{"id":32,"date":"2011-01-26T03:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T03:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/?p=32"},"modified":"2011-01-26T03:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T03:02:00","slug":"library-day-in-the-life-tuesday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/2011\/01\/26\/library-day-in-the-life-tuesday\/","title":{"rendered":"Library Day in the Life: Tuesday"},"content":{"rendered":"

So yesterday, I should have mentioned in my post that I’ve never done Library Day in the Life before. A few notes before I dive into what my day boiled down to. First, it’s worth noting that I check my Google Reader account repeatedly throughout the day: some days it’s about once an hour, other days its once every three or four hours. I’m on Twitter<\/a> and FriendFeed<\/a> fairly often, engaging in or sometimes starting conversations, but it’s in Google Reader that you can best see the traces of my blog reading, as I share and sometimes comment on things I read<\/a>. What I share in Google Reader is fed automatically into FriendFeed, which in turn generates lots of interesting discussions there. It’s fair to say that I live and die by my social network of colleagues in libraryland.<\/p>\n

Here is what my day looked like.<\/p>\n

Getting Back What I Put into the Sharing Economy of Social Networks<\/strong><\/p>\n

After finally getting around to reading an article by Gardner Campbell on setting up a personaly cyberinfrastructure for incoming students that had been sitting in my read later collection (using the Instaper<\/a> service), I decided to share it with the head of instruction, Randy Hensley, via email. Then, I decided that the article was really worth sharing more widely and posted a note about it on Twitter<\/a>. A librarian who works at the same university where Gardner Campbell teaches saw my tweet and sent me a reply<\/a> in which she pointed to a video of Campbell talking about the same subject<\/a> he wrote about in the article I liked so much. I wasn’t following her on Twitter, but I guess had been following me. Since she sent me such a useful reply, I decided to follow her back. I have FriendFeed set up to automatically republish all of my tweets, so it was nice to see that at least one person on FriendFeed noticed my pointer in Twitter to the article and “liked” it<\/a>. I also bookmarked the article in Delicious (which also feeds into FriendFeed<\/a>) so that I could find it again later.<\/p>\n

Serendipitous Discovery in the Stacks<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I’m not talking about unexpectedly finding a book collocated on the shelf with the one you were looking for. Instead, I’m referring to a pleasant run-in with an English professor who was pulling together some materials for a class he’s going to begin teaching in a few days. My fellow liaison to the English department, Chris Tuthill, and I were chatting up on the 5th floor when we noticed a professor we had met over a year ago when we made a presentation about new library services at a meeting of the English department. The opportunity to chat with this professor led to a nice opportunity to build up a relationship with him and to discover that the college has a new minor that we’ll probably want to start collecting materials for. After our impromptu meeting with the English professor, my colleague Chris and I continued to talk about our efforts to buy on a scheduled basis literature books that have won prizes; one issue we’re still wrestling with is whether we should also buy books that were finalists but not winners.<\/p>\n

Sticker Shock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earlier in the morning, I had gotten a price quote for Early English Books Online, a database that an English professor had wanted me to look into as a possible subscription option for the library. Both of us had a sense of how pricey it would be, but I still found myself shocked by the actual price when I saw it in an email from the vendor. Realizing that there was no way we’d be able to afford either the purchase + annual hosting fee option or the annual subscription option, I wrote a message to the English professor that detailed the actualy price quote and offered suggestions for other libraries in CUNY that have on-site access she could use. I also noted that the four research libraries in the New York Public Library where she or her students could use the database. I’ve found myself wondering lately if perhaps libraries shouldn’t put the actual subscription or purchase costs on their database descriptions, if only to help communicate to our users the often outlandish prices we pay for things.<\/p>\n

Adding Database Links to the Mobile Services Page<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday, I was submitted a request to EBSCOhost support for help figuring out how to get direct URLs for each of the mobile interfaces for the dozen-plus databases we get on that platform. This afternoon I was more than pleasantly surprised to get a reply (I was expecting not to hear back for a couple of days); even better was that the support rep didn’t just point me to some web page of instructions or type them up for me, he went ahead and gave me the URLs for each database. All I had to do was copy and paste them into the LibGuides pages that I’m building up to be a mobile services page.<\/p>\n

One quandary I’m having is whether it really makes sense to list both PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO, as the former is a subset (I am mostly sure) of the latter. I started a thread on the Library Society of the World room in FriendFeed about this<\/a> but have yet to get enough feedback to know for sure if I can leave PsycARTICLES off the list.<\/p>\n

Saying Goodbye to Some Great Colleagues<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to all sorts of budget messes in the CUNY system, and especially at Baruch, the college has seen a number of people jump at its early retirement package. Today, we had a retirement party for a colleague who helped run the access services division for more than two decades. Her boss, the head of access services, is also taking early retirement and attended the party. In the past six months, we’ve seen close to six (maybe seven or eight) staff and librarians take the early retirement offer. This week alone, four people will be having their last day. Next week, when the spring semester is just really getting steam, I think we’ll be missing a lot of those folks.<\/p>\n

Learning about Ebooks<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last hour of my day was spent listening to the first day of a two-day webinar on ebooks led by Sue Polanka<\/a>, whose blog, No Shelf Required<\/a>, is essential reading for anyone trying to keep up with ebooks in libraries. About a dozen of us in my library listened in and took notes. Here are Polanka’s slides:<\/p>\n

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Sue Polanka: Purchasing E-Books for Your Library<\/a><\/strong>
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Previously…
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