Categories
AWeekInTheLife

Busy Wednesday!

Today wiped me out. I almost don’t have the energy to write about it, but I’ll make one last push for productivity before sitting down and vegging all evening (between loads of laundry, of course…).
This morning I was going to get to work early to get the PCC ready before our All Staff meeting, but I ran into a former high school teacher (and chaperon on my high school trip to Italy) at the local coffee shop I frequent and had to sit and chat with him for a bit. Once I got to work (about 7:50am), I counted money, got change for our register and started up about half of the PCC computers before it was time to go to the meeting. At 8:15 on the Wednesday morning after the 3rd Tuesday of the month (stop laughing, I couldn’t make that kind of schedule up if I tried!), our director gets all the staff who happen to be in the building together to tell us about the board meeting the night before, pick a name from the pile for the Employee of the Month program (everyone who was given a “You’ve Been Caught” going above and beyond the duties of your job during the course of the month is in that pile – the winner gets a gift certificate and a prime parking space – and a spot on our Intranet announcing their win – I forgot to add our winner to the that spot today, but I’ve already added it to RTM to remember for tomorrow!) and generally keep the staff up on the news of the library. During the meeting, my participation in Uncontrolled Vocabulary (UV) was mentioned, so I’m curious to see if any of my co-workers decide to join us tonight on the call! After the meeting I talked to Bobbi (about scheduling a time to talk about our upcoming Summer Institute 4-day workshop on Web 2.0 stuff) and our Linn Library Branch Manager about the issues she’s been having with her projector’s color (I think it’s the DVD that’s causing problems – we’ll see for sure tomorrow) and with our Collection Development librarian about getting information on the web about our “Capital Read” program and the author of our chosen book. Finally, after all that, I made it back downstairs to turn on my computer and start the day. I got about halfway through my email when the Children’s department called – they had a non-responsive keyboard on one of their desk computers. I grabbed a replacement and went upstairs to change it out, but didn’t have to. It was a bad USB port – move the keyboard to a new port, fix the problem! Back down to the basement to finish my email (which I ALMOST did) and there is another call – the people using the Art Gallery for a program had video, but no audio, from the VCR. I went upstairs, cleaned the air filter (there was a popup on the screen saying it needed to be done, so I did it while I was there) and turned the stereo receiver to the correct setting to get audio from the VCR. Back downstairs to finally sit down and check my blogs…
Except that the director, who was going to give me a tutorial in the use of Norton’s Ghost application to speed up deployment of computers, showed up. 3 hours later, after installing, setting everything up, and burning through about 15 floppy disks to find 2 good ones to use for the boot disks, we discovered that the network card on one of the machines refused to play along with us. By this time it was 3pm, I hadn’t had lunch yet and I was so irritated at the floppy disk situation that I dropped the whole project (with a note to the director telling him where I was in the process) for the day. After all that, I finally checked my “daily” blog folder to see what was going on in the world and went through the email that had accumulated while I was valiantly fighting floppies.
[sidebar] I’ll note that not once in this very long narrative has there been a single mention of Twitter, Facebook or Twhirl. I was completely disconnected from my social network today and it was no fun. [/sidebar]
After I closed down and packed up my office and talked to the afternoon PCC clerk and asked him to relay information to the evening PCC clerk, I headed over to our Administrative building and tried out 4 different desk chairs before deciding on the one that I want at my desk. When that was done (at about 4:30 – deciding on a chair is a lengthy process with lots of discussion required), I got into my car and headed home.
Now that I’m done with my day at work, I’m going to start on laundry and really work on getting some quality vegging time in before I call into UV tonight. Hope to see you all there!

update And I completely forgot to mention the work I did today on the Gmail migration – adding all the library user names, starting the DNS change process with MORENet and working out billing issues to get us upgraded to the Enterprise Edition. That was all sort of sprinkled in among everything else…

Categories
Web 2.0

Intermission

As a break from the tedium that is my description of my workweek, I’d like to answer a question/comment left on Monday’s post by the lovely Lori Reed (who I met at ALA, but didn’t get any time to chat with, really). She asked me to elaborate on my use of Remember The Milk and, specifically, if I was using the Gmail/Firefox extension. To answer her last question first, I’m using the extension and LOVE IT. Not only do I have my task list right there in my most-used inbox, Gmail, but I can tag an email with Action (per my GTD setup) and it automagically adds the tagged email to my RTM tasks. How freakin’ cool is that? If I want to add a task, but not tag it as Action, I can also create a task from an email via the “More Actions” menu in Gmail. That makes RTM the obvious choice of social task lists for me! Speaking of – I just blogged, for our Library Learning 2.1 program, about just this topic this week. Monday’s post was on social task lists and discusses my use of RTM in the post. I also link to a really excellent blog post from RTM on setting up your system to work with GTD (along with an explanation of GTD for those unfamiliar with it). Links to the Firefox extension and a couple of alternative list programs are included in that post as well.

Categories
AWeekInTheLife presentations

My Tuesday

Tuesday is my “desk day”. This means that on most Tuesdays, I don’t even turn on my computer in my office… I get in around 8ish, open the PCC (count money, turn on computers, wipe down monitors/keyboards/mice, pick up trash left by yesterday’s patrons and get the desk machine ready for the day), check on backups and network traffic and spend some quality time with my co-workers in the smoking lounge (a corner of our driveway as far away from the building as they can put us…) before the patrons start to come in at 9am. This morning, I also went to our ILL librarian to check out why she couldn’t print from OCLC’s web page. I found a JavaScript error on the page and Nikki (my intrepid Computer Support Guru) forwarded it on to our Tech Services Manager to then forward on to OCLC. After that, I dealt with the influx of patrons at 9am, then joined Nikki at her desk to discuss the trouble ticket issues that have come in since yesterday. After giving her some advice on fixing email issues that have cropped up overnight (I hate Exchange mail, I can’t wait until I can offload that duty to Google…), I head back to the PCC desk to check on the patrons and check my email and FriendFeed “friends” tab.
After reading through all that (and seeing the flood of fixed trouble tickets from Nikki – Yeah! Our board report and stats this month are gonna look good!!), I head to Google Reader to catch up on the blogosphere. Hmmm, lots of “day in the life” posts. Interesting… 😉
One of the things I read about in my blog reading was the fact that Facebook now has “blog networks“. I installed the application and started adding blogs to my network. That was fun and killed some time until Nikki came out to take over the desk duties at 10:00.
After she relieved me on the desk, I answered a few emails, ordered a part for a projector, met with my boss (who totally made fun of the audio quality of my laptop on Uncontrolled Vocabulary last Wednesday, while I totally missed an opportunity to ask him for a raise so I could get a new laptop with better audio inputs…), and ate lunch. By noon, I was back on the PCC Desk.
I checked my email again, collated and counted numerous print jobs from the 30 computers that share our PCC printer, and looked for (and sorta found) a few classes for kids that I could steal borrow from kind folks on the Internet. I’ll try to have a full roster of classes for our Children’s programming coordinator by Thursday, but I’m having issues finding good quality “homework help” type of classes on the ‘net. Anyone out there got some they’d like to share?
At 2:00pm, my desk duties for the day were over!
Today, I did stick around long enough to turn on my desk computer. After it booted up, I checked email again, opened Twhirl to check on my FF friends and got to work. I responded to a vendor email about a possible new PC Reservation system, which promptly turned into a phone call when the sales rep called me because she had questions, and made arrangements to visit our library’s branch either tomorrow or Thursday to look into video projection issues they are having. I started to work on Ghosting the newest version of our OPACs, but realized I was missing a rather crucial hardware component, so I’ll be running to Best Buy this evening on my way to the library softball team’s game. Since that didn’t work out for me, I decided to upgrade our WordPress installation that runs our library’s blog. That worked just fine, and it might have fixed some of the issues Bobbi’s been having with tags and categories. I’ll find out for sure tomorrow, when she gets in to work.
I took off today at 4pm so I could pick my son up from the hospital at which he volunteers and headed home for the day. Now I’m finishing up this post and then I’ll be heading to Best Buy, Barnes & Noble (for a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappacino – perfect baseball watching refreshment) and then to cheer on our library’s softball team (Dewey Decimators are sooooo gonna win tonight!) before heading back home to get some sleep!
More tomorrow…

Categories
AWeekInTheLife

Monday

In response to my brilliant co-worker, Bobbi, I’ll be posting a running tally of just what it is I do all day during this week. I’m not sure this is a representative week, what with budgets due tomorrow and all, but this is the week that everyone else is doing it, so I suppose I will too! While the original concept was to illustrate what librarians do all day (or week, as the case may be), and I’m not really a librarian (I just play one on TV?), but a techie who happens to work in a library, this may not answer the original question. On the other hand, it may give a bit of insight into what exactly has to happen on the back-end for the front-line librarians to do their jobs!
So here it is, with no further ado, my Monday…

  • Come into work at 7:45am and start up the computer – go through mail while I wait
  • Check email, blogs and fire up Twhirl
  • Sent out email pointing to this week’s Library Learning 2.1 lesson
  • Check that backups ran and that none of the servers died overnight, make sure everything is working on the network
  • Count money in the PCC cash register
  • Talk to one of my staff who is going with me to Internet Librarian about what pre-conferences we can afford (not enough…) and get the one she wants from her
  • Spend an hour alternately chatting with Bobbi via GTalk, wondering why airline prices are changing by the minute, and buying airfare for the 3 folks going to IL while discussing hotel arrangements that Bobbi is making
  • Check email again before 11am meeeting
  • Budget and various other topics discussed for an hour or so
  • Fixed legal paper tray in Tech Services office
  • Lunch!
  • Added IP addresses from III (Millennium Automation System) so they could get into our server
  • Met with Children’s Programming Coordinator about reducing her network profile size
  • Went home a bit early so I could work on next year’s budget this evening
  • Added the winner of the You’ve Been Caught program to the staff website (way belatedly)
  • Registered myself and my staff member for IL 2008
  • Budget time!

The use of the Remember The Milk social task list helped a lot in remembering what I did all day! Check the LL2.1 blog post linked above for more information about that!!
More tomorrow!!

Categories
travel

ALA Left Overs

I just realized I didn’t write up the end of my ALA adventure. I did write up the last couple of sessions I attended at the LITA blog, you can head over there to read my takes on the Top Tech Trends session and the Keeping Your Computers Running session. Beyond that, most of what I did was either attend business meetings (including the Heads of Library Technology meeting) or social events. It’s too far back for me to really get into posting now – but let’s just say that I had a LOT of fun at the Facebook Librarians meetup, the OCLC Blogger’s salon (with apologies to David Lee King and Tony Tallent for monopolizing them at various points in the evening) and at my dinner out with the MaintainIT ladies, Sarah and Brenda. Vietnamese food is something I don’t get very often and I was pleased with both the food and (most importantly) the company! There was a lot of socializing going on at ALA!!
There were also the free food events – OCLC’s breakfast was informative – lots of information about the company and it’s direction, and the EbscoHost Public Libraries Luncheon was fabulous! Seriously great food and good conversation over the table with other public librarians (that was a class of folks that seemed pretty thin on the ground everywhere else – lots of academics, not many public library folks!). Getting a peek at what Ebsco will be releasing over the next months was nice, too! Anyone who follows my Twitter stream got the information about new databases and such at the same time I did – I just had to Twitter it!
Ok, that’s enough for ALA. I’m done (til next year, at least…) with that and I’m ready to tackle a BUNCH of new projects – one of which I’m hoping to firm up in the next 20 minutes or so!! More on that later…

Categories
mashups Web 2.0

Public Data Mashups

Hey – I just learned about a new “contest” being sponsored by the UK Government in which they are looking for creative and useful mashups using public data (crime, health, education data that is released by the government, but not in particularly useful ways). This is a fabulous idea!! What a great way to get people thinking about using the REAMS of data produced by the government! For a list of ideas that have been submitted so far, check out their Ideas page.
The winner of the contest will get their idea funded by the government and the chance for Internet fame and fortune – such as that might be… Wonder if this (in a stripped down fashion) would work for a library – we put out massive amounts of data about our collections, ILL information and more – or we could add pointers to public data ourselves and get civic-minded folks to do something with it!

Categories
travel

Apologies…

Well, a nice big spike of traffic during ALA, plus a bunch of people checking out my OpenID presentation on SlideShare (the MP3 is hosted on this server) meant that my site became a bit overwhelmed with all the activity. Hmph. My site’s a wuss – who knew? Anyway, I’ve adjusted things and hopefully this won’t happen again! Not that I’m complaining about the traffic…

I’ve got LOTS to write up and no energy with which to do it. I will say that I’ve been attending a lot of great programs and spending time with a bunch of different people – the Blogger’s salon last night and dinner tonight being two of the best experiences I’ve had at ALA thus far. I plan to write up full reports about all of it. Tomorrow. Or maybe Wednesday. Or possible Thursday while I’m on the plane…

Categories
presentations

Eek!

Ok, not a terribly descriptive title, but I’m at my computer at 6:45am local time, going over my schedule and trying to access my library’s email and getting a bit “eeked” out over both. Last night, just before I went to the Facebook meetup (which was great fun – pics later), I got a text saying that our network was down. Checked weather.com – no storms, so I texted the director to let him know. The network came back up within 10 minutes – no harm, no foul. This morning, I pulled up my work email – or attempted to – and discovered that neither server – email or web – is responding. No text has come through saying that the network is down. Oops…
The other “eek” for the day is my schedule:
7am breakfast at Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom – OCLC Social Networking roundtable – Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom – OCLC Social Networking roundtable
10:30am LITA Heads of Library Technology Interest Group – Hilton Anaheim — Coronado
12pm EBSCO Public Library Luncheon Confirmation
1:30pm *LITA Top Technology Trends – Hilton Anaheim — California Pavilion D
3:30pm Drupal BoF session
5:30pm OCLC Blogger’s Salon
And all that on 5 hours of sleep. Guess it’s time to text the director again and get my butt down to breakfast!

Categories
presentations

Saturday overview

Whew – I’m exhausted – and I still have one more event before I can crawl into bed! I started off the day with an overview of Public Computing, where I finally got to put a face to Sarah Washburn’s name (of the MaintainIT Project) and then went straight to the Social Software Showcase where I put a bunch more names to faces of people I’ve conversed with online. While the Showcase was fun for it’s intended purpose, the loose organization of it meant that I could spend some time chatting with people about whatever came to mind in between OpenID questions. That was a really rewarding part of it for me. I barely made it (across the street) to my next session – I came into it a bit late… Afterwards was more interesting discussion with people who really got something out of my brief talk. It makes the work put into getting material together and getting up there and talking about it worthwhile.
After my official duties for the conference were done, I met up with the twitter group (we stood in the convention center and yelled out twitter names – clearly confusing the heck out of some folks), but just to put more faces to names, I had to get back to the hotel to eat and write up my day. We did get to do some quality chatting and “getting to know you” sort of stuff while waiting for everyone to appear, though, so it was totally worth it to show up. I wish I could have justified staying, but home folks needed to be called and blog posts needed to be posted…
I’ve eaten, written up my posts and am ready to rest for a bit before heading to the Facebook Librarians meetup at 11pm. Tomorrow, I have a 7am breakfast with OCLC and a pretty full day after that, so it should be interesting! I’ll do more writing tomorrow!

Categories
presentations

Transformational Change: Evolving Library IT Departments

This was more of a traditional session than my first one – it was a panel (2 academic library folks and me) and we all gave a brief intro to our organization, then discussed the ways in which our IT departments are changing/have changed in response to changing technological realities. Carole and Terry – my co-panelists – gave interesting discussions on how their IT Departments have evolved with the times. Carole’s library began a formal Project Management procedure that sounded quite interesting. Terry’s library reorganized and reformed to improve how they serve their customers. I wish I could be more specific, but I was on the podium and listening, not taking notes and the whole thing was a long time ago…
My presentation was on the Web2.0ification of our library’s IT Department. We have made some changes in how we do our basic functions (offloading some of the work – such as web updates – to non-IT people, outsourcing some functions – hello Google Apps for Domains!, etc.) and we’ve made some changes in the way we think about things like security and privacy (not in a bad, way, though – I promise) in order to facilitate our patrons and staff in their use of Web 2.0 technologies.
We went a bit long and didn’t have much time for questions after, but several people came up after the session ended to chat more about what we were doing – and what was more interesting (at least for me) – what they are doing! The session was a great way to find out what IT departments, in different types of libraries, are doing to react to Web 2.0, greater customer service demands from our staff and opportunities that are coming our way!