Here’s another Library Day in the Life round, y’all. This should be a fairly normal day in the life of an academic librarian…
10:20 – I’m coming in to work late, since I’ll be teaching until 8:00 tonight. Here’s the agenda for the day:
Schedule a meeting for the Outreach committee.- Assign articles for the Spring newsletter *
Go over tonight’s BFIN 5000 presentationEdit the Business research guide, as neededMake handouts for tonight’s classRead through a stack of curriculum proposals for today’s university Curriculum Committee meetingLook over the eHRAF database trial- Brainstorm marketing ideas for tomorrow’s Ethnographic Video Online meeting **
Meet with some faculty members about a Black History Month display in the libraryGoal: order $1000 worth of business materials while on the ref desk1:00-3:00 – Reference Desk3:30-5:00 – Curriculum Committee meeting6:30-8:00 – BFIN 5000 presentation
11:33 – Outreach meeting is scheduled. With such a diverse group of librarians and staff from every department, it’s a miracle we can ever find a common time to meet.
11:41 – So, Hoover’s is getting a major upgrade. Actually, it was scheduled for last Friday, but they’re still having problems rolling it out. Problem is, I’m teaching a business class tonight and I can only work with the old Hoover’s interface and add “but, this will all be different any day now.” Went through the same thing last year with LexisNexis. I’m sure a flurry of quick and dirty emergency video tutorials are in my near future.
12:06 – Just finished giving a short tour of available library display cases for Black History Month. We’ll have some cool Yoruba art up by the end of the week.
1:00 – Just grabbed a stack of Harvard Business Reviews and BusinessWeek magazines to look for new business books. I find that collection development is a great thing to do while on the reference desk.
- 1:03 – “How do I get a receipt from the card station?”
- 1:11 – “How do I print?”
- 1:13 – “How do I print?”
- 1:17 – “Do you have Nixon and Kissinger by Robert Dallek (yes, E856 .D35 2007)”
- 1:21 – Printer 2 is out of paper
- 1:21 – IM question about interlibrary loans and dissertations (they usu. come as PDFs)
- 1:25 – “Is the tall librarian in?”
- 1:27 – “I think I broke the hole-punch.”
- 1:46 – “Where is Ms. Anderson teaching?”
- 1:48 – “Where are the science journals?” (Student actually needed current research on arsenic levels in East Tennessee groundwater. Helped out with that.)
- 1:48 – “Stapler?”
- 1:57 – “Tax forms?”
- 1:57 – “Stapler?”
- 2:00 – “Do you have another three-hole punch? This one only has two holes.” (I did a demo…yes, it still punches three holes.)
- 2:02 – Security guard asks, “how do i put money on my ID?”
- 2:06 – “Do you have Hamlet on DVD? Which version is best?” (FWIW, I can’t stand Shakespeare. Cervantes, Marlowe, Jonson, Lope de Vega…I love the early 17th century…just not Shakespeare.)
- 2:27 – Helping a new student print his schedule.
- 2:30-2:50 – Three students having problems authenticating their laptops.
- 2:52 – Directing a student to a work-study interview
4:53 – Back from an epic committee meeting. Note to hopeful academic librarians: you will have to be on university-wide committees and library committees. (Luckily, the committees here at UTC are productive and can actually be enjoyable).
4:56 – Now, on to the business research methods class…
5:11 – Just checked the tally: $2,089 worth of accounting materials ordered. I demolished my goal. I checked the titles against our catalog (of course) but I haven’t checked against approval orders yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there aren’t any dupes.
5:35 – The presentation is good to go for BFIN 5000.
5:40 – The eHRAF databases are subject-indexed at the paragraph level?! This is going to be interesting.
*6:00 – Didn’t get the number of responses I hoped for. I’ll have to assign articles tomorrow.
6:10 – Off to set up the classroom for my business class.
8:41 – Finished my class at 7:30, had to manually shut down all the computers :-(, rushed home in time to give Liam a bath and read him a goodnight story.
And that’s a Monday in the life of an academic librarian.
I don't think that anyone can say you don't work hard enough. Impressive crossing out of to-do list!
Thanks for the protip on using LibGuides for collection development. Good stuff!
[…] questions posed to the librarians were hilarious! “Is the tall librarian in?” from Sense and Reference made me chuckle. I hope you post pics of the Yoruba art that you’ll be putting in the […]