Librarian Day in the Life, Day 4 (Round 4)

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

• 8:35am. AM check of “the twitter” & email. Corresponding with film grad student over plans to do promo for Digital team. Start #libday4.
• 9:45am. Thinking re: how to present Herbarium project to Bio Faculty. Working w/team on collaborative indexing/keyword project. #libday4
• 12:35pm. Big win @ meeting w/faculty re: Herbarium. All metadata & scanning will be done by motivated faculty member. Lunchtime. #libday4
• 3pm. Drop ins & drop bys. Conversation w/team & colleagues re: new digital media service. How to launch, get buy-in, make it easy. #libday4
• 3:10pm. Filling out student time cards and reporting team leave for admin. Living the dream. #libday4
• 3:21pm. Hour or so in front of me. Time to work on topic recommending search engine (proof of concept). Work includes data entry. #libday4
• 4:17pm. Making Libguides API play nice with our database lists. I hate you unencoded &, but you are now fixed with urlencode(). #libday4
• 4:33pm. @springshare @LibGuidesFAQ Whom do I talk to about structured data coming out of your API? <LI> in caps is not valid HTML. #libday4
• 4:40pm. Broke search app. Checking error logs. Good place to stop for now. PM email check and then home to fam. Fix later. #libday4
• 4:46pm. tail -50 error_log command gives: “syntax error, unexpected ‘ on line 253 of view.php” Note for later. #libday4
• 8:57pm. Back in the saddle. Email colleague in Arts & Architecture re: people we met yesterday interested in go2collegeMT.org. #libday4
• 9:05pm. Tracking down parse error in “search for databases by topic” app. #libday4
• 10:05pm. Reducing noise to signal ratio in Google reader. Best signals get bookmarked at delicious/diginit/ #libday4
• 10:35pm. Final PM email check. Thread re: Bio faculty’s flickr photostream @ http://bit.ly/aQeMVB ; metadata for plant repositories. #libday4
• 10:55pm. Falling asleep at the wheel. Will have to fix search tomorrow. End #libday4.

Pretty average day.  Had some nice chunks of time, but I chose to do the face to face thing a little more.  It can take more time, but the “Drop Bys” can be an effective means of getting a person’s true feelings on a subject. No mediation by email or other tech, just one on one conversation. You can see some of my admin duties above as it’s the end of the month. Necessary stuff, but not my favorite. Big news for the day was the meeting with a Plant Sciences faculty about digitization of Montana herbarium samples. He’s already using flickr and has access to a high res camera. To top it off, he’s motivated to do metadata. Huge. Subject specialist with integral knowledge of objects doing first batch of metadata. We have plans to go after grant, but will build prototype using flickr API. Tasks for the day included: programming, data entry, networking, negotiating org politics, debugging, “metadataing”, admin documentation, prototyping, and sleeping. More tomorrow as I have my annual review with my deans… Bring it.

---