Library Day in the Life: Days 4 & 5

I didn't have time late last week or earlier this week to finish this "Library Day in the Life" blog thing, so I'll wrap it up today.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

7:00, up and at 'em, as my dad was fond of saying.

9:00-10:00, arrive at the office, check email, prepare for attending a day-long virtual conference, "Handheld Librarian Online Conference". Most of the librarians here wanted to attend, so one kind person (thanks, Sarah!) took it upon herself to have three meeting rooms reserved for us to gather in to listen to the presenters together. So from 10-4:30, I was in one or another of these rooms listening to some very interesting (for the most part) presentations about how libraries can cater to patrons who are increasingly relying heavily on handheld devices (mainly smart phones) to access our services. Here are the sessions I attended, with a few thoughts on those that I remember:

Gerry McKiernan, Opening Keynote: The conference got off to a shaky start with this presentation. McKiernan's voice was difficult to understand because of audio problems (mainly distortion) and then it got too soft. I was following the hashtags for the conference on Twitter and many people were complaining about the audio. Many others were having problems just logging into the site that was hosting the conference. The bugs were finally worked out about the time that McKiernan finished. His talk contained useful information about the prevalence of handheld devices and how much people are relying on them today, but it wasn't really the kind of inspirational/motivational talk that a keynote usually is.

Alison Miller: This presenter discussed her experience with being involved in the Altarama/Infoquest project, "a collaborative reference service that enables users worldwide to send questions via SMS text messages on their mobile phones."

Virginia Cole, Baseema Banoo Krkoska, & Gabriel Macias: Launching a Text a Librarian service. The first two presenters talked about using Mosio's commercial product "Text a Librarian"; Gabriel was there to represent Mosio and demo the product more fully. A colleague of mine and I had visited Mosio's booth at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago about a month ago and were so impressed with the product, we immediately recommended its purchase. Our library admin has initially stated that with the current budgetary constraints, it's not possible to make the purchase; my supervisor is trying to find a workaround.

The last few presentations (Tom Peters, the Academic Library Panel, and Joe Murphy) started to get jumbled in my mind because, frankly, we didn't get a break (our library supplied lunch for everyone, but we just ate as we listened), and I was getting Text a Librarian and Twitter overload. I do remember Murphy saying that texting and mobile phone services mark a revolution for libraries and that we must keep up or be lost in the shuffle.

At the end of the day, I spent a little time catching up with email and then headed home.

Friday, July 31, 2009

7:00, awake too early for my liking, as usual.

9:00-12:00, I spent a good bit of time just catching up with administrative tasks and email this morning. I updated the library's Facebook and Twitter statuses with information about our new high-speed scanner station. I had not had a chance to try out this new machine yet, and I wanted to get a couple of pics of it for our FB page, so I went down with our digital camera to have a look. It is extremely easy to use, and, in the interests of being "green," we are not charging our patrons for its use, which I think is way cool. They can scan what they like and save the images to a flash drive or email them to themselves. If they wish to print pages, they can go log onto one of our public PCs and pull up their images and send them to a printer. It is VERY cool. So I posted all this info and some pictures of myself using the machine to our FB page and got some great feedback from students who are excited about this new service.

12-12:30, lunch

12:30-2, email again. I did have a request from a student who was having trouble accessing an article he needed to find. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for me to try out Screenjelly.com. This service is free, web-based (nothing to download, don't even have to make an account), and allows you to capture up to three minutes of screen video; it then gives you a URL to which you can direct people who need to see your vid. It's super easy to use (allows you to automatically Twitter your URL if you wish) and really fun. I made this vid, sent the link to the student with a few simple instructions on the optimal way to watch it, and got this response from him: "Thanks! That's a cool tool you have there." Score! He liked the vid, and it was SO much easier and faster for me to record it than to write out all those instructions.

2-3, had to catch up on my journal (I keep a daily log of activities so that I can fill out my monthly report easily) and do my monthly report and time sheet.

3-4:30, worked on my PowerPoint presentation for the Gaming in Academic Libraries workshop that a colleague and I are jointly doing. I really enjoy this type of work -- pulling together a presentation with lots of cool images. In the past, I've been fond of getting royalty-free images from stock.xchng but recently heard about Compfight, which I'm going to try next time I need images. This was also the first time that I've experimented with having almost NO text on my slides, instead using almost all images as advocated here and here.

4:30-6, worked on the very earliest, initial stages of a research project that two of my colleagues and I are going to do together, write up, and try to get published. (Note: I am not in a tenure-track position and thus do not have to publish, but it certainly won't hurt, and this research actually seems interesting.) I don't want to go into the details because I think that the idea we are working on is very cool and it hasn't been done, so frankly, I don't want someone else to take it and run with it.

So that was my week, folks. If anyone has comments or questions, I'd love to hear them!