July 14, 2016

My day started too early. Most days feel like that lately. I got up a little earlier that I would have normally because my mom was leaving on a trip to Colorado this morning and I thought it would be nice to say goodbye. Then I had a haircut at eight o'clock to make up for missing it on Monday.

After my haircut I had a meeting on campus at nine o'clock. My haircut went faster than expected and I was left with not enough time to go home and too much time to go to campus, so I drove around for awhile. And then I went to campus.

I met my supervisor in her office, where she was entertaining her officemate's two kids. We then headed downstairs for our meeting with the other librarian about the assessment. It was a productive meeting. We decided we were all going to grade the first ten responses in the data in order to calibrate ourselves. Then we talked about how we would actually calibrate, which is good because I was a little lost on that. Turns out there is a rubric and we are going to look at the responses in the data that align with the rubric and grade it as to how well they met each goal. There was a little worry at first that there wasn't a rubric and that we would have to create one. I think they still want to tweak the rubric but that is for another day.

There was time before the next meeting so I wandered around the library for a little while before heading up to the fourth floor. Going up the stairs I was behind a girl playing Pokemon Go. I was a good distance behind her but she was walking slowly and staring intently at her phone. I paused on one of the landings to check my phone to see if I had heard back from my adviser yet and by the time I got upstairs the girl was slowly walking toward the stacks. The are moveable stacks and she slowly walked up to one of the closed sections, and then cautiously pushed the button to make the stacks open. And then she headed in. It was pretty entertaining to watch. It was like she was an animal stalking its prey.

The second meeting was a departmental meeting for the academic services department. We were joined by the three newest librarians because they work in a different department and the meeting started with all of the academic services librarians introducing themselves and saying what their areas of focus were so the new librarians knew who to send referrals to. They were going around the table and it got to me and I paused because I didn't think I was part of it, but apparently I was, so I said “I'm just hanging out,” which ended up getting a pretty good laugh. The best laugh however was when the other librarian on the assessment project introduced herself because she said “I'm so-and-so and I'm an ASS.” Turns out her title is Academic Services Specialist. That's pretty funny.

The new librarians briefly introduced themselves after that and the second one was a little too brief because as soon as the third one said his name the second one realized she had forgotten to say her name. And without skipping a beat the third librarian said “and that's so-and-so.” Another good laugh.

Following the introductions there were a few announcements and one was asking if there was interest in having a get together at the beginning of the semester where new faculty could come and meet the librarians. I guess they did it last year and it went pretty well so they want to keep it going and even invite non-new faculty. I think that's a great way to do outreach and put a face to the library to hopefully entice professor's to utilize the resources of the library more often.

The last half of the meeting was one of the librarians I interviewed for class getting the opinion of the group on changes to the website/catalog that he wanted to propose to the committee in charge of that. He had already brought up the ideas to the committee but they told him he needed the opinions of more people. So we went through them. The first was to change the “A-Z” link because no one really knows what that means. At least people who haven't gone to library school or aren't that familiar with library websites. One of the proposed changes is to have it say “eJournal List”, which gets right to the point, because it is an alphabetical list of all the electronic journals the library has access to. It also lists electronic periodicals and something else but the title would be much too long to say all of that. For me “A-Z” seems obvious but I also know what it is referring to, so I think it makes sense to change it.

The second proposed change was to hide the book and journal tabs in the Citation Linker, or at least reordered them so that the article tab was first since that is what most people would use it for. There was also a problem with the book tab only showing a single result. And that result was the first result in the catalog, which isn't that helpful. The librarian likened it to Google's “I'm Feeling Lucky” option. In the case of Moby Dick you would not be lucky because the first result is for a graphic novel adaption, so you wouldn't see the 127 copies of the actual book that the library has in its collection.

There is also a citation tracker that the librarian was curious about. When you click on one of the citation tracker links for a search result it will take you to a list of either a list of all the items referenced in the article or how many times that item has been referenced. The only problem is it isn't a comprehensive list for either. The feature is provided by a particular vendor I believe, and one thought is that it only shows the items in the lists that it has access to. Makes sense. The other librarians agreed that even if it wasn't a comprehensive list it was still a good feature. There was also a little note below the title of the lists saying that it may not contain all of the citations and it was suggested that the message be moved above the title and that it be made more noticeable.

And the last proposed change was doing something about all the items from HathiTrust showing up as available online even when they weren't. Almost all of the librarians raised their hands that they had received a question while working on the reference desk of someone being unable to access an item online from HathiTrust when it said it was available online. So it's an obvious issue. And there are no easy solutions. They only know of one other university who has solved the problem and it is suspected that it would take a lot of work to replicate. Other solutions involve taking all of the HathiTrust records out of the catalog so they won't show up in results and confuse people, figuring out how to turn off the little “Available Online” message on each record, and probably a couple other things that I'm spacing on at the moment.

After the meeting I went home, had lunch, and then went to work. It was a long day but it wasn't too bad. I got sidetracked a lot but I also did things. I finally finished the personalized reading list I started yesterday or the day before. I also briefly started working on compiling lists for my homebound patrons because we go out again on Wednesday and I don't work this weekend or next Tuesday, so time is running out. I helped patrons throughout the day, including several who were looking for books on a broad topic and didn't have a particular book in mind. And I took on a project of finding local, living authors in the county. That is a tall order. I lost too much time researching that tonight. And I wasn't that successful. But I did find more than I thought I would. That project will continue.

The patron who came in a few weeks ago, multiple times, getting different librarians, including myself, to print off information about a car he was trying to sell, was back in the library tonight. I assume with his wife. This time he wanted help with the actual sale of the vehicle. Like the forms needed and figuring out how to add in an 'as-is' portion to protect himself after the sale. I've never tried to sell a car before so I don't know anything about it but I tried to help them out. I probably helped them a little more than I should but also not as much as I wanted to. It was so tempting to just do it all for them. I think the guy has a problem with silence because he'd ask me to look for something, which required reading through a bunch of stuff, but as soon as I would start to read he would start talking to me and then just ramble on and on, which made it really hard to focus on what I was reading. He also had no idea what he needed and wasn't convinced by what I was telling him half the time, which just made the process even longer. The wife was also fed up and they ended up rushing to print things before we closed, so I'm almost certain he'll be back looking for more help.

A guy who briefly worked at the theater came in to use one of the rooms at the library tonight. He's a unique dude, to put it one way. He thought I looked familiar and I asked if he ever worked at the movie theater. His eyes got real big and said “You worked at the movie theater!” Then he gave me a very awkward hug. I obliged with a pat or two on the back but he just kept holding on. For at least five seconds after I stopped. It was better than his old hugs where he would go in cheek-to-cheek. I never need to find out a dude hasn't shaved by feeling his stubble on my cheek. Anyway, he also remembered my friend because when he came out to borrow and dry erase marker he said “Remember Levi? Levi, 501 blue jeans!” The memories.

When I got home from work my sister was there taking care of the cats so we talked for awhile. I also showed her my new fountain pens because those arrived today. They get here really fast to begin with but I managed to order than early enough that they shipped out the same day. I got a Jinhao x750 and a Jinhao x450, both matte black, the x450 with gold trim and the x750 with silver. They both look really nice and hopefully they write well. I wasn't very impressed with the big yellow Jinhao 150 I got so I hope these are better. I'm not expecting greatness out of pens that ended up costing me about five bucks a piece but it would be nice if I didn't have to put a fifteen dollar nib on them to get any use out of them.

Good grief, it is one o'clock in the morning and I've been tired since I woke up this morning.