Library Day in the Life: Day 1

I started this blog as a class assignment when I first began to work on my master's in library and information science. I did the three posts that were required for the assignment and haven't touched the blog since. But I heard about this Library Day in the Life project and thought it sounded pretty cool: "Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog. Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do."

So this week, I will attempt to make a post every day, sharing what I do at my job at the University of Texas at Arlington. Today is Monday, and the post will be easy and short. I am not working today because I am home with a cold. If I had been at work, however, I would have gotten in at 9:00 and worked on the reference desk from that time until 11:00. Since it is summertime right now, the desk is not that busy, and I'm usually able to catch up with my email during my Monday morning shift. One of the other things I usually do first thing every day is check the library's Twitter and Facebook pages and start trying to think of interesting things I could post or link to. I am one of about four or five people who have admin privileges on these accounts, and I'm usually the one who makes the most updates. I have several projects I'm working on right now, most having to do with designing upcoming instruction sessions. In particular, I need to pull together a class on plagiarism for entering grad students in linguistics and modern languages (two departments that I serve as a liaison librarian; my others are philosophy and interdisciplinary studies). I'm also working on a class for the library staff focusing on gaming in libraries; I'm copresenting this with a colleague. We are trying to put together a really super presentation that includes a PowerPoint, but we want to make it very simple and graphically oriented, not text heavy. I've always used graphics in presentations, but I usually have also had a lot of text, so this way of putting together a slide show is novel and fun, but also rather difficult. Anyway, had I been at work today, those are the things I would likely have worked on :).