I meant to write this post last night to keep up my daily posting regime for #blogjune, but after watching the new Donna Summer documentary, I was just spent. So I’ll try to write two posts today to make up for yesterday.

For a while now, I’ve been one of the cogs put into gear when the regular discussions come up of what hours we should have for this semester or that intersession period. As the person who updates our library hours page, my role lately has been to initiate the conversation about planning the hours. If it’s a fall semester, then I look at:

• what we did last fall
• what days the usual holidays fall on
• the college’s academic calendar

Once the library administration and the heads of various service points agree on the draft of the hours, it’s been my job to:

• add those upcoming hours to the library website (we use WordPress)
• create signs for the library hours (I basically screenshot the hours page and print it out)
• alert our campus IT so they can update the XML file that powers a “today’s hours” feature in the top right corner of the header of our website
• update the hours in Google My Business and the Yelp and Bing equivalents
• update the hours in LibCal, which we just started using this January for booking study rooms (the availability of rooms is pegged to when the circualation desk is open, as we check out room keys to students)

There’s one piece of the library hours machinery I’m not involved with: updating Alma so that loan periods and due dates can understand what days the library is open and when loans are considered due. I think that there is way that the LibCal API can transmit hours info to Alma. It would be great to link those systems up, as we are planning a move away from using a WordPress page with a manually updated table of hours and instead using LibCal fully to present a public page with our ours. We’d also use a LibCal widget on our home page to present those hours. It also seems likely that the decade old system of using an XML file to power the “today’s hours” feature in our header could be replaced with using the API from LibCal instead.

I always love finding ways to write data, words, etc. once and publish them automatically in multiple ways. Right now, we’re having to formally “write” the hours in different places. Cutting a few of those out of the picture would be a good thing.