Library Day in the Life Round 4 Announced

AndyW — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:49:24 -0500

Bobbi Newman announced on Thursday the start of the 4th round of her Library Day in the Life Project. Like the title suggests, it is a blog post detailing the day in the life of a librarian. Round 3 (for which I wrote an entry) had a fun array of takes on the library day, from Marianne Lennox’s Photo Diary to Julie Strange’s multipart post of the week (more of a ‘week in the life of…’).

I’m looking forward to another round of the project. It’s an interesting insight into the lives of my peers; sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s serious, but it always has a lot of heart to it. I find that I like these kinds of posts the most because it shows how much librarians love what they do.

Be sure to read the directions and then hop right in!

AndyW

A day or month in the life of the.effing.librarian

effinglibrarian — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:37:51 -0400

I came across a discussion about what a librarian does which led me to the wiki: http://librarydayinthelife.pbwiki.com/.

And it made me wonder what-the-hell-do-I-do-all-day? So I thought about it and this is what I mostly have been doing lately...
Regular duties: troubleshoot pc, printer, wi-fi, database issues; answer system-wide email; work virtual and actual reference desk; help wherever needed; other crap I can’t think of at the moment.

Sample of what I’ve done during June-July.
weeded 50 books (another 50 today, but it's August);
requested 300 books (someone else places the order);
shot and edited video for upload to youtube;
ordered equipment replacements and budgeted items for purchase;
edited system-wide training materials;
edited my web pages;
produced monthly system-wide posters, training schedules and promotional materials;
brought cookies to my co-workers;
edited monthly programs to fit into PowerPoint show displayed in library;
assisted with pc and projector and sound set-up for public programs;
taught seven instructional classes to public;
monthly, quarterly and annual stats;
prepped supervisor’s laptop for webcast;
discussed presenting long-distance webcast with instructor from NY;
attended day-long workshop;
blogged my ass off;
other crap I dump from memory after I leave work.

Also, I’ve made 5 of these presentations this summer: from list of titles provided to me, edited book descriptions, collected cover images, created one or two slides in PowerPoint for each book (around 175 slides total for the 5 presentations); saved slides as .png images formatted for high-quality svcd display (easy); dumped images into Nero Vision Express, added slide transitions and timing; burned slideshow to CD as svcd program for playing on DVD player in lobby to promote the books. Yeah, I did this because one day I had nothing to do and thought it would be a fun project.

And I do whatever anyone asks me to do.

June and July were kind of busy for me: I had a health issue where I thought I might die, and I was buying a house (which didn't work out... neither thing, since I'm still houseless and still alive, darn).