The Library day in the Life project collects the activities of library staff for a single week. The idea is to help prospective librarians and library staff get a sense of what life is like in particular roles. This is a rather strange and strangled week for me, but here goes Monday.

9:30am

• Check email.
• Discussing new website design with our graphic designer. Ask for permission to include her in our skype meeting with dev.
• Saw girl in the bathroom curling her hair with a curling iron while talking on her cellphone.
• Got permission from everyone to include graphic designer on our call.

10:30am

• Got into an email discussion about how we intend to use Twitter on the library’s digital signage. Announced decision to set up a second Twitter account, tentatively UTMLtraffic. That way we’d have an announcements feed and a traffic feed; announcements for the Big Things that are happening on campus, and traffic feed to help students work out whether there’s room in the library for them to come study here.

11:30am

• Comparing meebo and digsby chat widgets. Leaning toward digsby, but meebo looks cleaner on a site.
• Discussing meebo and digsby with FLC tech. If you need students to log into the service from multiple locations, web-based is preferable to client-based.
• Got a phone call from campus staff asking for clarification about how Blackboard manages survey results. Lots of confusion about a note on the website that makes it look like something changed in the upgrade when actually it’s just that a lot of people misundersood surveys to start with. You don’t get know who said what with a survey. They are anonymized. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to break that to an instructor when it was FAR too late.

12:30pm

• Forwarding a message from a mailing list to two colleagues; had moment of terror thinking I had sent reply to the list.
• Thinking about what angle to take in an article proposal relating to our new website project. Project management? Creating (or trying to create) a digital culture? Both?
• Emailed dev about bringing graphic design person into our skype call this aft; now reading LITAblog http://bit.ly/19PHGP

1:30pm

• Chatting with FLC tech about new website, schedule for creating pages, etc.
• Played with FLC tech’s new iPod Touch: decided to suggest we use library iPod Touches to have students update library twitter accounts. (Specifically: one on traffic flow in the library.)
• Got a delighted reception to the idea of having students use our 2 ipod touches to update library twitter feeds. Discovered ipod Touches are out of the library, and thus cannot begin setting them up and testing them.

2:00pm

• Call with developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) on Skype. No word yet on how I can manage my desire for mutiple blogs, tags, and categories.
• Design looks good. Minor changes proposed and accepted. Colours finalized. Hosting situation discussed.

3:00pm

• Finished call with the developer. Need to mod hours php file. Added to to-do list. Brain not quite ready to fix code today.
• Discover yet more evidence that the “net generation” isn’t all that hip to the interwebs. http://is.gd/1Pglf

3:30pm

• Brain slowly going numb from the sound of the construction going on, seemingly directly over my head.
• Created new Twitter account for traffic reports in the library. UTMLtraffic it is.
• Help reference desk show an instructor how to graft multiple lecture sections into one course website. That felt weird. Normally I do those things myself, now I just hear about other people doing it. :/

4:00pm

• Still don’t understand why so many girls want to spend quality time hanging out in library bathrooms.
• Briefly discussed GIS/Data website with GIS tech.
• Have headache.
• Construction noises have stopped.

4:30pm

• Post day’s tweets and assorted happenings to blog.
• Going home!
• Get call from developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) about blogs and what’s possible
• Blogs the way I want them appear to be doable. Yay!

5:14pm

• Now: actually going home!