Last week I participated in the 7th round of Library Day in the Life. I participated by tweeting my daily activities and blogging the reference questions I received during my reference shifts. Here is a summary of a week in my life as a librarian.
I am a reference/instruction librarian at a small, public university in southwest Virginia. We are 4 weeks away from the start of the Fall semester. Instruction classes and reference questions have been in short supply this summer, and this is completely to be expected. This is my first summer as a professional librarian, but I know from speaking to more seasoned librarians that summers for academic librarians are for catch up and for planning for the coming academic year. That is what I have spent most of my summer doing. Here is my week.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Today I work the 1:00 - 10:00 p.m. shift. I start everyday off by checking and responding to any necessary email. After that I spent most of my time from 1:00 - 4:45 p.m. working on my annual report. This is the first annual report I have had to write, and I am a little nervous about it. The annual report is just a summary of everything that I have done in the past year, with an emphasis on the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the fiscal year. I set 5 goals for myself. This was a rookie librarian mistake. This report is going to take me forever to write! This is a lesson to heed. Set no more than 3 goals for yourself. Apart from working on my annual report, our new instruction librarian started today, and we are sharing an office. I took many breaks during my report writing to answer some of the different questions she had about the library and how we do things here. At 4:45 p.m., I took supper and then reported to the reference desk at 6:00 p.m. for my 4 hour shift. It was a very slow night. I only received 7 questions and they all rated below a 3 on the READ scale. I spent my downtime at the desk working on blogs and reading.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
I am again working the 1:00 - 10:00 p.. shift. (It is very unusual to be working multiple nights during a week at our library. However, we have several people out on vacation this week, and I volunteered to do this. Do not think it is going unrewarded. I am receiving 2 comp days next month for my pains.) After checking email first thing, I again spent most of the time between 1:00 - 4:45 p.m. working on my annual report. I also took a break during that time to give our new instruction librarian (and my new office mate) a tour of the supply closets in the library, and again I fielded many of her questions about librarian life here at our library. I also took a break to go on a walk over to the Starbucks on campus. Librarians cannot run on books alone. ;) At 4:45 p.m., I took supper and then reported to the reference desk at 6:00 p.m. for my 4 hour shift. It was another slow night at the reference desk. This night only yielded 4 questions. At least one of them was a "real" reference question. I spent my downtime at the desk reading and checking my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Today I worked from 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. I started my day off at a planning meeting for the library's staff picnic. The library is holding the picnic on August 19, at a local park. This meeting lasted about 30 minutes. After the meeting I spent the 30 minutes before my 10:00 a.m. reference desk shift checking email. At 10:00 a.m., I was at the reference desk desk for the first of my 3 hours on the desk. There were no questions during that shift. I spent the downtime during this shift on Facebook. After my reference desk shift, I returned to my office to continue working on my annual report. At 1:00 p.m. I took lunch, and at 2:00 p.m. I returned to my office to finish up the annual report. I finished my annual report right before my 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. reference desk shift. At 4:00 p.m. I reported to the reference desk for my shift. While I was on the desk, the instruction coordinator came out to speak with me about the online modules we had been working on. She wanted me to evaluate one of our colleagues online APA modules (on in-text citations) that she felt was a little too confusing. I told her that I would report to her on Thursday about it after I finished proofreading my annual report. I spent my downtime at the desk going over this module and taking notes on it. I did receive 6 questions while at the desk, with 5 of the questions being from the same patron who was trying to locate various books in the collection.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Today was my final 1:00 - 10:00 p.m. shift until the Fall semester begins. When I arrived at 1:00 p.m., I began by checking my email and then I proofread my annual report. After making the necessary changes to my annual report, I emailed it (along with all 24 appendices) to the coordinator of reference services. Around 2:45 p.m., I finished reviewing the online module that the instruction coordinator had asked me to go over and I had a meeting with her about my thoughts on it. During that meeting she asked me to redo the APA in-text citation module and make the changes we had discussed. I need to make 3 Jing videos for this module so I returned to my office to start working on the scripts for these videos. At 4:45 p.m., I took supper and then reported to the reference desk at 6:00 p.m. for my 4 hour shift. I spent the downtime at the desk working on the scripts for my Jing videos along with a Prezi that I would be using in one of the videos. I received 6 questions on the desk, and all of them were from the same person. She was attending a conference at the university and needed help finding articles for a research topic she was pursuing. I spent about an hour and a half helping her locate articles and using the microfilm machines.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Today I worked from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. I started my day as I do most days, checking and responding to emails. My first reference desk shift of the day was at 10:00 a.m. It was a shift that saw no questions. I spent the shift tweaking my scripts and Prezi for the Jing videos that I would be creating later in the day. At 11:00 a.m. I began working on the first Jing video. This was the video that I would be utilizing a Prezi in. I had never used Prezi with Jing before and I had a little trouble getting it to work. Honestly I spent an entire hour just trying to get the screen size right and figuring out how to advance the presentation like I wanted to. It was a very frustrating start. So without a single second of usable video, I went to lunch at noon. At 1:00 p.m. I was back at the reference desk. This shift again saw no questions, and I spent it browsing Facebook, trying to relaxing before tackling my Jing videos once again. When my shift was over at 2:00 p.m., I returned to my office determined to conquer these videos. And conquer I did. I was able to create video #1 on the first try (after working on it for an hour before). The other 2 videos on took me 2 attempts each to complete. I loaded the videos into our CMS Desire2Learn, and reported to the instruction coordinator that I had completed and uploaded the videos. I returned to my office to begin working on the activities for the module. At 4:00 p.m., I was once again at the reference desk. I received 2 questions during that shift, one being a very complicated scanner question that had to do with putting a PDF through OCR. During the downtime of that shift I worked on the activities for the APA in-text citation module.
I did not work on Saturday and the library was closed on Sunday, so that is a week in my library life. I really enjoy working on this project. I always amazes me how much I actually do in a week. And to think that I get to do it all over again on Monday. Joy, joy. ;)
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