in at 9:00, whichis technically early (I’m officially  on a 10-6 schedule). I turned on computer, added to the to do list while it was booting up (added: input Haiti LibGuide information, remember to tweet about last day of voter’s registration, check on some feedback from Internet Librarian conference, get SA feedback on OBOC)

Sent out a tweet about the Voter Registration Kiosk in the UGL, and today’s primary deadline.

About 5 minutes after everything opened and I scanned my calendar and my email, windows wanted to reboot. I decided to elt it and went to the ladies. Came back, sent in a facilities request about the broken lights in the Ladies.

Went upstairs to ask a staff member a question, spent several minutes chatting with 6 staff on  my way to and fro.

Put together a poll of the One Book One Campus nominations selections and sent out to our Student Assistant listserv for their input. I’d really their feedback before I pick my three (but I think I’m going to select Logicomix even if none of the SAs go for it, we’ll see). This was my first time using Google Forms.  It’s pretty easy to use, I think I’m happy with it.

Answered an email from my brother who really needs a law librarian at his firm!

Consulted with a couple of colleagues about the text I drafted for the website, defining the Learning Commons. We do Learning Commons a little differently here, so the language is really challenging. Some progress, and agreement about the challenges.

Went through my email, responded to 13 emails (including the looking over the nominating ballot results for Faculty Senate)

Added several events to our UGL Recommends calendar, reprinted and reposted this weeks calendar at the reference desk

Added the Study Abroad partners to permissions for the computer at the Connections desk

This afternoon I have 1 hour on the reference desk, when I hope to start inputting the content my GA gathered for the Haiti Libguide. I then have my weekly meeting with my boss, and a meeting to discuss signage in the library

The to-do list for the week will probably not get much more attention after today — tomorrow is a research day, at least until the Collection Development Committee meeting. Wednesday is solid meetings (Librarian’s meeting, research agenda discussion, and a division meeting) and the reference desk from 10-4. Thursday I am taking a statistics workshop, and then have 2 hours on the reference desk and have scheduled 2 hours to work on my annual report. Friday is 2/3 research day, and at some point this week I have to wrap up my ACRL-IS obligations around Midwinter.

A pretty usual day, and a pretty usual week!

Collaborative workspace in the digital library?

I’ve spent most of the last two days in an online conference that didn’t really work for me. The whys and wherefores and ponderings I’ve had about online conferences may become fodder for another post, but not this one. This one is about the good thing that came out of attending a conference that didn’t match what I wanted: I put some energy into articulating what I had been hoping to learn.

The conference was about building collaborative learning environments. Much of the conference was billed as happening in their virtual Learning Commons, which is what explicitly led me to sign up for the conference; I wanted to see what a virtual Learning Commons built by Educause would look like, how it would behave (It ended up being a Ning community).

One of my greatest strengths is that I see new ways to solve problems, and new ways to move forward. A long time ago I stopped being surprised that no one else was seeing what I was seeing.  I am generally accustomed to that most frustrating search, for something that doesn’t exist. But I never get used to that feeling of being all alone. I want to lean on work done by other people, I want to move small increments forward. I like being on context, I thrive on being in community. Far too often professionally I’m seeing a way through that no one else has acted upon or written about.

Today? What I wanted from this conference were tools and ideas for creating non-classroom based virtual collaborative spaces. The digital component of the Learning Commons, the online space where students gather to work on classwork, passion work, student organization work. The workspace of the digital library. With collaborative tools in place, access to the library’s resources, IM and document sharing, video conferencing, storage to leave work in a safe space…

Does it sound self-evident as a next step to you? It started to for me. And now, now I’m seeing that this may be huge leaps into the future. I’m trying to see what the baby steps might be, and starting to think about how to flesh out my assumptions about the desirability of such a space, and its applicability. I’m starting to feel a touch overwhelmed at the thought of creating this (I breathe more easily when I think maybe all I need is a particular sort of LMS, like Moodle or Blackboard).  I feel over my head, and am hoping I’m not really a couple laps in front.

Are you working on a project like this? I’d love to see what you’re doing!

A day in the life …

Wow, today is a completely crazy day to do a Day-in-the-life post. It’s the end of July, and that means three important things:

1. My new Unit Head has been here long enough to settle in
2. Most folks are recovered from ALA
3. The start of semester is suddenly looming large in folks’ heads.

This morning, my day looked like 4 meetings and a video interview with the student paper about @askundergrad. In the end, it was only 3 meetings, and no interview. And I feel (wrongly) like I got very little done, but let me fill you in on the details.

I generally get to work between 9:00 and 9:30, and today was here around 9:00. I checked voicemail while booting up the computer, one vendor call I will have to vet through a friend working on the project the vendor was asking me about. Once the computer was up, I spent about 20 minutes checking in with my emails, twitter, and FriendFeed. I discovered my 10:30 meeting was canceled, and decided to check out some of the Table of Content alerts I get. By 9:45, I have 22 tabs open on my browser. Gmail, FriendFeed, and 5 articles from the TOC alerts, the rest are articles Twitter or FriendFeed tipped me to.

Before submitting more ILL requests for articles from Library review, I sent an email query to our LIS librarian wondering why we don’t have it. The answer was pretty stunning — the journal costs over $10K a year. I submitted my ILL requests.

I checked out an article on twitter in libraries, saw that my library’s twitter stream was mentioned, and misrepresented. Queried the twitterati, and decided to follow up with a letter to the author (or the publisher?); I later worked out (after discussing with a colleague) that the article was written 8 or 10 months ago, and decided not to bother correcting it. And also, that I really need to get my article on the pedagogy, libraries, and Twitter written!

I spent a few minutes catching up with a colleague back from vacation, and we discussed some fun search topics for GA training and/or student sessions for fall

Reality definitely derailed my plan to spend 2 hours writing this morning, and so by 11:00 I was prepping for the three back to back meetings of the afternoon. These are about prioritizing the suggestions gathered by my new Head from the Undergrad faculty & staff for implementation; developing an overall signage strategy, tone, and design; and re-imagining our annual Homecoming week research rally (which will also probably include discussion of our Quad Day plans – the day before classes start. They used to start midweek, but now on Monday, which makes Quad Day a Sunday, which makes it more difficult).

In the process of searching email for the (properly filed) list of suggestions, for my 2:00 meeting, I found the details I need for moving some current books from the Main Stacks to the Undergrad. We have a non-duplication policy, and care deeply about having the right books in this particular library for this audience, so moving current, Undergraduate-appropriate titles on AIDS and HIV from the Stacks to Undergrad would help our students. I spent about 25 minutes removing excess formatting from the WorldCat list of titles (from 54 pages to 11– being an environmentalist sometimes feels like an enormous time cost burden!)

By 11:45, I was sick of my desk, took a long walk to a colleague’s office (outside, even!!) to pay her for the local blueberries she picked up for me at the farmer’s market when I was out of town this weekend. I wish I’d thought to ask for heirloom tomatoes 

Got back to my desk, saw a tweet about Star Trek playing at the local opera house this week, invited a few friends, realized that I now have plans for every single night this week, and promptly got exhausted, then removed grocery shopping from my to-do list

Around noon I followed up with another colleague on determining if any of the presentation mice owned by Library IT can click links, or if they are all ppt mice. Turns out they are all PowerPoint mice, and so I began the process of asking IT to buy some that I can use in teaching. Budget details haven’t percolated far enough down yet for IT to be able to let me know, but my request is in the queue.

My phone rang, I answered, it was a vendor call. Created a GMail folder for the emailed vendor stuff. Sigh. I asked for it, specifically, at ALA, but now it feels like junk mail again (some day I’ll get to refurbish my Learning Commons with appropriately sized tables, and create the sort of cool seating vignettes that i want, and I spent time at ALA getting furniture vendors to start sending me catalogs)

Ate a quick lunch at my desk at around 1:00. This was my third meal on this particular restaurant leftover. It was tasty, I’m glad it’s all gone now! I saw my mailbox had a huge package in it, turns out it was a catalog, more vendor mail, which I had indeed asked for. Make note to create physical file space for vendor mail I need to keep

Read a couple news articles about ebook readers (the Apple tablet looks awfully pretty, but I am not enthused that it is being reported to run iPhone as its OS) and make a mental note to move the ebook reader pilot project to the next step, which leads almost automatically to guilt about the dropped state of the Career Services Support working group I’m chairing.

My new boss had asked me for a prioritized wish list, so I spent some time with my Learning Commons wishlist. It’s a pretty unspecific list at present, and I am trying to turn it into a concrete, prioritized, actionable list of items. Like, instead of “materials to display art” I now have three items. They still need a lot more detail and definition, but it’s a start. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of challenges have arisen over my desire to display student art work. Not people challenges – everyone likes the idea- but around how to hang it, and how to protect it, and I’m currently leaning towards digital displays, but will need to follow up with several stakeholders, and that will almost certainly lead to more questions than answers. Maybe by Spring we’ll have art?

Finally, 2:00, and the suggestions meeting. When the new Head started, she met with everyone in the Undergrad, and this group was formed to work on implementing the ideas that she pulled out of all of those meetings. We’ve added a few, primarily about facilitating the ongoing sharing of ideas. Hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow to write up the notes and pull out which we are each responsible for.

My 3:00 meeting was about signs (and also part of having a new sherrif in town), and that went so much better than I had expected! I’m not sure we’ve got a whole lot of action items yet, but we have agreement in principle about style and tone and attitude, and a shared will to change some of the policies that we feel aren’t necessary. Excellent, all around.

My 4:00 meeting was about programming for Research Rally, our Homecoming Week event, which is widely advertised, but could be much more exciting and muscular. My proposal went over well, and I’m really excited about. I’m not sure we can pull it off as I imagine it — a day long series of 15-50 minutes workshops — since it will involve convincing 5-7 more folks to play along and teach a session or two. But it will be great.

This colleague and I agreed to hold off on a proposal I just dropped the timeline on, and we chatted a bit about what we’re going to do for Quad Day, which is held the day before classes start. Classes now start on Monday, so Quad Day is Sunday, and the library isn’t usually open. We’ve decided to be open, and now we have to work out what we should expect.

When I’m done with you all, I will write up the First Day FAQ we brainstormed for Quad Day, I will work my way through the 15 open FireFox tabs, the 7 Word docs, and check my email before heading out the door to meet a friend for pool, beer, and fries, not neccesarily in that order. Tomorrow I plan on wwriting a proposal for an article, meeting a colleague for lunch, taking 90 minutes for a doctor’s appointment, and then fleshing out the suggestions committee’s suggestions. I hope I will also get my Wishlist fleshed out with brands and dollars, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Tomorrow will be capped off by an evening of trivia and cocktails, and if we do well, karaoke. Wednesday is blissfully unscheduled (except for lunch) — we’ll see what that brings!

Are you exhausted? I’m definitely ready to start my end-of-day processes!

Do libraries make people feel like this?

After months of trying to find a new phone that would meet my needs and not overwhelm me with more than I need,  I finally upgraded my phone, my life, my plan, to an LG Xenon. I waited with baited breathe for the UPS man, and after taking the package from his hands, and ripping it open, my excitement started leaking like a 3 day old helium balloon.

Nothing about this is fun.

Nothing about this makes me happy.

N0thing about this is remotely the way it should  be.

The phone arrived uncharged– a major deterrent to immediately diving in and playing around. The directions for authorizing the phone, for changing my phone number, for setting up my voicemail — none worked as described. I mean, the reps I spoke with were great, but I spoke with 4 of them. They were all also mystified about how to proceed with someone who only had the cell phone. Do most people do this from work?? I mean, landlines are scarce amongst the company I keep, are we really that abnormal?

Every step along the way has been ugly and unpleasant. Nothing has worked according to direction, and everything that seemed intuitive has caused a problem somewhere else down the line.

And while I am siting here, seething and pouting, in the back of mind I’m wondering:  is this the library user experience?

• We  have sexy tools
• They are far too complicated
• Our help systems — vendor and librarian –do they meet the challenge? Do they assist with the actual problems our patrons encounter?
• Are the help tools a poor match to the systems as the currently exist?
• And, do we put way too much emphasis on assuming (requiring?) the user will come talk to us? Us, lovely, helpful, kind, librarians. But such a hassle to sidetrack from the task at hand to talk to, and too bound in procedures and checking the work to offset the waste of patron time having to ask represents.

Do we make out patrons feel the way AT&T and LG are making me feel right now? If the answer is yes, it’s unacceptable. How do we, how can I, start laying out an agenda towards developing better, more intuitive systems and implementing far better and less intrusive help?

What am I doing this summer?

There’s a meme gaining steam around teh interwebs and since it matches what’s been on my mind, I thought I’d chime in. What exactly does a librarian do in t he summer time? Well, this academic librarian has a few things on her plate!

• Working on focus. I’ve gotten much better at limiting the continuous partial attention, but this summer offers a vast panorama of un-meeting-ed time, and I am developing exercises to force myself to focus for ever longer times without distraction
• Work with my Undergraduate Research Methods Project team to analyze our data and get at least one article written
• Immerse myself in the literature on learning commons, on the impacts of the interactive web on cognition and learning  styles, and learning spaces. Overly optimistically, on privacy, ethics & libraries too.
• Frame  out an article, maybe even write one
• Pull together a pilot personal librarian program with a couple of stakeholders
• Get to know my new unit head, and start working towards the future
• implementing the processes and technology pieces that will allow us  to turn our twitter stream interactive; develop the training for all the parts; train staff and GAs on the new processes
• Figure out how to selectively tweet to our Facebook page. This is much more of a challenge than I ever would have guessed
• Talk to stakeholders and develop three pilot proposals for e-book readers. This will include working out the pros and cons and capabilities of each of the readers. I’m really excited about this one, have a couple  of great ideas for the pilots projects
• Read the One Book selection and develop a plan for physical and virtual discussion groups on the book for Fall semester, and on related themes (or books related by themes) for the Spring.
• Reconnect with some of the Learning Commons partners that have fallen off my radar
• Make sure that Learning Commons partnerships are on the minds of the new hires replacing the 2 partners who left to follow their bliss elsewhere.
• Lay the groundwork with a stakeholder for a re-purposing of a particular space in the building
• Now that the IT reorg has started to settle in, start building the relaitonships I need formore effective partnering with campus IT
• Work with EdTech to start to resolve some of the technology training issues that have fallen through the cracks on campus
• Work with stakeholders on integrating (or not) the workshop series I’m launching in the Fall with an existing workshop series aimed at a different audience
• A handful of web page updates and a couple pf entirely new pages, including one that will involve creating a whole new communication process for a bunch of folks across campus
• Do a better job at leading my working group, get the next phase rolling and the lib guide up
• Visit (and photograph) each of the (40some?) libraries on campus to get a sense of the variety of spaces we call “library”
• Make a point of having coffee or lunch with a librarian I would otherwise not interact much with at least every 2 weeks. These conversations are always rewarding and inspiring.
• Deal with the logistics of the party a colleague & I are throwing for my friend and soon-to-be-former unit head to celebrate her election to ACRL vice-president/president elect.

Wow. That’s exhausting. I had actually been feeling like I didn’t have enough going on this summer, but maybe now I’ll be a bit more able to cut myself some slack!

How about you? What’s your summer look like?

Who shapes culture for the future?

One of last year’s LOEX sessions ended with a Q&A that centered on librarians judging their directors harshly and how directors aren’t being very transparent or inspiring of the line librarians reporting to them. That conversation has stayed with me, and I’ve spent a lot of energy and time over the last year pondering  the roles and responsibilities of library directors, Deans, and other high level administrators. I’ve also been looking at a lot of Administrative changes in the past year — a new job (new Unit Head, and anew structure which includes a Library Dean/UL), the Director at my former place of work announcing her retirement, a colleague being raised up in her place, and now an imminent transitioning of my current unit head, — leadership in all its flavors has been on my mind a lot.

If you ice that cupcake cake with the knowing that I’ve been reading strategic plans to analyze for SWOTS identified therein (for my Marketing class…) and filter all that through the byzantine maze that is my inner workings, you find me asking one question:  How does/how should organizational culture fit into the responsibilities and visi0ns of high level administrators?

I’m sure it does fit, but I’m not sure I’m seeing how it is being positively and actively shaped from on high. I’m also left wondering if my own sense of what a healthy, dynamic, vibrant, organizational culture looks like might be very different that the optimal culture as seen from the Administration offices.

That LOEX session urged more transparency and charitable viewing of what directors do, so it’s in that vein that I am posing this question — do you see your Dean, Director, Unit Head, University Librarian, as having a role in creating, developing, changing or sustaining organizational culture? In what ways? Do you see them taking on active roles in shaping it? If so, how? If you are an administrator, how do you deal with this? Help me see it!

AskUndergrad on Twitter

New jobs are full of important accomplishments that are largely invisible. I’m really happy that in my first few months on the job here I’ve got at least one loudly visible accomplishment.

I feel like I’ve figured out how to make Twitter work for my library. How to use it to connect our patron base to our collections & services. And I’ve been able to use Twitter to support the philosophy I’m building my job around: connecting undergraduates to their intellectual life via library services.

What do I mean when I say that? Well, if you look at the screen cap to the right you can see the three main types of tweets I’ve been training the grad assistants to develop. The blue one is a “service tweet.” A research study I’m involved with (based on Nancy Foster’s Rochester Study – link is a .pdf) has been revealing that our students don’t know what they can do in our library. We’re trying to tweet at least one service a day, from our 24/5 hours to the existence of typewriters, color printers, and scanners, right on down to the nitty gritty of reserves searching and the OPAC itself.

The purple one is a “partner tweet“. My Learning Commons has a number of student services and campus partnerships that we host in an effort to both be “the campus in the library” and hopefully develop intellectual and library connections with units like Study Abroad, Career Center, undeclared advising, and One Book One Campus.

The use I am most excited about though is the “this day in history tweet.” These are connections between a historical event and library resources. The links are to pre-canned searches in the OPAC or database, or to a LibGuide, and are designed to make the connection between something interesting and library stuff, and hopefully build critical thinking skills as well as basic library awareness. We also do variations on these tweets with campus & community events, film series, festivals, and current news. My secret wish? That the Google calendar we use to make note of interesting events will eventually be maintained enough to make public, and that campus & community program planners will seek out inclusion on the UGL Recommends calendar!

I’ve been considering this semester an experimental roll-out, where I am working out training issues, fleshing out the wiki we’re using for guidelines and content, getting folks used to tweeting regularly and using the variety of tools we need to pull this off (we use Twitter, a PBWiki, a Google calendar, a link shortener with analytics, a canned search generator for the OPAC, a website with instruction for creating proxied search pURLS for the databases, and we’re looking into a tweet scheduler and Google analytics!)

The biggest challenge has been that we’re broadcast only. Our Twitter is embedded in the UGL home page (that’s why every entry is dated), and we’ve been using it in such a way that no one needs to understand twitter to get some advantage. I now have to solve a very luxurious problem though — we’re catching on, and the number of actual UIUC undergraduate students who follow askundergrad has shot up. I like having the feed on the homepage, but I also want to get interactive! I’m thinking about using a hashtag and embedding that, but am leery about losing more precious characters. It’s a fantastic dilemna, and I’m looking forward to solving it!