On Monday, January 24 I began the week by teaching an ESHE (Exercise Sport and Health Education) 350 class. In this class I covered popular vs. scholarly articles, what a research article is, and APA style. I was also scheduled to cover database searching in this class, however I ran out of time. I often think that fifty minutes is a long time to fill, but that time goes by quickly. The week before I taught a similar class that lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, and I believe I ran out of time because I was thinking I had an hour and fifteen minutes when I really only had fifty minutes. Following lunch, I had a two-hour shift on the reference desk. With eight questions asked it was not a busy shift, but not a slow one either. The typical beginning of the semester questions persists. Textbooks and printing are always popular topics at every reference desk at the beginning of each semester. After my reference desk shift, I attended the weekly instruction meeting. We have this meeting every Monday in order to discuss instruction within the department, and to divide up the next week's classes. The meeting lasted about an hour, and after we divided up the classes (I ended up with six) we discussed several topics including prep time for instruction classes and how to allot for it during busy instruction times. This semester we are evaluating our instruction sessions, and we also discussed how to place the evaluation link in our LibGuides. I am the minute taker for the semester, so after the meeting I worked on the meeting minutes until it was time to go home for the day. My normal Monday runs from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
On Tuesday, January 25 I arrived at the library at 1:00 p.m. On Tuesdays I work from 1:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. I began my shift by attending a CPR/AED certification session. I am now certified in CPR/AED for two years. After the training session, I returned to my office to check my email and to finish up the minutes from Monday's instruction meeting. I filled the rest of my afternoon with class prep for this week's remaining classes, and I began to look ahead to next week's classes as well. I had to email the professors whose classes I was assigned to touch base and get clarification on what they were expecting from next week's visit to the library. I went to supper at 4:45 p.m. and at 6:00 p.m. I was on the reference desk for my two hour Tuesday night shift. My shift actually ran over about fifteen minutes because the librarian who I share Tuesday nights with had a class that ran until 8:00 p.m. and she needed a few minutes to collect herself before coming to the reference desk. This reference desk shift was a steady shift, with great deal of printing questions asked. We had lots of trouble with our printing system last semester, and it doesn't look like things have improved much. Word docs freeze when students try to print them, and printers disappear from computers. Library schools need to start offering printer and computer troubleshooting classes. I know I have spent a great deal of my time troubleshooting hardware since I became a librarian in September. On a side note, the shift was also peppered with the sounds of fighter jets flying low over the campus. It is amazing how loud they are. You can barely hear yourself think when they fly over. I believe at one point during my shift they were simulating a dogfight over the campus. We hear them nearly every day. I remember the first time I heard them here. I thought we were under attack. I've been told they are flying out of Langley and that they like to fly missions/maneuvers around the mountains here. Our campus is a favorite target because we have the tallest building in the area. It keeps things exciting. When I did return to my office I spent some time answering emails, and I continued to work on class prep for this week and for next week. I left the library at 10:00 p.m.
On Wednesday, January 26, I arrived at the library at 9:00 a.m. My typical Wednesday sees me working at the library from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I spent the morning working on class prep. Most of my free time seems to be devoted to this. When I refer to class prep I mean creating scripts and LibGuides for the actual class instruction, along with worksheets or other handouts that the students will need during the time they spend with me. I'm still new to library instruction, so I like to run through my script or class plan several times before I actually teach. I do this to avoid any surprises, like a search in a database not producing the desired results. At 1:00 p.m. I taught the first of the two classes I would teach for the day. It was a Core 103 class. Core classes are required classes that all entering freshman must take here. This class was on avoiding plagiarism and APA style. The class went amazingly well. The students were engaged and asked great questions. At the end of the session the professor gushed about how wonderful the class was. She said it was the best instruction class she had sat in on in two years. Well, needless to say I was blown away. That comment made my semester. My next class was also a Core 103 class for the same professor that I saw at 1:00 p.m. This class was also on avoiding plagiarism and APA style. The class went well. However, the students were not as engaged as the ones before. They were very quiet and asked few questions. After the class the professor thanked me again for a terrific job on both classes, and she told me that she was going to email the instruction coordinator about it. Before I left for the day I got a very nice email from the instruction coordinator praising me and thanking me for my hard work. The reference coordinator even stopped by and congratulated me on a job well done. My last hour in the library was spent monitoring chat from my office. During busy times of the day someone in the department is assigned as "back-up" for the reference desk. You provide "back-up" by monitoring chat. We received no chats during that hour, and I left the library at 6:00 p.m.
On Thursday, January 27, I began my day at the library at 8:00 a.m. This day was wide open. I only had one scheduled appointment for the day. So most of my day was spent working on class prep, and catching up on emails. At 3:30 p.m. I went to a classroom in Floyd Hall to give a Core 202 class a quick walk through on Prezi. I have become the library's Prezi guru, and I am called on at various times to teach classes on it. (I actually have an hour and a half workshop scheduled on it for next week.) I guess this is what happens when you use a Prezi on a job interview and then you get the job. This is the third time in less than three months that I have given a Prezi workshop. The professor of the Core 202 class has assigned the class a group project where the end result is a Prezi and a poster. So I gave them a quick fifteen-minute walk through of the site and how to use it. I am sure I will be hearing from many of them in the near future. The rest of my day was spent in class prep for next week. I left the library at 5:00 p.m.
On the final day of the week, I the only thing I had scheduled was a one-hour shift on the reference desk. My 10:00 a.m. shift was very slow. It may have been due to the fact that we received a light dusting of snow this morning. I had two questions asked during my hour-long shift, and of course one of them was about a printing issue. Hopefully some day these printing problems will be solved. The rest of my day was spent in class prep, with a great deal of the afternoon spent on one class. On Monday, myself and another librarian will be teaching a NURS 362 class. Nursing classes are always complicated. For this one we had to request a training password from a database vendor, and we spent much of the day trying to get it to work. We had to keep bothering our electronic resources librarian because first they gave us extra access to the wrong databases and then the account was not working at all. We finally got it all straightened out. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon getting the script worked out. I was not the script person for this class. The other librarian I was working with was, so it was his job to get the script together. After he got the outline of the script together, we took time to go through every search and database to make sure we were finding what we needed to. This is a two-hour class, and during it we will be covering database searching in four different databases and APA style. I was glad to see 5:00 p.m. roll around, and with it the end of this week.
So that's my library
