Library Day in the Life - Day 1!

I had a blast last year participating in the Library Day in the Life project so I'm excited about jumping in again this year. While I'm still in the same position as I was a year ago, Branch Services Manager at Sacramento Public Library, the Library and my job responsibilities here have changed a good deal since then. Aside from managing the operations at nine of our branch libraries, I also now am in charge of the Library's burgeoning Digital Services program while also assuming managerial responsibility for the Sacramento Room, the Library's very extensive local and regional history collection. One exciting piece of the Sacramento Room work is the fact that we are just about to jump into a major digitization project that will make available a lot of cool stuff both through the SPL website and in WorldCat. I also plan to have a Sacramento Room Flickr stream up so this wealth of Sacramento history will be findable online in a few different ways.

Anyway, here is a brief listing of what I've been up to on Day 1 of the project:

• As always, while working on more specific work, I'm constantly inundated with e-mails, phone calls, and drop-in's at my desk. Many of these interruptions will pull my divert my focus from whatever project is supposed to have my attention. Sometimes this is because I'm easily distracted and other times it's because I need a break from what I'm working on. Either way, it's bad practice but just today somebody I work with remonstrated me to "stay focused". Oh well, I still get it all done...
• One branch I manage has a fairly major renovation coming up and the architects need to have some specific collection size numbers. I spent some time going over current collection sizes and deciding on future collection sizes. Looks like the "renovated" collection will be somewhat larger than the architects want and somewhat smaller than the staff will want. So I'll annoy both groups.
• I had an impromptu meeting withe Library's Collection Management manager about the composition of a collection we'll be placing in our first 100% automated check-out location (just another project on my list...). Our conversation reminded me that I need to visit the community center that will house the GoLibrary to speak with the Director there; her feedback about the collection ought to prove useful. As I'm typing this, I received an email from the project manager on the community center construction project with the contact information for the community center Director so I'll set up that meeting tomorrow and include it in tomorrow's report!
  
• I've had several conversations today with SPL's new Digital Services Librarian, Megan Wong, about projects on which she is working (check out her blog at Megan's Blog!). One of Megan's projects right now is working with our web developer to build a great mobile presence for the Library. Megan has been going over some details of this project with me and has arranged for a conference call with a vendor who wants to demo their product, Boopsie (I'm not making that up). They say it would be far better than Innovative's AirPAC mobile catalog. Of course.
• Had the regular, weekly meeting between the Branch Services Managers and our boss, the Deputy Director for Public Services.
  
• Oh yeah. The paperwork. I've signed several training requests and reimbursement requests today. I've received mail from unhappy customers. I read a performance evaluation. Etc.
• Ate some homemade peach pie.
• Scratched one more "thing" of my list of 27 Things but, boy, am I running out of time.
  

Tomorrow, in between the inevitable distractions, I hope to start drafting a cost estimate for a system-wide conversion to RFID. We'll see how that goes.