Library Day in the Life 6

Librarians just read books all day, right? WRONG! I urge all interested in the daily work of librarians to check out Library Day in the Life.

You can read my entry for Round 5 of Librarian Day in the Life here. I've been participating via Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/hhibner) for Round 6 and thought I'd blog it too. Instead of a play-by-play of my day, though, I thought I'd just list a few things I did today:

-Email, email, email. Email leads to other work: revised schedules, responded to program idea, responded to LIS student wanting to interview librarians.

-Looked in training manual to remember how items are ordered from Alibris. It only happens once a year or so.

-Served an hour at the Readers Advisory desk. Looked up the order of series books by W.E.B. Griffin and Nelson DeMille. Looked up several movies asked for, and helped patrons find them on the shelves. Suggested a book club kit. Referred a few people downstairs to the youth desk and upstairs to the reference desk. Talked about eBook Readers with a patron. Talked about tax forms (and the current lack of instructions) with another.

-Glanced at some blog posts via Google Reader to see what's new in libraryland today. Some of my favorite blogs: Early Word, The Reader's Advisor, Librarian by Day, and Practical Librarian. Oh, and of course Awful Library Books (shameless plug)!

-Went to see how it was going with the switch to a new time/print management system on the public computers. All's well! A few patron training issues, but they'll get used to it (and so will we!).

-Updated a few slides for the Social Networking 101 program I'm co-presenting next week. Had planned to talk about Delicious, now switching to Diigo, but still want to mention Delicious. Too much for newbies?

-Have more serial records to delete. Running into a permissions problem whenever there is a checkin note attached to the record. Emailed tech svcs about obtaining permission.

-Thought about items to put on tomorrow's reference meeting agenda.

-Spent time looking more closely at collection turnover rates and collection age reports.

-Looked at updates IT staff made to an automated reference counter software they're implementing for me. It's getting really close to being usable!

-Made tomorrow's desk schedule and planned time for intern projects this week.

-Started creating the April/May/June Sunday schedule sign-up sheet. Seems way to early to be thinking about those months, but it's really not!

-Oh, and more email and more re-scheduling and more time off request forms (torfs). A few building walk-abouts just to see what's going on where, and two more hours at the Reader Advisory desk.

My favorite part of the day? Of course, the desk shifts!