I started back at work today after a three month maternity leave to take care of this little angel and her older sister:
What will be keeping me busy this summer?
- Weeding a significant portion of our Computer Science collection. How many books do you need about Fortran? Do we need a 1977 guide to using minicalculators in the classroom?
- Working with the committee composing our campus’ HHMI grant application
- Chairing a search committee
- Working on our campus’ Middle States Report
- Learning about the new CMS for our library website
- Figuring out what our new library assessment committee will be doing
- Talking with more faculty for a project I wrote about earlier
- Trying to remember why I put a note on my calendar to contact a certain faculty member next week. Perhaps I should have added an explanatory note!?
Luckily for me, summer time in my academic library is time to get the big projects done without worrying as much about reference desk hours and library instruction classes. It’s a good time to come back to work.
What keeps you busy during the summer?
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 
Welcome back!!!
> How many books do you need about Fortran?
Probably more than you think. There’s a prof here who still teaches it in a “programming for science students” course so our Fortran books still get a lot of use. If not for that, I’d probably just keep a few.
> Do we need a 1977 guide to using minicalculators in the classroom?
Depends. Do you have a research group in the history of technology or the history of technology in education? We have the former so I’d be tempted to keep the book if it was the only one on that topic that we had.
I’ll be weeding several parts of our CS collection this summer too, so these are just the kinds of questions I’ll be facing myself.
> Trying to remember why I put a note on my calendar to contact a certain faculty member next week. Perhaps I should have added an explanatory note!?
Yeah, I do that sometimes too. Now when I put a note about an IL class in my calendar I put the course number and the prof’s name, just in case I forget one or the other. Sadly, I cannot predict which one I’ll be more likely to forget.
Anyways, welcome back!
John – I was lucky enough to work closely with the folks in the computer science department for the weeding project, so they were able to make the tough decisions. No to the 1977 book about minicalculators in the classroom, and we only kept a few of the high quality books on fortran. No research into the former, and no one is teaching the latter!