Friday, August 1, 2008

Day in the Life of a "Virtual Librarian": Friday

Hmm...well actually, my official title is "Lead Information Resources Coordinator." But I do work in a library that has no books, no walls, etc. I have an office in an office building and our collections are completely online.

So the first thing people always ask is what I do all day. How can I possibly fill an 8 hour work day every day in that environment? Lemmie tell ya, it's easy when I get to get my hands dirty in just about every aspect of the biz here! And since I've been observing the "A Day in the Life of a Library" meme grow recently, I thought I'd kill 2 birds so to speak and add my 2 cents. I'm starting with a Friday, because Mondays are real iffy as far as free time to do stuff like this and besides I'll forget by then...

Here's what I did today and it's fairly typical for a Friday:
  • 5:30am: wake, walk dog, wash-up, etc.
  • 6:45 am: 40 min commute
  • 7:30 am: arrive @ office, eat a breakfast-ish snack (pop-tart, cereal bar, fruit, chocolate?), check e-mail, review reference responses from last couple days, quick twitter/friendfeed check
  • 8:00 am respond to e-mails
  • 8:30 am: register for Elluminate V Room and begin testing it out to see how existing Wimba workshop content and activities might work with it. Some functions are improvements over Wimba, others not so much. Conclude it will be a bit of work to get it running smooth on new platform, regardless. Look at my calendar frantically and fear not enough time to do this.
  • 9:30 am: Bloglines prof dev break - catch up on library and tech stuff, explore couple cool new (at least to me) tools: http://g.ho.st/ (online desktop) and http://www.factcheck.org/. Also revisit Zoho for 1st time in ages. It looks like it's improved.
  • 10:30 am: Work on outline and hands-on plans for 1 hr Library Intro workshop for new nursing students via Elluminate - keep it simple, Dana!
  • 11:30am: working lunch at desk: crappy bag o' microwave mac'n cheese
  • Noon: more 2.0 exploration: Finding Dulcinea, Learning Interactives and Gliffy
  • 12:15 pm: more Elluminate work
  • 1 pm: reading break at park across street: Gibson's brilliant "Spook Country"
  • 1:30: edit EZProxy cfg file for new ACLS Humanities e-book collection, add that + 2 Alexander St. Press resources to our web site
  • 2:30 pm: provide feedback to nursing faculty whose 401 course I'm embedding in about possible research assignment adjustments and how I can best help students.
  • 3 pm: draft long list of social networking tools/apps/sites I use or am thinking of using for any purpose at request of IT dep, via my boss + LibGuides tweaking
  • 4 pm: weekend is here after commute home!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting blog...I was curious if you wouldn't mind sharing your list of social networking tools/apps/sites that you compiled?

Unknown said...

Certainly! Although it should be reiterated this is a "kitchen sink" list - many I've only come across and not even had a chance yet to evaluate beyond the most cursory of glances. I'll create a new post soon with that list