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. Here’s Tuesday’s activities:

9:30am

• Check email. Congratulate our Finance Librarian on his new baby girl.
• Agree to meet with a faculty member re: blogging options for her class in the fall.
• Start work on a controlled vocabulary of tags for our new library blogs.
• Update colleagues on status: need to wait for carpet cleaners.

10:30am

• Still working on controlled vocabulary. Established conceptual categories, including audience, subjects, technology, special portfolios, and facilities & services.
• Added tags to a Google doc.

11:30am

• Still modifying tags. Went through spreadsheet that lists all webpages set to be created on the new website; applied tags to each page, based on what content should appear there.
• Shared Google doc with colleagues, with long description/introduction.
• Realized that I had left my phone in my office. IMed colleague, got her to fish out my phone and check my messages. She called the carpet cleaner and arranged for him to meet me. Went and met the carpet cleaner, led him to my condo.

12:30pm

• Kept working on tags; removed “audience” category as it just was not functional across multiple tags. Added (student) and (faculty) to a couple of categories instead.
• Carpet cleaner blew a fuse. Ran across the street to the Canadian Tire to get new ones. Current fuses made by company called “FUSETRON”, with labels clearly printed in the late 60s. New fuses not nearly as awesome-looking.
• Got email about status of current library construction. Immediately related it to website/digital signage content. Emailed facilities manager to ask him how he’d feel about making that kind of content public on the website/digital signage via Twitter. He’s intrigued. Set meeting with him for next week to talk it out.

1:30pm

• Carpet cleaner still cleaning my carpets. This is what happens when you have a white carpet and a big fluffy orange cat.
• Shared tags with one of the reference staff; got some feedback, brainstormed around how to manage “reference” as a service and the blogs. Separate, or really just another part of every other service? Reference is really a flexible service.
• Rethinking the need for two different chat services that really are just going to go to the same person. Need to label the reference widget with a line that encourages students to use it to report noise problems in the building, perhaps? I still like the idea of having a special widget just for noise reports.

2:00pm

• Looked over our test site (minus design) and the design screenshot. Discovered a few weird things.
• Composed email to developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) about weird things (all minor). Sent it. Forgot to copy colleagues. Forwarded sent mail to colleagues.

3:00pm

• Carpet Cleaner finished. Let him out of my condo (it’s all twisty.)
• Got ready to go to work. Realized I have lost my keys (again).
• Decided my time would be better spent working on my various documents rather than trying to find my keys and travelling to work.

3:30pm

• Got corrected on one of the weird things on the test site; new development. Having two versions of one page based on audience. Only second time that’s happened on our website (so far). Sent the news (do nothing! It’s fine!) to Barbara.

4:00pm

• Got a skype call from Barbara to talk about some design questions; got 5 minutes in and Barbara lost her connection.
• Waited for her to come back.
• Kept picking at tags. Feel confident that I’ve covered enough for the first round.

8:00pm

• Barbara gets her internet connection back and calls me. We talk about various design issues, answers to questions we asked on Monday.
• Made some executive decisions based one two things: 1) not spending more money, 2) getting the website finished sooner. Executive decisions all extremely minor with no huge impact on the user experience (library staff content creation experience or the student experience).
• Questions about hosting; things I don’t know enough about.
• I realize I’m going to miss Barbara when we’re done; I quite like her. She’s a Stargate Atlantis fan.

8:30pm

• Write up details of my conversation with Barbara and send it to colleagues, including our graphic designer.
• Scrounge dinner.