Librarian Day in the Life, Day 3 (round 4)

The third day in the life of the Head of Digital Access and Web Services at Montana State University Libraries. Based on tweets in chronological order.

• 7:30am. Has decided that Earl Grey Tea doesn’t cut it. Going for coffee. Start #libday4.
• 8:25am. AM email check. Thread re: ALA talk on cloud computing. Building search index for article DBs w/keywords fm Yahoo BOSS API. #libday4
• 9:42am. Figuring out how MySQL automagically does relevance ranking. http://bit.ly/16tf6R #libday4
• 9:52am. Checking MySQL error logs. #libday4
• 10am. MSU herbarium digital project discussion. #libday4
• 11am. Preso to school counselors re: go2collegeMT.org. #libday4
• 12:41pm Back fm lunch. 11am pres to MT school counselors on new tech in education went well. Open afternoon. Time for programming. #libday4
• 2:15pm Still working on optimizing search index for articles. Making progress with mysteries of MySQL relevancy ranking. #libday4
• 4:15pm. Search interface is on dev. Team testing queries. PM email check. This portion of day over. Time for Fam time. More later. #libday4
• 9:15pm. Back again. Trying to make openURL queries to Serial Solutions API work from one of our citation DBs http://bit.ly/9nneBb . #libday4
• 10:15pm. Trolling through my feeds via Google Reader. Saving/tagging interesting stuff to Delicious. #libday4
• 11:30pm. Google Waved reminder re: starting to record DOI in citation database records. It makes openURL much easier. End #libday4 day 3.

Quite a bit on the technical side today. Largely due to my having a 4 hour block in the afternoon. But, here’s the thing: if I want to build/work to customize library apps, I need these blocks of time. Picking away at these projects for a half hour here or there doesn’t work. Just before lunch, I had the opportunity to speak (with Terry Beaubois) to a group of school liaisions for the k-12 set. It was a Q & A session about new technologies that could be used in the classroom. uStream, iTunes for k-12, mobile devices were pieces of the discussion. It hardly gets any play above, but the MSU Herbarium project could be a winner. Rene Tanner has been working with the Bio department and pointing to our digitization services. Rene and I have an eye on some grant possibilities for the project and some early prototyping using Flickr as a data store.  Great day overall. Some of the meetings tomorrow have been canceled. I should have some big chunks of time tomorrow as well. Looking forward to it.

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