The Unclassifiable Library Remix

Friday, April 13, 2007

Living at the Reference Desk

Though technically an Access Services Librarian, I am also one of the library's reference librarians. While all of the librarians take part in the rotating evening and weekend coverage, four of us are responsible for the main portion of daytime coverage at the Reference Desk. Some weeks I work as few as 8 hours at Reference, but this week I worked 20 hours at Reference. This is a very difficult balance for me, as being the head of Access Services doesn't cease while I am at the Reference Desk, which ends up becoming a satellite branch of the Circulation Desk when I am over there. Add to that the hustle and bustle this week from preparations for the annual Friends of the Library benefit, a Staff Council meeting, and it's surprising that I was able to squeeze in any "real" work.

However, I did manage some squeezing and got quite a bit accomplished this week. I managed to completely catch up on processing our automated inventory reports - over 200 of them! We are making excellent progress in our first automated inventory, but keeping up with the pace of the scanners is not an easy feat. The students doing the scanning have been hard at work, and we should finish the entire collection by the end of the semester.

Additionally, I managed to spend a modicum of time on my ILL projects - consulting with another librarian here about the editing of cascading style sheets in order to change the header/logo at the top of the web pages and beginning to edit the content of the pages per the customizations my staff and I agreed upon. I also performed the first test of my Odyssey set-up - sadly unsuccessful. I am now waiting on hearing from IT about a port issue before contacting technical support for assistance - god I love being hosted.

Not bad for a week spent living at the Reference Desk.

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