Library Day in the Life #7 - Thursday

It's the fourth day of the Library Day in the Life Project... and I have my 2nd late night of the week ahead of me. Before going in to work though, I saw my husband off for a 10 day trombone seminar (he's a professional orchestral trombone player). It will be good to have a work day packed with to-do's to keep my mind occupied.

10:00 - 11:00    As is a common theme when I arrive at work, I check and respond to e-mail and also check in with my online class. I also checked our holds queue and noticed an item being requested from our library. Unfortunately, the item is long overdue/lost, so I had to contact the campus requesting the item and suggest an ILL instead.

11:00 - 12:00    I did a bit of online grading. I will be in and out this weekend, so I wanted to get a good chunk of the grading completed today.

During this hour, an e-mail came through from a librarian colleague at one of the campuses, asking if any of us were familiar with the Khan Academy. I saw a TED talk with the founder of the academy a few months back, and it's a really neat concept. My faculty really like the resources it provides too. So...I spent some time formulating an e-mail and sending along my thoughts and how I've utilized Khan Academy material in my faculty newsletters. You can see the TED talk below

Finally, I fixed a link on our new APA research guide and spent some time collaborating with my committee co-leader on plans for our legal sources portion of the guide.

12:00 - 1:00      In preparation for Monday's Info Lit class, I inputted the chapter 3 quiz into quizstar. I also started working again on the monthly report and tried to figure out how to pull statistic reports with our new ILS system - no luck.

I spent some time assisting a student with printing and helped another student with a research assignment using our databases. I'm always super excited when I get to assist with real research!

1:00 - 1:30        Another student came through needing help with one of their online courses. This poor student didn't know how to open an internet window, and didn't know how to submit an assignment by attaching a file. Keep in mind, we're in week 5 of the quarter, and this student is taking more than one online course. I did the best I could and gave the student packet information from a basic computer workshop that I designed and present each quarter. Hopefully this helps.

1:30 - 2:30         Lunch. And yep, you guessed it, I ran home to let the dog out. Good ole' Ditters

2:45 - 4:00         I rushed back to work and grabbed my notes for a faculty meeting. Many agenda items were discussed, and towards the end, I was able to share what we've been doing in the library (yay for PR time!). As a result, an adjunct instructor approached my assistant after the meeting to ask about a new Free and Fabulous presentation we put together. We've set a date with his class to discuss parts of the presentation that will work for presentation skills and we will also incorporate a bit of research as well.  We're slowly getting our foot in the door with more and more faculty...in hopes that they will continue to utilize our research expertise.

4:00 - 5:00         I spent this time to finish inputting the quiz questions and started writing the narrative for the library monthly report. I'm always amazed at the amount of information I come up with for these reports. At the time of gathering info for the report, I never think I'll have enough information...but boy we've been busy!

5:00 - 6:00         An online chat came through with a student having trouble logging into EBSCO. Turns out, the link in our catalog sent them to the non-subscription EBSCO area, so I headed to the actual database to search for the item, only to find that we didn't have it available in full text.  So, I mentioned the possibility of ILL, but in the end walked the student through finding other resources directly in our database, narrowing by full-text.

I had an e-mail join.me discussion after an instructor insisted that it was a security risk. My thing is - 1) it's by the makers of logmein which is used by companies all across the US to remote into servers and computer workstations. 2) if it were truly a security risk, our IT department would be all over it by blocking it (affectionately known as the barracuda). So, I'm not so sure there's a real problem with it! It has come in handy NUMEROUS times with students that are phoning in or using the chat reference service with computer issues.

6:00 - 7:00         I kept getting sidetracked, so I spent a good chunk of this hour working to finish the monthly report narrative. It's looking pretty set, except for statistics, which I'll have to figure out on Monday.

7:00 - 7:30         A few students and faculty members came in on their break from class to check out books and DVDs. I was able to promote our Novel Destinations summer reading promotion and was excited to see another student checking out the Hunger Games (yes, I work in a college... but it's a fantastic series and I had to purchase it! The COM instructor even said she was glad we had it for book reports).

Tomorrow I'm in an all day meeting in Indianapolis, so stay tuned for a different kind of post tomorrow evening.