Being as it’s Library Week and all I’ve decided to take a snap shot of the day and document what I do. I may even add it to the Library Day in the Life wiki. I always find it interesting to see what other people do with their time and for people considering librarianship as a career, this sort of record is useful.
7.00am Wake up with a start (having spent the night on the lounge because of my cough) and rush through the shower. Get dressed. Wake children and hurry them into their clothes.
7.30am Put lunches into bags, find shoes for Mr 5.5 , can’t find shoes for Miss 2 so give up.
7.50am Prepare smoothies and toast for family. Attempt to soothe 5.5.yr old over the fact the frozen strawberries are no longer whole but part of the smoothie experience all the same. Husband prepares morning flat white.
8.00am Have breakfast, flick through newspaper bits that aren’t taken by husband, hurry children along.
8.15am Bundle everyone out the door. Wave goodbye to husband and Mr 5.5. Spend “ages” waiting to get out of our street onto the main road.
8.20 Drop Miss 2 at daycare. Find shoes in her locker. Chat with caregiver about the fact she is no longer having afternoon sleeps. Say goodbye to Miss 2 who is doing a puzzle.
8. 50am Get to parking building to discover all the “free” spaces are taken. Mutter about discrimination against working mothers who have to start later than 8.30am and therefore don’t get to benefit from free parking. Mutter about the fact this campus has much fewer amenities than the main campus i.e. on site daycare, on site gym, free parking for staff, a bookshop etc
9.00am Waltz into the office trying to shed grumpy demeanor.
9.05am Turn on computer. Wander over to the other workroom to say good morning and to chop up some scrap paper for writing stuff on at the reference desk downstairs. Chat to boss about text messaging pilot we will be running next year and the fact our 16 laptops are all issued by 9.00am. Fortunately they seem to be working okay this morning. Make some comments about the new e-learning strategy coming out soon that will be promoting the use of wireless mobile devices and the need for our network to run effectively for this to happen.
9.20am Come back to office and look at email. Forward an email about course reserve item to colleague who does that job. Log on to Library H3lp (IM/chat reference service we offer). Colleague fields a lewd question while I log on. Discuss whether or not we can trace the perp’. No, only their IP address, but we decide not to disabuse students of the notion that we can track them down. 😉
9.25am More emails. Read one about the re-vamped book ordering system we use. Log on to new look. Decide it looks nice but not sure it’s doing anything better/different, in fact it seems awfully slow but maybe that is our network. Change a few preferences to see what they do.
9.30am Recieve email from colleague who can’t seem to get into Libguides. Log on to Libguides to see if I can work out what is going on. Receive email 3 minutes later to say colleague has managed to log on after all.
9.35am Check webmail, Twitter and Facebook for updates. (Ack! K has beaten me in Lexulous… again!). Wonder if I should do a WISE course advertised on nz-libs. Then remember am supposed to be saving to pay off some bills and for a family trip next year. Add a couple of recommended blogs to my feeds to be considered.
9.51am Decide it isn’t too early to make coffee.
10am Settle in for a stint of searching for books to order. Need to replace some old titles and get some new stuff for a couple of newish courses being run. System runs so slow I read some feeds while each step loads. (Leap out of my chair when fire alarm test goes). Decide the NZ dollar isn’t too bad today against the US dollar.
11.00am Answer a Library H3lp query. Spend 30 plus minutes helping a business student find some stuff. Order some books while they take time to look at the links I’m sending them.
11.52am Head downstairs to listen to West Auckland publishing director of Oratia Media. Very interesting talk as part of Library Week celebrations at the public library.
12.45pm Leave talk early in order to have lunch before going on the reference desk shift. Gobble lunch at desk since staff room is so full of staff there are no tables free.
1.00pm Grab trolley of books and head downstairs to reference desk, hiccuping. Put books on recently returned trolley. Log on to reference desk computer. Discover there are no statistics sheets left so email colleague to bring some down for me.
1.10pm Patron comes to desk looking for Abode book for dummies [sic]. Decipher she wants Adobe Photoshop for dummies.
1.24pm Resident nutter comes in and chats. Tells me I look lovely. Tells me he remembered his library card today. Borrows a CD and tells me he has a $1 to borrow it too. So happy for him I hiccup.
1.28pm Do search for dog behaviour books for patron.
1.29pm Answer query about internet use and overdue books.
1.34pm Read some feeds. Colleague comes down to point out spare stats sheets in the cupboard behind me. Feel embarrassed.
1.42pm Does a request for a stapler count as a Technical question or a Referral (to the stapler I mean)?
1.50pm Answer queries about a computing book. Can’t find it on recently returned shelves or the shelf itself. Recommend placing a hold.
2.10pm Realise my relief isn’t turning up so switch the Available sign to This desk is unattended blah blah sign and head upstairs for a staff meeting.
3.14pm Staff meeting begins. Boss has provided snackies for the meeting. Just an informal natter today. Discussion of laptops and how messy the cords get. Demonstration by expert cord wrangler colleague ensues. Eat a chocolate biscuit to recover from the demonstration. Someone has tagged the air bridge, cleaners will be needed with a cherry picker to clean it since it’s on the outside. Glad I am not said cleaner, and eat a piece of cheese to recover from the thought of having to deal with heights. Dress code of our joint library discussed. No cleavage allowed – am devastated. NOT. Various other discussions but nothing of great note. Staff meeting finishes. Eat some afternoon tea at my desk while wasting some time on Facebook.
3.3opm Colleague consults about the new APA 6th style in response to student query.
3.40pm Check Twitter. Check NZ Herald headlines.
3.50pm Start to order some more books. This time on narrative therapy rather than my earlier delightful topics of abuse and incest.
4.20pm Get sick of ordering books. I have spent NZD$1,002.50 of my budget today. Read some RSS feeds.
5.00pm Close everything down. Leave to pick up Miss 2 and feed the walking eating machines that are my whanau.
Hope you had a good day too.
That’s fabulous.. 🙂
I might have to do one… 🙂
Wow, that’s a busy day you have there!
This made my day.
Wish I could get one done including the meeting yesterday for 1.25 hours on who will clean the fridge.
Very interesting.
Bummer about the “no cleavage” – how disappointing!
Hi Penny,
I blogged mine as ‘Days of our Librarians’ because we work as a team downstairs.
Keep up the good work!