Welcome to #libday8 !

Good... afternoon all! (Yikes, where did the morning go?!)

Today is the start of the wonderful Library Day in the Life Project round 8! For those of you unfamiliar with the fantasticness that is this project, this week librarians from all over will track what they do in an average day or week and share with the world! This is the second time I've participated, and I love reading all the posts! I will, primarily, make blog posts here and post those links to my twitter and facebook feeds as well.



Here's a recap of my day so far to get you caught up!

8:00 am - arrived at work. Okay, well, let's be honest, it was really more like 8:03 by the time I got here. I take the bus so my "arrive" time is often a few minutes early or late... but I make up for it!

8:10 am - everything is finally up and running on my computer. I always have to open a bunch of programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, our server, and ILLiad) so it usually takes a little while

8:10 am to 9:10 am - dove in and started processing requests. Usually, I start in what we call our "regular" queue, which is basically the "newest" requests. Patrons will place InterLibrary Loan requests for items they want that our campus does not have, or for articles they'd like electronic copies of - either from our campus or other institutions. We have many other queues to watch too, and we usually rotate through them throughout the day as they all require different type of searching and some are harder then others!

9:10 am - I left the office (gasp!) for my Staff Development Committee Meeting. I've been on this committee for a few years now and it's a lot of fun! We do the programming (both work related and some personal growth type events as well) for the Library Staff which range from tech/how-to type things to staff art shows and travel brownbags.

10:15 am - returned back to the office after my meeting and went into the "Doc Provider" queue. From 10-12 and 2-3 every day, I'm responsible for this queue. These are articles and book chapters that folks have requested that we need to pay copyright on prior to giving our patron access. So, this queue involves going to publisher's websites and buying access to an article. I'm sure most patrons don't have any idea that we spend money to get their items for them - but doc providers can cost almost anything. We do have a limit - if an item is over $55 dollars, we send the patron an email asking them "Are you SURE you want this?" and if they say "yes" we buy it. If it's more then $115 - then we say "Sorry, no can do!" but - just as an example, on 'Cyber Monday' (the Monday after Thanksgiving in the US, where MANY folks make online purchases for Christmas) I did that queue all day and I spent $1143.83 of the University's money. Most people don't realize what they're really getting from their libraries! :)

During our doc provider shifts, we also "clear [the] copyright" list which moves new requests into the queues they should be in based on whether or not we owe copyright fees on them. 

12:00 pm - Lunch time! Started typing this post...

1:00 pm  - You know what my grandfather says... BACK TO WORK!! :)

2:10 pm - Doc Provider shift again... just bought a five page for $49... see what I mean? :)

3:00 pm - discussion of the likelihood that ghosts exist... of course!

4:59 pm - actually still talking about ghosts... :) Time to go home!