More in the Life of a Librarian - Day 1, Round 5

Great to be back in the "Library Day in the Life" game! The way this event has taken off is testament to the innovative thinking of Bobbi Newman (aka Librarian by Day). I'm sure at least some of the intent of the idea back when Bobbi conceived of it was to demonstrate the diversity of work that librarianship and LDIF has certainly delivered.

Quickly, before I regale the reader with my own exciting events of yesterday's day in my library life, if you are new to this program, head over to Twitter and search for the hashtag #libday5. Instant streams of library-work snippets to last all day long.

Well, I am the City Librarian for the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library and yesterday was my first day back after a week away from the office. Clearly, then, a good part of my day was spent digging out from a week's worth of accumulated e-mail. OK, almost a week's worth (I'm a compulsive e-mail reader even when not at work so I had maintained some modicum of up-to-dateness even while away). After the email purge, I checked my phone messages and made some follow-up calls regarding a worker's comp issue and a collection agency issue.

Next up, I reviewed this year's e-rate disbursement and did a little research to see what kind of restrictions I have on how that money can be spent (I've never dealt directly with e-rate before). Looks like the restrictions are very few and SSJCPL just might be joining up with the Link + lending group here in California and Nevada. Adding 9 million titles to what our users already

have available sure would be nice!

Another part of my job is preparing staff reports for the City Council concerning actions I want to take in the library with significant fiscal impacts. My first four months on the job were pretty much consumed by budget preparation but now that we're into July, I'm getting ready to undertake all kinds of projects. To that end, yesterday I began drafting four different staff reports. I suppose I'm feeling a little ambitious but my goal is that, come twelve months from now:

• SSJCPL will have brand new, reliable, and flexible self-checks (in sufficient numbers) at all locations
• we'll be borrowing through Link +
• we'll be very well on our way to completing an ILS migration (I'm looking at Evergreen - just want to see what version 2.0 looks like come October), and, lastly
• we'll be full bore into an RFID conversion.

I also proofed a draft of our annual report that our wonderful publicist Heather is putting together. Here are a couple shots at what she's working on:

Later in the day, our Tech Services guru Susan and I met with a couple of folks from the City's IT department to work through some issues surrounding our newly launched telephone notification service. We also talked about some the same things library folks everywhere are talking about: how to redistribute staff responsibilities in light of new budget constraints. SSJCPL is unlucky in that we don't have 100% dedicated, in-house IT folks but we are very lucky in that those IT people who are assigned to the Library do fabulous work and are as excited about improving services as I am.

On both IT and "redistribution of staff responsibilities" fronts, the last thing I did yesterday was install an FTP client on my computer. Yep; because our IT staff honestly is swamped, I somehow found myself volunteering to serve as the Library's webmaster in addition to being the City Librarian. It ought to be interesting juggling everything going on here but I've done web work before so at least I don't have to learn anything new (except HTML 5...)!