Library Day in the Life - Day 2

Today wasn't quite as varied a day as yesterday but it was still interesting. One of the cool things about my job is the variety with which I'm presented. I don't ever know for sure what I'll be doing on a given day (in between all the meetings...). Like I said, though, today wasn't so "all over the map" like some days are; almost half of my day today was taken up by two projects both related to my new Sacramento Room responsibilities.

First, I and some other SPL staff attended a conference call with the folks from OCLC who are on the project team for our upcoming digitization project. We discussed some of the general tasks that need to be complete prior to actually sending off our materials for digitization. These are things like the establishment of a file naming protocol, the creation of metadata for each item to be digitized (this isn't strictly necessary prior to the scanning but is preferred to the additional, unnecessary labor involved in the "enriching" the metadata later), and determining the organization of the materials to be scanned (are we grouping by subject? by accession number? by title?). Granted, much of this ought to have already been in existence within our collection but better late than never, right? We also discussed with the OCLC folks some technical aspects of their web interface of public access to our collections once the materials have been scanned. Not having any background in special collections or digitization, I am learning a lot but it is very interesting!

The second Sacramento Room-related project was a debrief with an individual who has developed for the Library a detailed process for planning, recording, and presenting digital stories. This grew out of the "California of the Past" digital storytelling initiative in which SPL participated. Now that we have this process in place, we can continue creating oral histories from interesting people in the area and, thus, add a new, vibrant collection to our Sacramento Room.

Completely aside from my Sacramento Room work today, I spent a little time meeting with SPL's Digital Services Librarian about the excellent progress she is making on several projects as well as piling some new projects onto her lap. One of the funnier parts of my day was watching her reaction as she was introduced to the bureaucratic process of formally initiating new projects with other departments: forms to fill out, justifications made, etc.

The last thing I did today was visit a branch for an update on how things are going out there. Usually, when I visit a branch a leave with a good list of things that need fixing and today was no different. Facilities issues, IT issues, collection development issues, and then some. So, part of tomorrow will be spent trying to get the ball rolling (or re-rolling in some cases) on addressing the concerns of the branch supervisor in question.