As part of the ongoing project illustrating the daily work lives of librarians, here’s a taste of what I did on Monday. Is this typical? Not really. I rarely have as much time to devote to a single project (the grant). Summer time is normally a chance to work on big projects, whereas the school year is largely devoted to library instruction and reference-type questions from students and faculty.
8:00am (OK, 8:10am). Arrive at work, turn my computer on and make tea. Because a day that doesn’t start with tea won’t go smoothly. Tetley tea, milk and sweetener, in case you’re wondering.
8:15am to 9:00am: Read and write several emails related to a search committee I am chairing. Come work with us! We’re hiring a Library Business Manager and an Electronic Resources & Digital Scholarship Librarian. Check the HR system to see if we have any applicants. Yay! We do!
9:00am to 11:00am: Work on an outline for a grant. It is a science education related grant, and I’m working with some folks from the biology department. Naturally, I can provide the literature searching and citations. When the faculty members want to say “35% of students do/know this” I find the citation that proves it (usually). I am also assisting with their assessment plan.
I get distracted several times following my stream on twitter, tweaking my circles on Google+ and chatting with a colleague about who should be responsible for updating the library floor plans. I find some cool things:
- From Scientific American: Motherhood: Your Brain on Kids
- A book review of a book I read recently
- A new app for Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform that will read journal articles to you and let you create an MP3 file to listen on your iPod
11:00am to 12:00pm: Search committee meeting. Today we devised the rating form to use when we rank candidate applications.
12:00pm to 1:00pm: Meet with several colleagues to discuss the status of a USGS document weeding project we’ve been working on. A perusal of our storage room and stacks indicates that the project is farther along than we thought. Next steps: set up a meeting with the Geological Sciences faculty to discuss where we go from here.
1:00pm to 1:30pm: “Teaching with Technology” seminar series. One of my colleagues from our IT department demonstrates how to customize Google Forms so that the data still goes into your Google Spreadsheet but you can use your own style sheets and additional HTML. Already thinking about how this will be useful in some information literacy classes this fall.
1:30pm: More email. Send an email to the faculty in the departments I work with about the new app for ScienceDirect I found this morning. Respond to emails from HR about our search, and read email from faculty regarding some library instruction sessions for the fall. I don’t have time to read all of the attachments, so I’ll have to put that off until later.
2:15pm: I broke a shoe coming out of the staff lounge. It’s really broken – the leather strap split in two. Luckily I have sneakers in my desk, but I end up looking a bit dorky for the rest of the day.
2:20pm: Spend 5 minutes looking for new shoes on Zappos.com. I realize that I don’t really need a new pair when the pair I like best costs $200.
2:30 to 4:00pm: Meeting about the grant to finalize the outline that we need to send to the President and Provost. Realize that our latest budget outline doesn’t match up with our latest program description and attempt to figure out which one is correct.
General daily notes: Lunch is often a luxury between meetings and getting work done. Like today, I often eat at my desk. Since I’m nursing my 4 month old daughter, I also need to find 15 minutes twice a day to get her milk. It’s nice to work in an environment where I have the flexibility to do this.
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 