Extended Absence Greeting Friday

Next week I'll be on vacation, so consider this post my extended absence greeting.

Unlike previous years where I took all of my vacation time at once, I tried doing something a little different this summer, taking a week in June, a week in July, and a week in August. Although I do appreciate the frequency of breaks, each time I feel that I'm only just starting to relax when it's time to return to work again. Oh, well. Perhaps I should just be thankful that higher ed gives out enough vacation time for me to take so much time off in the first place!

So this week we'll be visiting in the in-laws in fabulous Poughkeepsie, New York, but I'll be making a detour to Albany in order to attend the 2011 IDS Project Conference, where I'll be giving a presentation on International Interlibrary Loan, reprising my talk at the 2010 conference in Oswego. Not only am I excited about the return gig, as I will be sharing some fresh new content representing some innovations we've made over the past year in handling international requests, but my new Big Boss will be there as well to deliver the keynote address. I'm also looking forward to seeing my resource sharing colleagues from New York and elsewhere and catching up with old friends.

I'm happy that I took the time to participate in this round of Library Day in the Life, and glad that it coincided with a renewed burst of energy on my part in contributing to this blog. I love that librarians are such prolific bloggers, and I hope to sustain my enthusiasm for writing about librarianship now that I've (re)discovered my professional voice. Many thanks to Bobbi Newman for keeping the torch burning! If you haven't taken the opportunity to explore other librarians' dispatches over the past week, I heartily encourage you to do so on the Library Day in the Life Round 7 Wiki.

As this week winds to a close, my final thoughts are about Random House's #ThankYouLibrarian campaign that's unfolding on Twitter this afternoon, where people are using the hashtag to thank a librarian who made a difference at some point in their lives. I posted my own thanks to the librarians who recognized in me a member of their own tribe a heck of a long time before I myself did, and mentored and nurtured me along the path to librarianship until I was ready to leave the nest. I'll always be grateful for their wisdom and advice, and I only hope that I will be able to do the same for the next generation of librarians.

There is no Thursday, only Zuul

(This is my Thursday entry for Library Day in the Life. If you're feeling particularly ambitious, here are links to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as well!)

5:30am- Wakey, wakey. As my Coordinator is out for the day, it'll be on my head to get operations rolling, which means if I have any hope of getting both her job and mine done today I'm going to need to take the early train...

6:54am- On the train, putting the finishing edits on my Wednesday entry for Library Day in the Life. I thought it was going to be easy to talk about how I became a librarian, but as my "adaptation" of my library school admissions statement evolves into a full-blown rewrite with bonus extra footage (let's call it the Director's Cut), I realize just how much of myself I was putting out there, and I want to get it right.

8ish- Riding the MBTA for most of my adult life now, I've learned one thing-- there is no such thing as an exact arrival time when travelling via public transportation.

8:30am- I'm at the office, already busy at work processing new Scan & Deliver requests. Scan & Deliver is our electronic document delivery service, and since our launch in 2009 every summer has seen a pronounced increase in traffic over the previous year as more and more of our patrons discover the joy of accessing the Harvard Library's print collection from afar.

9:40am- It takes me a good hour or more to have our requests ready for pulling from the Stacks. Tedious though it may be, I always look forward to the days when I get a chance to do some grunt work. I call them "Library Fundamentals" days, and I like them because they remind me that every workflow can stand to be improved upon. Nevertheless I'm glad I finished with time to spare before ten o'clock, because I still have a spreadsheet to analyze...

10:00am- Time for my weekly 1:1 with my supervisor. I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I think it's almost a year to the day that he took over as my boss. Although for various reasons-- some within my control and some way beyond it-- last August and September were a complete disaster for me on the job, my supervisor was in my corner all the while nevertheless, which made a world of difference in setting things right again. Now that my division is in a good place, he and I can concentrate on making things even better, and that's exactly the tone of our meeting today.

11:15am- Why am I so hungry already? Riiiight, I took the early train this morning. I dig into my leftover pasta and (contrary to my own sage advice) try to squeak a little bit of outside work into my lunch hour. I'm editing a chapter for the next edition of Magazines for Libraries and the deadline is looming, so I do a little fact-checking from the computer to see if all of the titles that Ulrichs says are still in print actually are. Guess what? I catch three of them that Ulrichs missed-- advantage Wikipedia, guys-- making it five publications out of 16 that folded since the last time I did this chapter in 2009. Truly, it's been a bloodbath out there for magazine publishers.

Noonish- Back to the grind. I knock out some emails requiring simple answers-- setting a borrowing library's at ease about a returned book (and learning that the Canadian post has been on strike in the process!), coordinating with my boss about a graduate information festival later next month, resending a couple of Scan & Deliver requests, then freaking out about an email notice about a change in the ILS that might seriously impact our operations.

12:29pm- I put together a quick statistical query for my boss all by myself using Access and wonder when exactly it was that I leveled up.

Sidebar. After slogging through library school you will no doubt be of the opinion that your mad PowerPoint (or Prezi) skillz and a copy of AACR2 are all you need to get ahead in the go-go world of professional librarianship. You are wrong. I have no idea why none of my courses towards the MLS required me to show at least as much proficiency in putting together a spreadsheet as it did writing a paper, cataloging a monograph, or coding a finding aid in XML, but trust me on this. You need to know how to make your data dance-- the sooner in your career as a librarian, the better. Got it? Now back to the show...

1:28pm- Whew, false alarm about the ILS change. Glad I asked for clarification, though!

2ish- Working with one of our new student assistants, whom we're training up on Borrowing request processing. He's run out of requests to process-- a happy tragedy, to be sure!-- so I turn him loose on a ginormous data cleanup project that I've been waiting all summer to foist onto someone. At least he won't be running out of work anytime soon.

3ish- Working with another one of our students, who will be leaving us in a couple of weeks for greener pastures. Saying goodbye to our graduating student assistants every year is one of the hardest parts of the job, and this particular student is one of the best we've ever had. Her work training other students over the past year has been absolutely top-notch, so before she leaves us for good I've had her documenting her training tips and tricks as much as she can. I get a chance to read a draft of what she's written and it's good-- really good. Maybe she'll consider working as a long-distance consultant?

4pm- Time for an all-staff meeting. Our Access Services department is so large that we need to have three separate showings in order for everyone to attend, and this is the last of the encore presentations. Our department head (my boss's boss) speaks about the Harvard Library Transition thus far and our library's goals for the next several months. Needless to say, there's still a lot of uncertainty in the air, but it's good that we're meeting to discuss the future as a group.

5:25pm- It's come to my attention that there's been entirely too much laughter going on in the office today- most of it from me. It's been a long but rewarding day, and despite having to serve double duty (making me feel more than a little like a man possessed all day), I find that I've really enjoyed myself. There's just something about those Library Fundamentals, I guess!

And now it's time to go.

EPILOGUE

6:14pm- Remember that bit this morning about there being no such thing as an exact arrival time? That was FORESHADOWING. Because lo and behold, I manage to miss my regular train home.

6:45pm- I finally settle into the later train and start to write today's post.

8:00pm- Home at last! The worst part is, I have another early day tomorrow...

Wednesday- the inevitable origin story

(For this Wednesday's edition of Library Day in the Life, I thought I'd change things up a bit and share what lead me along the path of librarianship in the first place. The original inspiration for this post is actually my admissions essay to library school, which I've adapted here. Enjoy!)

Bitten by a radioactive bookworm, mild-mannered Tom Bruno is transformed into THE LIBRARIAN! With the amazing abilities to shelf books and shush patrons, he champions First Amendment rights for all patrons and battles against the evil forces of budget cut, copyright lobbyists, and whatever malevolent entity keeps on jamming the public photocopier...

It all began with the bookmobile.

As my hometown was too small to afford a public library of its own and my elementary school library's collection was woefully narrow in scope, the weekly arrival of the community bookmobile was something akin to a religious experience for me - a kid who grew up in a "one bookshelf" home. I remember the wonder and amazement I felt at being surrounded by books and the joy at being able to borrow whatever I pleased as I browsed through the titles. Although that bookmobile couldn't have had more than a few hundred monographs crammed onto its shelves, at the time it seemed like the sum total of the world's knowledge. I never left without as many books as I could carry!

My first library job was a student assistant position at the Dewey Library at M.I.T., where I had begun my undergraduate education. You see, I was convinced that I was going to be an astronaut, but after flunking both my freshman physics and calculus classes mightily I began to doubt whether or not I had the right stuff for such a stellar career choice. It was at this point, when I picked up the Dewey job, that my love for libraries was rekindled. During a difficult period of time when I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to be, the library became an intellectual haven for me, as well as a place to work (I was fortunate enough to pick up a full-time staff position just as I requested a leave of absence from my studies). Had I been a little smarter, I might have put two and two together considered librarianship as a possible career path then and there, but at the time when a colleague did mention the idea I simply laughed at him.

The last of his kind, the infant Tom Bruno is sent in a rocket from the planet Melvil just moments before its destruction. Crash landing on Earth, he is raised in anonymity by a farmer and his wife until the fateful day when he is summoned by the Library of Congress to fulfill his destiny. He is... SUPERLIBRARIAN!

Fast forward a few years later, when I decided to transfer to Boston University in order to complete my Bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek and Latin. By this time I'd traded in my dreams of working for NASA for getting a Ph.D. in the humanities, but as luck would have it, librarianship had other plans for me. With my undergraduate studies coming to an end and my continued graduate studies still a question mark, no sooner was I looking for a "real" job than the temp agency I had signed up with called to let me know there was an immediate long-term opening at the Harvard Medical School library, in the interlibrary loan office.

I ended up working at the Countway Library of Medicine in the office of Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery, and once more a whole new aspect of library operations opened up to me. This time not only did I have a keener appreciation and better understanding of academic libraries, but I also found a mentor in the form of my supervisor. A recent graduate of Simmons College herself, she saw in me the love of librarianship and not only potential but enthusiasm for library science, and did her best to nurture it.

It was at the Countway that I first began to tackle problems of policy and procedure as an employee trusted with the authority to optimize my own day-to-day workflow and to “own” my job in a way that I hadn’t before. This was a monumental change for me – no longer content simply to do what was expected of me, I wanted to know why we did things the way we did in the ILL office and the library as a whole. Feeling like I had a personal interest in the well-being of the Countway, I didn't hesitate to raise my voice and make my opinions known when decisions were made that had an effect on what I thought our library's mission was. Sometimes I found myself in direct conflict with the decisions that were made, but never did I let that deter me from ensuring that my patrons received the best possible service and assistance in obtaining the information they sought.

After watching his parents gunned down by a crazed ILS vendor, young Tom Bruno donned the cowl of the DARK LIBRARY KNIGHT, dedicating his life to protecting innocent library patrons from arbitrary renewal limits and unreasonable overdue fees...

I left the Countway in 2003 to take advantage of a rare opportunity - a cataloging job had opened up in the Modern Greek Division at Widener Library, on the Harvard main campus in Cambridge. Unlike the bulk of the Harvard College Library's cataloging work, which is done now in the vast Technical Processing Office, materials in the Greek alphabet were handled by the Modern Greek Librarian and two assistants. This meant that instead of doing one job over and over again in a high-volume setting, I would be doing a little bit of everything in the cataloger's job description - acquisitions, provisional cataloging, serials holdings, and the like.

Again another vista opened up. For years I had been learning about the external mechanics of how a library worked; now I was privy to the innermost workings, the basic classification and organization of knowledge and library materials. Everything I learned on this job made me want to learn more, and I therefore finally screwed up my courage and took the plunge, applying to the MLS program at Simmons College and starting my classes in the Summer of 2004. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from library school, especially I'd already been working in libraries for almost ten years, but I found myself pleasantly surprised by the experience. My professors were inspiring and the course material challenging in a much more personal way than my undergraduate teachers and classes had been - with only one or two exceptions everything I did at Simmons was relevant to my education as a library professional. I have particular fond memories of Ernie DiMattia's Management course and Sid Berger's History of the Book, where I had a chance to cast my own type in hot lead!

In the meantime I had also begun working at the Widener Circulation Desk on the weekends, a definite change of pace from cataloging and a return to the “front line” service orientation that I began with, all those years ago. Once more I was answering reference questions along with checking out materials to patrons, only now my answers are informed by years of experience at all of the diverse positions I have held as a library assistant at both Harvard and M.I.T.. The Circ Desk gig lead to a full-time position as supervisor of one of Widener's reading rooms, where I was working until a series of staff vacancies put me in the perfect position to take over as the Head of Resource Sharing, my current position. I had finished my MLS by this point and was in the middle of my first professional job search when I got the call-- the rest, as they say, is history.

Hot-shot fighter pilot and NASA astronaut Tom Bruno stumbles upon a dying alien who gives him a ring of immense power, limited only by the confines of the Dewey Decimal System. In brightest day, in darkest night, no overdue books shall escape my sight!

Needless to say, I've come a long way from the bookmobile. Although the road to professional librarianship was quite long for me, I wouldn't change it for the world. In one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, Captain Picard, who is on his deathbed, is given a chance by the omnipotent trickster Q to reverse a foolish decision he'd made in his youth. Picard learns however that if not for that mistake, he would not have become the person he was. As much as I may occasionally feel the same way as the Captain Picard did about my own missteps, I realize that my identity as a librarian has been informed by every seemingly wrong move I've made along the way.

Instead of bemoaning these detours, I should be thankful for them... for taken as a whole, they represent my origin story - how I got from being a kid who staked out the weekly arrival of his county bookmobile to becoming a professional librarian working at one of the largest research libraries in the world.

Tuesday- no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

(This is my Day 2 of Library Day in the Life: Round 7)

6:50am- Wait. I'm supposed to wake up at 6am, right?

ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!

8:02am- I send an email to one of my bosses, whom I'd run into when leaving the library yesterday. I had mentioned a document/link that was relevant to some of the big changes currently taking place in the Harvard Library system and I wanted to make sure I didn't forget to send it to her, even if I did forget to get out of bed this morning.

8:06- Emailing my staff and supervisor, letting them know I'll be late. Fortunately my wife is willing to drive me in to Cambridge after dropping our daughter off at camp...

10:20am- Finally at the office, bearing empty calories for my peeps no less. I'm a big fan of keeping staff morale high, and love to bring in cookies, Hershey's Miniatures, or Swedish Fish whenever I can to keep the resource sharing fires stoked.

A quick round of office rounds ensues. Fortunately nothing is on fire this morning, so I can settle in and try to get myself caught up.

10:30am- I tweet this: "I'm seriously contemplating a Ph.D. in library science. Anyone have any advice/strong opinions?"

I get an equal number of responses divided between genuine offers of advice and colleagues asking me if I've lost my mind. It's true that I'm seriously thinking about it, as I really miss teaching and doing my own academic research (rather than facilitating the research of others). Getting a Ph.D. would allow me to adjunct and encourage me to explore some topics in library science that fascinate me, while allowing me to continue along my current career path.

10:50am- Going through my email, I respond to one of the coordinators of next week's IDS Project Conference in Albany, where I'll be presenting on the topic of International ILL. Although I am not from New York, I have been following the IDS Project for years now and look to their work for inspiration in implementing my own resource sharing initiatives here at Harvard.

The budget woes for New York libraries happened years before they hit the rest of us, forcing them to become a laboratory for resource sharing innovation. The best part about the IDS Project, however, is that they embrace a philosophy of sharing these innovations, so I relish any chance I get to hang out with them and learn something new!

10:57am- Time to put on my troubleshooter's hat. I am the first line of ILLiad technical support between our own IT department and OCLC/Atlas, and I've been wrestling on-again, off-again with a strange error that keeps on popping up at another resource sharing unit. This kind of troubleshooting can be difficult, as it involves keeping the asynchronous communication between the vendor, the local IT contact, and the affected staff member moving along, as each party is always waiting on the other two.

11:53am- More troubleshooting, this time assisting a new Harvard unit in setting up their ILLiad for ILL and Scan & Deliver operations. It's fun because we're excited to welcome new libraries into the fold, but it's a little frustrating because I realize how dated and scattered our original implementation documentation is. I root around my Gmail archives for a while, however, and manage to rustle up the docs we were looking for.

12:27pm- Two quick emails to colleagues overseas, thanking one for allowing our Preservation department to cut the pages on an item we borrowed whose pages were still attached, then replying to the other about a thesis we wanted to have copied for our patron. Dissertations often require a signed Copyright Declaration Form from the patron, so I forward the form while letting the lending library know that we are still interested.

12:39pm- Another ILLiad email, this one about webpages. Yes, I wear all kinds of hats.

12:46pm- A question to our Finance department about ILL shipping costs for FY11, as it's one of the few remaining numbers I don't have for this year's annual report.

1:01pm- Status check from my supervisor about a statistics problem I've been tasked with. I let him know we're making progress (in fact I've been working back and forth on this very report with our stats guru while knocking out other actions items).

1:17pm- Answering an email from one of our Collection Development librarians about the special loan of a microfilm set to a patron at another university. I particularly enjoy working with our Collection Development department, as they really do understand the basic tenet of positive resource sharing karma that you need to give in order to get. I can only think of one time in my three-plus years as Head that a special ILL request was rejected, and even then the librarian had a pretty good reason for nixing it.

Lunchtime.

The rest of the day is devoted to a last-minute stats request from one of my Big Bosses. Whereas the other statistics project on my plate involved data that was already available, I'll need to generate a whole bunch of monthly reports in order to solve this particular problem, then cut and paste each set of twelve months into a new aggregate spreadsheet. Why the vendor in question doesn't offer the ability to download data in a time format other than month by month is quite beyond me, as it makes answering these kinds of questions extremely tedious.

Fortunately I have my new musical toy Spotify to keep me company, so as I cut and paste my data I rock out to a Covers playlist I've been assembling (it's a collaborative playlist, so please add to it if you're a Spotify member!).

4:35pm- Email to a colleague about my vision of resource sharing and the changes ahead at Harvard. I love these opportunities to think aloud about the Big Picture, and am confident that there will be more of them as our transition continues.

4:42pm- A chance IM with another colleague about Xtranormal, the online animation tool which she is currently using for training purposes. I think it's a clever application, but we discuss about how it is sometimes perceived in a negative light in some circles. I guess some people don't think fuzzy bunnies are worthy of the Ivory Tower!

Time to call it a day, though before I leave I begin to sketch out my Monday post for Library Day in the Life. I'll continue working on it on the train, then finish it from the home office, at which point I'll plow ahead and start writing today's summary. So while I may have started the day running late, at least I get to finish it on schedule.

I can't help but think back to the question I Tweeted earlier in the day about getting a Ph.D., however. It's not like me to worry about things like this, but I catch myself wondering if I'm too old at this point to be going back to school. After all, I am 39 years old. While I've always been squarely in the "you're only as old/young as you feel" camp, for some reason I have been thinking more and more about the passage of time. Had I come to librarianship ten years sooner, I'm sure I'd already be on my to a doctorate, if not finished already, but alas, my career path took a lot longer to become clear to me.

Part of me wishes that I could send a message in a bottle back in time, telling myself to stop dithering and get my ass into library school already. But who's to say I would have found my vocation at all, had I not chosen the path less taken in the first place? More about this in my Wednesday post, when I talk about why I chose librarianship-- or, perhaps mote to the point, why it chose me-- but I wonder if the theme of lost time is a common concern for "second career" librarian-types such as myself?

...or maybe I should just lay off the Pink Floyd!

Monday- the Kobayashi Maru of weekdays

(I'm a day behind already, so I'd better get cracking!)

Every day starts with my making the rounds in the ILL office. I supervise a staff of four full-time support staff members and a roster of between 120-140 hours per week of student labor, so unless I'm on a deadline or I have a 9 o'clock meeting-- by the way, don't do that-- I spent the first half hour or so of my day talking to everyone and getting a sense of how their day is shaping up. I make sure to spend a little extra time with my student coordinator, as she is responsible for the hour-to-hour deployment of our student workers and is my early warning system for any large-scale problems that might be brewing.

Fortunately resource sharing is a field of librarianship that lends itself very well to statistical analysis, so barring any truly unusual circumstances we do a reasonably good job of knowing how the request volume ebbs and flows over the course of the year. Not surprisingly the summer is a slow period for traditional ILL, but our electronic document delivery service (Scan & Deliver), now in its third year of operation, grows increasingly popular every summer with our faculty, students, and staff as a means of accessing the Harvard Library collections while traveling or doing research away from campus.

Part of this Monday involves making sure that we will have more than adequate student coverage through August, so as to anticipate any possible surge in Scan & Deliver requests prior to the start of the Fall semester. Last year we found ourselves somewhat overwhelmed by the volume of requests, and aftering analyzing the factors which lead to our being unprepared we adjusted our operations so that any potential bottlenecks or delays would be telegraphed to the stakeholders in our department long before actual service was impacted. So far this year the new system has been working marvelously, and I am happy to hear that we should have ample student labor this time around.

After talking to my staff, I always try to check in with my own supervisor, whose office is adjacent to the main ILL office. This way any critical issues that come up during my morning rounds can be communicated immediately, so he's in the loop as soon as I am and he can support me as needed. It's also a chance for him to check in on my progress with any action items or long-term projects he's tasked me with.

On to my least-favorite part of my week- time approvals for staff and students. But I suppose we all need to get paid, after all! Sometimes, however, this very simple-sounding task can literally take an hour or two as I try to square reported time with our student scheduling software (we use Shiftboard) and the daily sign-in sheets, and occasionally I need to communicate with Human Resources, the Student Employment Office, or our department Student Coordinator in case there are any major discrepancies I cannot account for.

Enough HR paperwork and I'm almost excited to answer some email! This will be my first major pass through the inbox, so unless something is absolutely on fire or can be easily dispatched in a three-sentence response or less I will do a lot of color coding at this stage of the day. Red is for action items, orange is for items requiring lengthy responses, blue is for FYIs that I'll probably end up deleting at the end of the week, yellow is for items I should bring up with my supervisor, and green is for any email related to ILL payments (more about that later).

By the time I've worked my way through the inbox in this manner I'll have a good sense of how my day is going to go, and depending on whether or not I have any meetings that afternoon I try to plan my work around those appointments. I am lucky in that I tend not to have many Monday meetings, so I'm looking forward to buckling down and getting a lot done this afternoon!

All the while I try to keep an eye on TweetDeck to see what my librarian colleagues are up to. As resource sharing is a very outward-looking discipline I am encouraged to use social media to interact with my peers and share information, best practices, and discuss common concerns (I do the same with Facebook). I also use Google Reader to follow hundreds of library-related RSS feeds, sharing articles with others or setting them aside for myself to read later, and occasionally I will take a look at the ILL and public services listservs that I follow and see if there are conversation worth following or contributing to. Although listserv traffic on the whole is just a shadow of what it was a few years ago, sometimes I will encounter a colleague in need whom I can actually help, which really makes my day.

Okay, time for lunch. When I was first started this job I had a tendency to work through lunch, but it's almost never worth it. Would-be librarians take heed! You need that hour to yourself more than you think, so unless you really have to short it do yourself a favor and get out of the office (even if you are a good little doobie and you brought your lunch!). The reason for this is obvious- as librarians, "kindness is our chief export", and if you aren't mindful of your own needs you will inevitably be less prepared to meet the needs of others. Librarianship is a wonderful thing, but even when you're doing it right it takes a lot out of you. Be sure to stop every once in a while and allow yourself to recharge.

The afternoon is a blur. The major actions items of the day are statistics-related, so I spend a good hour or so designing the queries I need before I message our resident Access guru and set the reporting wheels into motion. All the while I am dealing with emails requiring personal responses, answering staff and student questions about how to handle specific requests, and speaking to patrons or colleagues who walk in with questions or who call on the phone or instant message me. It's amazing how much instant messaging goes on in our library nowadays, a marked increase from even a year or two ago. Since everyone had a veritable deluge of email and dreads the ringing of their phone, IM is an effective way to swoop in and get the answer you need without having to command the undivided attention of the person you're talking to.

I'm also paying invoices and making other important purchasing decisions regarding our ILL borrowing activity. While most of the items our patrons need can be found on OCLC and paid for via electronic funds transfer, many of them require more creative solutions. If a patron can discover it-- and trust me, this generation of born-digital scholars can find anything!-- they will expect us to make every reasonable effort to acquire it. And so we do. It can be exciting to go to the ends of the earth, but when it comes to paying for the timely delivery of these items things can get a little complicated, as financial settlement practices can vary widely... not just from country to country, but from library to library within each country!

Needless to say, I'm always extremely happy when a library will accept IFLA vouchers:

Is it 5 o'clock already? No, it's actually after 5pm! But that's how Mondays work in the Big Library. There's always so much going on that you simply have to accept that it's not all going to get done by the end of the day. Every Monday is its own Kobayashi Maru: a test of character under impossible odds. As the workweek progresses we will have fewer and fewer action items left over at the end of each day, and some days we will even manage to run out of work before we close up shop for the night, but right now it's about keeping spirits high and making sure that we keep the week as a whole on a steady course to completion.

When my staff and student assistants leave, I try to make sure I say goodbye and thank each and every one of them for their work. We'll all be at it again soon enough on Tuesday morning!

Library Day in the Life: Round 7

It's one of my favorite times of the year:  Library Day in the Life.  The brainchild of Bobbi L. Newman, Library Day in the Life challenges librarians two times a year to document a day or week on the job, both for the edification of non-librarians and as inspiration and validation for one another.  Participants sign up on the wiki, then either blog away, Tweet (under the hashtag #libday7), or add pictures and/or video at Flickr and YouTube.  Library Day in the Life is now in its seventh round, and with each iteration it attracts more participants-- librarians, library support staff, and LIS students-- from all over the planet.

This will be the third time I'm joining in the festivities.  My name is Tom Bruno, and I am currently the Head of Resource Sharing at Widener Library of the Harvard College Library.  Most of my day to day activities revolve around managing our interlibrary loan and electronic document delivery (otherwise known as Scan & Deliver) services, but as the Harvard Library system in the midst of a vast and comprehensive reorganization I am occasionally asked to serve in a broader capacity as well.  I also coordinate training and troubleshoot any problems involving ILLiad, our common system for ILL and Scan & Deliver, and act as liaison between Harvard and OCLC and/or the vendor, Atlas Systems for any service or support issues.

Resource Sharing is one of the oldest disciplines in librarianship, addressing the basic problem faced since time immemorial:  i.e., that no one library can possess all of the knowledge in the world.  Even as we experience wave after wave of disruptive technological changes it remains unlikely that our patrons' need for information beyond the collections of our library (be they physical, digital, or whatever comes after that), although the tools with which we meet our patrons' information needs will no doubt change and/or evolve. I hope that over the upcoming week I am able to shine a little light on what it is I do-- feel free to ask any questions, and I'll do my best to answer them!

Library Day in the Life- Thursday

This is the Thursday tl;dr ("Too Long, Didn't Read") Edition. I often chide my colleagues for sending me any email that's longer than a paragraph, but here I am writing a novella-length rundown of my day on the job. If you're feeling like your attention is somewhat deficient at this point in the workweek, by all means skip down to the end.

8:11am- The hooplah surrounding the launch of Apple's iPad finally trickles down to our discussion of e-readers, which I have been investigating and trying to pilot in ILL for almost a year now. Whereas buying a Kindle or Nook locked us into a proprietary form of hardware, the iPad has the advantage of supporting the existing iPhone/iPod Touch apps, including the Kindle and BN e-reader apps, as well as providing access to the ebooks in iTunes store. While this doesn't make the iPad 100% platform-neutral, it's the closest we've come to a reader that lets us have our cake and eat it too.

8:22am- One of my freshman advisees emails about dropping by for me to sign his Study Card for the Spring semester, as it's that time of the year again. We set up a block of time for tomorrow.

8:47am- Hey, wasn't the train already supposed to at North Station by now? At least the wi-fi isn't flaking out this morning so I can get some work done- I thank one of the IT staff for answering a question about network access for one of our satellite ILL operations at the Science Library.

9:49am- It's been a while since I've posted to one of the ILL listservs, but this issue is one I've been thinking about since last November, when the ILLIAD-L listserv shut down and moved to a message board over at OCLC. Ending the mailing list was fairly unpopular at the time, but as my fellow ILL librarians were reluctant to split the community by starting another listserv and going online with the new message board. Three months later, though, and it's clear that the whole community never quite made the jump. I have nothing against message boards per se, but I simply don't have time to monitor one on a daily basis, and it seems that many of my colleagues are in the same boat. Listservs are some of the oldest information age technology at our disposal, but they still work for certain forms of communication, and serve as emergency hotlines for the ILL community in manner that even a dynamic message board can't replicate. So I add my two cents to the post mortem, hoping that if enough of us voice our discontent then perhaps someone will offer to host a new listserv.

9:49am- An email to one of the Harvard libraries interested in joining our electronic document delivery service. There's enough interest at this point that we have dubbed it "Phase Two", which means we'll likely spending this Spring on training and troubleshooting as we did the previous year. Nevertheless it's exciting to bring new libraries into the fold, as it's the surest indicator that we have launched a popular and useful service for our patrons. Speaking of which, today is one of the days that I am gathering detailed information about processing times for every step of the request fulfillment process, so that I can put together our first cost model based on hard data.

10:24am- A rare opportunity for me to lay down the law. While the heart and soul of my job is finding ways to say "yes," there are times when I'm obliged to tell someone no and this is one of them. 'Nuff said!

11:00am- You knew there'd be a meeting in there somewhere, didn't you? But this one is different, as it's one of my own meetings with my own team- the ILL Borrowing and Lending Coordinators and our newly-hired Student Trainer/Coordinator for the department. We've been working on some ambitious changes in our workflows for request processing since the beginning of the Fall semester, but now that the Spring term has started we are kicking things up a notch. It's a good meeting, as everyone here understands my vision and is excited about it, because although we'll be doing things differently my staff see that if we're successful we'll be doing things much more efficiently as well. I love that feeling when things click and you realize that not only have you convinced your team, but motivated them as well!

12:41pm- Another advisee emails me- can she come by later this afternoon? Sure thing, I say. Come on down!

(But first let me grab some lunch.)

1:01pm- As I munch a flatbread sandwich from the Dunkin Donuts across the street, I check in with our IT people about our scheduled upgrade to the latest version of ILLiad. Although we were originally concerned that the change would affect our billing scripts that push invoice transactions to our Accounts Receivable department, we have received confirmation that this should not be an issue. Whew!

1:30pm- My advisee finds her way down to the office and we catch up. Even though being a freshman adviser is a significant time commitment at the start of each semester, I've enjoyed getting to know the incoming class and helping them find their way through their first year at school.

2:15pm- Our central OIS people send me a troubleshooting email from a patron who can't log in to our ILL/Doc Del system, the cause of which is a past expiry date. I update the account and send the patron on their way.

2:24pm- The same expiry date issue has just cropped up again, less than ten minutes later- funny how these things tend to cluster, even when they're completely unrelated.

2:25pm- I briefly correspond with the Circ staff at one of College Library's component libraries, as they need help with some of their document delivery scanning workflow since they're neck-deep in course reserves processing right now. I offer to take the backlog on their hands, for which they are grateful, and they tell me they'll be sending over the items for scanning later in the afternoon. One of the great things about being the hub for resource sharing in our school is that we have the manpower to help in situations exactly like this.

2:57pm- A message on Facebook from Justin Hoenke's (of Justin The Librarian and 8bitlibrary.com) band Belsapadore. Would I like to become a fan? Hells, yes!

3:31pm- More correspondence with the other College libraries, this time about upgrading their scanning capabilities to support Odyssey sending rather than ARIEL, as Odyssey libraries now represent well over 3/4's of all electronic deliveries.

3:41pm- Another one of my freshman advisees wants to meet tomorrow, so I need to shift a meeting in order to fit everyone in. Friday is starting to look quite booked at this point.

3:47pm- More correspondence with OCLC and our school (not library) IT, as we are moving to Microsoft Exchange for our email and we need to make sure that there are no issues with automatically generated notifications from our ILLiad hosted server. Hopefully this round of information exchange should do the trick- fingers crossed!

3:55pm- A returning student wants to come back to work at ILL. Are we still hiring? We sure are...

4:00pm- Time for some good old fashioned hands-on troubleshooting, as our Circ scanner is on the blink upstairs. I spend some quality time with the machine, as I know most of its tricks and quirks, but try as I might I can't get it to stop spitting out a certain error message. I email the vendor, who is very responsive, and set up a WebEx session to fix it first thing in the morning.

4:36pm- An email from a friend who has been doing research at our library on Phineas Gage (the remarkable individual who survived having a six-foot tamping rod pass through his skull and brain during a freak accident in the 19th century) for the past several years, pointing us to an exciting new find just announced on NPR- although it was believed that no pictures of Gage had survived, it appears that someone recently identified a photo of Gage on Flickr! I love when people share the fruits of their scholarly labors with us, and in this particular case it's been fun to watch my friend's project develop over the years.

4:38pm- Some more follow-up from our morning meeting with the student coordinator, who is having Instant Messenger installed on workstations where we will have student assistants working on ILL request processing, giving them instant access to the Borrowing and Lending coordinators whenever they run into trouble. It's a great idea, and I'm glad to have someone helping behind the scenes to get all of this in motion.

4:39pm- Correspondence with a colleague about doing a poster session about our document delivery service for an upcoming digital scholarship fair. Can I have something ready by the end of next week? Despire the fact that I'm already chock full of deadlines this is a great opportunity to do some marketing and outreach for the new service, so I of course agree.

4:44pm- More strategic planning with my staff about finding better ways to incorporate student assistants into our processing workflows so that our staff have more time for troubleshooting the truly problematic requests. A fellow resource sharing librarian observed that in the world of ILL the easy requests are getting easier and the hard ones harder, and I know that my Borrowing staff can definitely corroborate this. So the goal is to free up as much of their time to deal with these truly difficult requests, and I think we have a great plan for doing just that.

5:19pm- One more email to schedule another of my advisees and it's time to go. I crunch my way across a frozen Harvard Yard and hop on the subway, so I can catch my train and get home just in time to do it all over again in another twelve hours or so.

It's been a busy Thursday, but a good kind of busy- a nice mix of troubleshooting, problem-solving, and strategic planning with my staff both in formal meetings and casual conversation. Heck, I even helped a patron or two along the way. I'm happy that even though mine is a managerial position, the job still gives me an opportunity for front-line public service. It's something I would definitely miss if I didn't have it.

Library Day in the Life- Wednesday

Today was everything I love about my job. This was not a day for Getting Things Done or Taking Care of Business- no, Wednesdays are generally reserved for team meetings and my 1:1 with the boss, and in both cases we had an awful lot to discuss. I enjoy sitting down with the various Heads in Access Services and talking , as due to both the nature and location of my job I wouldn’t get much face-time with my colleagues otherwise.

Our ILL shop is situated so as to be convenient adjacent to both the library’s mail room and the closest service entrance to the Stacks, which is great for workflow synergy but cuts us off from our colleagues at various public service desks upstairs. On a good day I refer to our office space as “the bunker,” or even the Bat Cave; on other occasions when I’m feeling less charitable, though, I just call it a cave. However I refer to it, it’s a welcome change of pace to leave it for a spell and not think about the thousand and one fires I need to extinguish. Given our request volume it’s hard to tear myself away even to grab something from the café vending machines, let alone lunch someplace in Harvard Square, so I appreciate having a weekly break that is not mine to cancel or postpone.

We don’t normally go the full two hours for our Team meetings, but today’s agenda items invite lively discussion and we are reluctant to break early as we brainstorm our way through several pressing issues and connect the dots between our various areas of responsibility. Like most libraries, we have seen so much change over the past year that it is good to resume an air of normalcy, and even though there will doubtless be even more change around the corner being able to sit down together and anticipate it makes a world of difference. There is a spirit of camaraderie at these meetings that I greatly enjoy, and it speaks well to us as a group that we are able to laugh and joke with one another as well as we are able to work.

Whether or not to break for lunchtime is also entirely out of my hands today as it turns out, as I am being taken out to a nice little bistro to celebrate an award I won for my work involving the document delivery service we launched last Spring. It’s a real honor, and over an excellent meal I get to talk about the role of libraries and resource sharing in the 21st century with my colleagues, my past and present bosses, and our library’s director. I’ll admit that I recycled my own blog post yesterday about how the ability to say yes is the true bottom line of our profession, and I’m happy to report that it was well-received.

After lunch I have a brief respite before launching into my 1:1 with my boss, which feels more like an extension to the day’s conversations, albeit with more action items specifically for me. I end up walking out of my boss’s office with an even fuller plate than I already had for the next couple of weeks. Part of the challenge of what I’m tasked to do is that our resource sharing efforts continue to grow by leaps and bounds, so much so that we need all the help we can get. This means more cross-training, more coordination and cooperation across traditional boundary lines, more dotted and horizontal lines on the org chart, more willingness to explore and implement new solutions to the unique problems of the postmodern library. In light of everything that we’ve talked about today, however, I can see how each of these new projects fit into the larger picture, and I am excited to tackle them head-on.

So granted, I spent approximately forty-five minutes in the office today, during which time I barely had enough time to touch base with my staff, let alone get anything else substantive accomplished. But sometimes the most important part of being a librarian is thinking and talking about the Big Picture. And that's what my Wednesdays are all about.

Library Day in the Life- Tuesday

“Meetings and emails,” a colleague apologizes on Twitter. “Emails and meetings. I wish today were more glamorous.” I nod sympathetically as I take a look at my own agenda for this Tuesday- my Google Calendar entry for today is a patchwork of one-hour meetings, punctuated by hour long blocks of free time during which I will be making a frantic attempt to get everything else done… including answering the dreaded email, which I’m still behind on as a result of ALA Midwinter. Like yesterday I’ve gotten an early start to my day, neglecting my writing efforts for a second day in a row as I knock out some easy questions on the train ride in to work. It sounds funny, but I think the fact that we librarians have put ourselves under the microscope for the week has energized me in a way that is most unusual for a Tuesday morning.

I’d like to say that the emails in question were about matters so riveting that I just couldn’t wait until I got work to answer them, but in reality they were the day-in, day-out sorts of little problems that my inbox inevitably accumulates over time. I like to joke to my staff—no strangers to the challenges of time management themselves-- that library work is all about identifying the 10% of your workload that is truly important, but once you join the professional ranks you’ll quickly find that you have no choice but to distill that 10% down yet again. What remains is the essence of librarianship, which can so easily get lost in the background noise of any postmodern workplace. It is what makes our job not just another job, but a vocation. The rest is of course important, and as the boss you’re the one on the hook if the daily grind doesn’t get ground, but in reality it’s that quintessential one percent that gets us out of bed every morning.

Here are the fundamental questions of access to information, many of which we must wrestle with daily on behalf our patrons. “Err on the side of ‘yes,’” I always encourage my staff, mindful that behind the scenes we are an operation with a bottom line, obliged not only to satiate our users’ desire for information but to observe the limits of publisher licenses and copyright law. I think I actually laughed when someone first suggested that libraries should be run like a business, but as I walk through my ILL shop (yes, we call it a ‘shop’) I am ever mindful of the calculus of profit and loss. Are we scanning library materials as quickly as we could without sacrificing quality? Are we shipping our ILL loans in the most cost-efficient manner possible? Are we searching for our Borrowing requests against the right combination of lending libraries and purchase on demand vendors? These seem like questions more suited to a maker of widgets than a librarian, but if I do not take them seriously our ability to facilitate research—not just that of our own patrons but of students and scholars worldwide—is diminished.

And this, I realize, is the true bottom line: our ability to say “yes.” The fancy-pants term for what I do is called Resource Sharing, and my job is not only to share our resources now but to ensure that we will be able to go on sharing those resources long after my tenure. Every detail I sweat is another loan we can fill somewhere down the line- one more term paper finished, one more research grant approved, one more bibliography complete, one more happy patron. And this is worth all the meetings, all the emails... all the Tuesdays in the world.

(Thanks to Andy Woodworth for inspiring today's post!)

Library Day in the Life- Monday

It's that time of the year again for Library Day in the Life, where librarians blog about what exactly it is that they do on the job with that mysterious MLS. Do we spend all day stamping books, collecting overdue fines, and shushing noisy kids, or is there something else to the profession beyond the stereotypes?

(SPOILER ALERT: This post is 100% shush-free)

My Monday starts with a question. Although I'm not even in the office yet, on my train ride into town I spy an email from my boss' boss about our document delivery service. Since launching it last April we've filled over 20,000 scanning requests for articles and book chapters for Harvard University Library patrons, but at the same time we are mindful that this is a service still very much in its infancy, with plenty of room for improvement as we learn more about what works and what does not. The question is about some of these potential improvements, which I've been actively thinking about since entertaining a colleague just before ALA Midwinter who offered his advice as to how we might make our operations more efficient, so despite my original plans to spend the morning commute on my own writing I spend the hour banging out a thoughtful response highlighting some easy upgrades that we could implement over the Spring and outlining a strategy for developing the "next generation" of the service.

Once I finally do make my way to the office (let's call it 9ish), it's time to do staff time approvals and request whatever adjustments are necessary for the next pay period. Many weeks this is a fairly straightforward affair, but owing to the three-day weekend from the previous week time entry is a little trickier than it normally is, so I spend some additional time sorting out everyone's timesheet so that there are no unpleasant surprises come payday. Many librarians fail to consider the possibility that they may find themselves in a supervisory or managerial role, especially if they end up following a public services track. I am responsible for five full-time support staffers, plus over a hundred hours per week of student help, which means that even during a good week I can rightly expect to spend a certain non-negligible portion of my day on human resource matters. Fortunately we've been successfully experimenting with students self-reporting their time worked in our online system, which means less paperwork and generally speaking more accuracy, as students have proven to be rather compulsive in adjusting their hours throughout the week to reflect actual hours worked (whereas written timesheets are invariably either incomplete or incorrect).

By ten o'clock I've dispatched all of my payroll problems, so I can finally set myself to triaging the mountain of email that has been accumulating since last week. Email is the bane of any office worker's existence, but librarians seem particularly vexed with this form of communication, which with each passing day feels just as archaic as faxes, snail mail, or-- dare I even say it?-- phone calls. There's nowhere near enough time in the day/week/month/year to craft a thoughtful response to every work email I receive, so I must prioritize the genuine emergencies and hope I have the opportunity to circle back later in the day to mop up some of the less urgent matters arising in my inbox. So what merits an immediate response? I need to coordinate an essential upgrade to our FedEx shipping capabilities, touch base with my student workers returning for the Spring semester (as for many of them this is their first day back from the holidays), and exchange email with a staff member at our central OIS as we try to troubleshoot some slow response time when patrons attempt to log in to our ILL and Document Delivery system. This doesn't seem like all that much, but before I know it it's a few minutes before noon and I am obliged to close my email and get some other work done.

Over the weekend I decided that I needed to adhere a little more closely to a regular schedule in order to make sure I dedicated enough time to recurring weekly, monthly, and quarterly responsibilities that could just as easily end up forgotten in the daily deluge of email, phone calls, questions from staff, and anything else that comes up that is capable of diverting my attention away from my best-laid plans. Take statistics, for instance. While all modern librarians deal with stats in one form or another, Interlibrary Loan librarians are expected to produce and analyze a truly bewildering array of data. Not only are there monthly stats to collate, but I am always working on several additional statistical queries-- some of them long-term projects to improve turnaround times or save our operations money, others of them quick questions from my higher-ups that can't be answered with the numbers that we regularly report.

To better address all of these needs, I've marked off every Monday afternoon as the exclusive domain for stats work, and as it turns out I'll need every minute I've set aside today, as a couple of my garden variety Microsoft Access queries are spitting out numbers that I know are way off just by looking at them. It takes me a couple of hours to figure out what the anomaly is and re-write the queries so as to account for the weirdness, and it makes for a pretty frustrating afternoon. Fortunately I'm able to punctuate this slog through the data by checking on my colleagues on Twitter while I copy long sets of numbers from the live Access database. Most of my friends on Twitter are fellow librarians, and I am able to make sense of their communications by using a program like TweetDeck to search for specific library or conference-related hashtags-- for example, #alamw10 for the recent ALA Midwinter Meeting here in Boston.

It's through Twitter and my online librarian colleagues that I realize it's Library Day in the Life, so I make a mental note to write up this post on my train ride home. After a long day of data-wrangling, indulging in this kind of summary is exactly what Melvil Dewey ordered. I leave work on Monday feeling exhausted but somewhat exhilarated, as I feel that my new weekly schedule blocks are going to be a huge help in getting things done. It's also nice to see students criss-crossing Harvard Yard again, soggy though it may be this rainy and unseasonably warm Monday. My chief Borrower remarked that calling it "Spring Term" is an extreme form of optimism in these parts, but as I pick my way through the puddles of melted snow and ice on my way back to the subway and my commuter train home I'm feeling a bit optimistic myself.

Extreme Multitasking Thursday!

I've noticed that my blogging updates for this week's Library Day in the Life have been coming later and later: on Monday it was around 11pm, on Tuesday after midnight, Wednesday at 3am (!!!), and now I'm bringing you Thursday's entry on Friday morning. This is no doubt a function of how busy the week gets as it progresses, with the result that by the time I've made it to Thursday I'm usually in the process of closing out several major tasks and/or troubleshooting efforts so that when Friday does finally roll around I have a chance to catch my breath, open my mail, and make sure that my staff has also successfully made it through another week.

This Friday is going to be a little different, however- as I need to get my car inspected in the early afternoon I'll be working from the home office and keeping an eye on the Google Books Settlement Discussion at the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School. Not only do the folks at the Berkman Center consistently offer fantastic and thought-provoking events such as this one, but they always webcast their content live (both in "real" cyberspace and in Second Life)!

But back to Thursday...

9:00am: Another stats inquiry from one of the other Scan and Deliver units- I suspect that I'll be getting a lot more of these as libraries start writing their annual reports for the previous fiscal year. It's funny how quickly I've become proficient in turning these things out in such short time- had someone told me back in library school that of all of the computer skills a person can have one of the most useful for a librarian is the ability to coax information out of Microsoft Access and render it into an Excel report, I probably would have laughed. Or cried. But numbers are power, even in the republic of letters!

10:00am: Time to fix the ILL scanner's resend capabilties. I set up a WebEx session with the vendor and away they go...

...meanwhile, up at the Circulation scanner, our student assistant runs into a completely different technical problem and calls our ITS department, who then come and find me. It seems that the last time this problem occurred they had to uninstall and reinstall the scanning program, a cumbersome fix that is not the best long-term standing solution. I'm just about to email the vendor again when I remember that I had handled this error before on my own- long story short, every once in a blue moon a scanning image will become corrupt and cause the scanner to choke unless you go into the C: drive and delete the offending raw scan. Yes, tech support is another essential part of your job, no matter what kind of librarian you turn out to be. Even if you have responsive vendors and one of the best ITS departments in the university behind you, there's never a substitute for understanding the technology that you use and being able to implement a quick fix on the spot instead of calling in the cavalry.

11am-onward: For the rest of the day I shadow the Handheld Librarian Online Conference, where I try to listen to the speakers, following the expanded discussion on Twitter, take notes, and somehow keep another eye and ear on what's going on in the office at the same time!

This is the double-edge sword of virtual conferences- yes, it's a great professional alternative in this era of slashed or nonexistent travel budgets, and yes, it allows you to theoretically be in two places at once (thus minimizing lost hours due to approved release time), but you have to work that much harder to focus on all of these great ideas and add to any discussions unless you're able to sequester yourself in a bunker while you're there but not there. My boss said that some of her past colleagues used to drape a stuffed animal on the back of their chair or wear a funny hat when they were not to be disturbed. I always laughed at the suggestion, but if virtual conferencing becomes the norm and not the exception, it's sounding like a better and better option to me.

So as I mentioned above, this will be my last post for the week's Library Day in the Life event. But it's been a blast for me, and I hope you've learned a little bit about what it is I do here at Widener Library as well. I can't wait to catch up on all of the other participants' posts!

Wednesday: Brass Tacks Edition

9:00am- Wednesday mornings an are exception to the "no email first thing in the morning" rule, as we have our weekly Access Services team meeting every Wednesday from 10am to noon(ish). So my first hour of the day today is a leisurely one, replying to email, checking RSS feeds, following the essential hashtags on TweetDeck- #librarians, #illiad, #followalibrarian, and of course the day's trending silliness: #failedchildrensbooktitles.

10:00am- Supposed to be at the team meeting, but like clockwork there's a minor issue with the ILL scanner that needs to be sorted out. Fortunately my boss is the understanding type!

10:10am- Meeting time! I can't really share specifics on this one, but given the changes at Harvard with respect to the University's financial woes recently these team meetings have been as much about mutual support in a time of crisis as they have been about managing the weekly business of our department. Of course every crisis is an opportunity in disguise, and if there's a silver lining to the present predicament it's that the old library divisional and departmental silos are crumbling at an even faster rate than before as we reorganize ourselves and rebuild, offering myriad possibilities for cross-training, new technologies and innovation, as well as greater cooperation both internally and externally. Maybe I'm just that "glass is half-full" kind of person, but I know we'll make it through this rough patch and even come out the better for it.

Noon- A couple of troubleshooting emails, then my Borrowing coordinator and I sit down to flesh out our training plan for the public service desks assisting with our Borrowing request processing in the Fall. Fortunately all of our recent informal discussion about us has put us in a perfect frame of mind for the meeting, so in less than an hour we have ourselves an actionable plan with a timetable that seems achievable to the both of us. Although traditionally students have always helped the Lending side of our ILL operation, the exploding Borrowing request volume has necessitated some creative thinking on our part, and emboldened by our successful training of student processing assistants this summer we think we'll be able to pull this off on a larger scale!

12:45pm- Here come the brass tacks- an afternoon of knocking action items out of my email inbox. I won't bore you with the laundry list, but just as it can be gratifying to spend an afternoon thinking outside the box as I did yesterday Getting Things Done has its satisfactions as well. The new organizational scheme for my Gmail inbox seems to be working very well, so that urgent items and open troubleshooting "tickets" are no longer getting buried off-screen.

4:45pm- At last we have some resolution on one of yesterday's outstanding bugs about Odyssey resends, so a rapid-fire email conversation ensues between myself and the affected unit through the remains of the work day. I'm excited because not only have I managed to solve their problem, but in doing so I've discovered a much better resend workflow for our own ILL office. One of the great incidental positives that's come out of launching our campus-wide document delivery service is that the participating units now collaborate on a level that would have been unheard of before. In a sense it is a microcosm of the resource-sharing community at large- we are now a community in the best notion that word connotes, actively sharing our experiences and troubleshooting by bringing the collective wisdom of the group to bear on each problem. Librarians are a sharing lot by nature, but I've always been blown away by how much ILL librarians are willing to share their time and expertise with colleagues around the world. It makes me very happy that this is the library career path that I've chosen.

More tomorrow, where I'll be spending most of my day shadowing the Handheld Librarian Online Conference!

I Don't Like Tuesdays

10am- Off to a late start, I begin my Tuesday with a statistical inquiry, trying to determine our ratio of ARIEL to Odyssey deliveries. Since switching to an "Odyssey-first" policy for ILL article requests (i.e., always delivering via Odyssey if the requesting library has an Odyssey address) in the Fall 2008 I know that our ARIEL delivery volume has sunk dramatically, but simply ballparking the figure isn't going to work here. So I'm going to have to get at this data somehow, even though it's not a stat that we actively collect- although I have a couple of ideas as to how to coax these numbers out of the database it'll have to wait, because...

10:45am- ...we have ourselves the first troubleshooting call of the day, concerning Odyssey delivery no less! In trying to help my colleagues with their resending woes I discover that our own scanner is having its own trouble with the resend function, so I grab a screencap and contact our scanner vendor for help. Fortunately they're extremely responsive, so after I email them I return to what I was doing before. What was I doing again? Right, those statistics--

11:15am- Oops, I completely forgot that a couple of the vendors I'd tried to pay yesterday were closed when I called, so I now take care of that before the day gets away from me. I always enjoy calling the British Library, and today is no exception- I joke with a friendly rep from Manchester while making sure that our library is in good standing with their resident bean counters. Now where was I again?

Noon- All right, I admit it. Sometimes I'm not very good about leaving the non-essential email alone. In the interest of being a good neighbor I like to keep an eye on the various ILL and resource sharing listservs and offer whatever help and/or advice that I can when the opportunity arises. Today's an international copyright question about an unpublished work in Germany from the 1940's, and since I've more or less had copyright on the brain for the past several months I feel the old College Bowl urge to be the first kid to ring the buzzer. At any rate, the answer is exactly what the librarian was looking for, so it seems like time well spent.

12:30pm- Back to the stats. It seems that this question is proving a little thornier than I had even imagined, as in the process of building our campus document delivery service we coopted a database field that our preexisting reporting tools don't know how to separate out from regular ILL requests. The net result is that all of our canned reports now mix everything up. But is there a quick fix? I email the vendor in hopes of getting those reports tweaked, and while I wait for their response I try and tackle another project.

2pm- During the previous week my Borrowing coordinator and I were talking about the problem of communication within our rather large Department of Access Services. Instant Messenger has been nothing less than a godsend in addressing this difficulty, but unless you already knew someone's IM address and had them listed on your buddy list a lot of the convenience of the medium was lost. This is when I got an idea: what if we created a "live" version of our org chart, only with Meebo chat windows for each of the IM-enabled staffers? Since I was waiting on a couple of vendor responses to proceed with my other business I decided this would be a good time to work on this a bit, so using Blogspot I hacked together a proof of concept mockup consisting of an HTML table and several embedded Meebo widgets:

http://harryneedsbooks.blogspot.com/2009/07/sample-live-org-chart.html

Though I was pretty pleased with the results, there are a couple of barriers to getting this adopted- first, it would have to be posted on the College Library's intranet and not our departmental iSite, which is the preferred platform for such online content. The second problem was that everyone on the "live" org chart would need to monitor a separate Meebo account in addition to their normal IM presence. Still, the benefits of having the potential of instant and ready access to the entire department all on one page might outweigh any downsides. I send the mockup link to my boss and share my work with my librarian Tweeps, who are very encouraging.

3pm- Still no response on either outstanding issue, so I bust out another one of my "20% projects" (the term coming from Google's allowing their employees to dedicate 20% of their workweek to their own personal projects, a fascinating and controversial policy that nevertheless has yielded many of Google's current suite of apps). I have always want to mash up our ILL data with Google or Yahoo Maps so that we can create maps of everywhere that we've loaned to -- or borrowed from -- in the previous fiscal year.

After finally locating a batch geolocating application (http://www.batchgeocode.com/), I start playing with our Lending data to see if I can get it into a geocoding-friendly format. The problem was that we had too much data. In FY09 we loaned over 11,000 books, and to render that much information without our own servers is proving to be more trouble than it's worth. That's when it occurs to me- why not use a pivot table to consolidate deliveries to the same location? I do just that and now we only have 900+ data points to plot, and voila! The batch loader is done within half an hour. Though some of the data fields need a little tweaking to prevent totally whacky map plottings (we had one in the Canadian tundra hundreds of miles from any human settlement!), it worked and it worked well, and I can't wait to spend more time with this.

4pm- Well, it's 4pm and I need an answer to my original stats question whether or not I hear back on tweaking the reports, so I roll up my sleeves and dig out the numbers the old fashioned way. For some reason the task doesn't seem as daunting as it had earlier- maybe getting away from the problem for a bit was just what I needed, or perhaps I'm just on a roll at this point. Whatever it is, I'm happy, the person who asked the stats question is happy, and it's almost time to close up the office...

5:15pm- Almost. I just need to answer some email while hashing out a student training plan with my Borrowing coordinator, who will be inherited 70+ hours of student processing help at a couple of our service desks in the Fall. Given that our Borrowing request volume literally doubled from FY08 to FY09, he'll need all the help we can get! After coming up with some good ideas we agree to continue the conversation tomorrow, when hopefully we aren't as exhausted as we both are at the moment.

All right, so this Tuesday turned out much better than I'd originally thought. I think one of the most challenging aspects of being a professional librarian is balancing Getting Things Done on a daily basis with both the extremely time-sensitive queries (such as the ARIEL vs. Odyssey question) and the more open ended special projects which, although not urgent, often prove to be just as important, if not more so. We're all so busy these days that it's so easy to default to crisis mode, when there's so much more we could be doing to take our field to the next level if we just make an effort to carve out the time for such innovation and creativity. I don't always succeed in this regard, but today the stars just aligned. I leave work much later than I had planned, but much more satisfied than I'd hoped as well.

See you on Wednesday!

Library Day in the Life: Monday

Apologies for the late post, but I only just learned that this was the 2nd Annual Day in the Life of a Library week! So let's see if I can't reconstruct my day...

9am- Arrive at work. First order of business- time approvals and/or adjustments for my support staff and student assistants. Fortunately no one forgot to report their hours last week, so this is much less time-consuming than it otherwise can be. I supervise five full-time support staff members as well as upwards of a dozen students and/or temps at any given time, so if there are any major problems it can take a couple hours out of my Monday morning to fix. Not the most rousing way to start your work-week, but this is one of the joys of management!

9:45am- Run up to Circulation to give a staff member her new ILS login, which includes enhanced privileges. I am the new ILS liaison for our department, and am pretty much learning how to wear this hat as I go. With a lot of recent staff departures as well as a newfound commitment to cross-training across divisional lines, I should get plenty of practice in exercising the duties of this new role.

10:15am- Whoops! There was a time adjustment to be made for an international student whose paperwork finally cleared through HR and Payroll. We love to hire international student assistants in the libraries, but the paperwork can be quite daunting, and often takes a few weeks to get everything sorted out.

10:30am- I sent out an email reminding my staff that we will have a new ARIEL IP address as of 8pm this evening, as our local library ITS department is transitioning its network support to that of the college. This means I also have to send out notice on all of the relevant listservs (ILL-L, ILLIAD-L, ARIE-L, as well as our own Harvard ILL mailing list) and update our Constant Data in Worldcat Resource Sharing.

11:00am- Another round of emails to our Circ staff and ILL student assistants regarding opportunities for our student trainers to begin training Circ student assistants on how to use the new overhead scanner behind the Circulation Desk to support our new campus electronic document delivery service, which despite starting with a "soft" launch in April of this year is already proving to be extremely popular with Harvard faculty, students, and staff.

At this point I am reminded to finish writing up some scanning training materials for which I had compiled a bunch of screencaps on our ILL scanner during an unusually slow afternoon. Somehow I am able to work on this continuously until I am able to finish, around 2pm or so. I guess it'll be another lunch of dry-roasted peanut and Diet Coke at the desk! At least I have my TweetDeck to read on the widescreen monitor while I eat...

2pm- Time to answer my email. Like a good little Lifehacker I've tried to triage my email only at set times during my work day- the first pass usually happening around noon and the second around 4pm or so (my work on the scanner training docs has made me a little late today, but fortunately there's nothing truly urgent or time-sensitive in the inbox this afternoon). The goal is not to get distracted from existing action items, which I've recently retooled my Gmail inbox to display in order of importance. So far the new organizational scheme seems to be working well, keeping me focused while also ensuring that various action items don't linger any longer than they have to.

3pm- A little bit of sleuthing to locate a set of rare journals that were mistakenly returned to our library- the owning library was trying to ascertain whether we had already sent these books back to them or not. In ILL circles these kinds of "courtesy returns" are a daily occurrence, as patrons return items from other libraries to ours by accident all the time when dumping them off by the armful. Interlibrary Loan offices tend to become the final stop for these such mystery books, and like good resource sharing neighbors we try to make sure that these items find their way back home. I've always wondered if some patrons return others' items to us in the belief that all libraries are fundamentally interconnected at some level- perhaps this isn't such a bad idea for us to foster, especially in these tough economic times when even Harvard can't go it alone.

3:15pm- An interesting discussion breaks out between myself and two staff members about copyright and its application to various ILL and document delivery services that our library offers. While the conversation begins as a simple point of clarification about a specific rule we'd been following, it quickly mushrooms into a pointed debate about balancing our legal obligations against providing superior (dare I say 'extreme'?) customer service. In the end we all have to concede that Interlibrary Loan is at its core applied risk management, and that the ambiguity of current intellectual property law in the United States is proving to be more restrictive than anything else. But what a great conversation! I have the best employees in my office, equally committed to each individual patron as they are the bigger picture.

4pm- So much for the law- now it's time for money matters. Although ILL has made great strides in simplifying most financial transactions between libraries for various resource sharing activities, the fact remains that in an office processing upwards of 20,000 Borrowing requests over the past fiscal year we're going to run into all manners of invoicing and other billing arrangements, from IFM to IFLA vouchers, from credit card payments to international bank draft authorizations. I make sure that we are current with all of our major partners while saying good night to staff and students as they leave one-by one for the day.

5:30pm- A little bit of troubleshooting in my now-empty office, as one of our electronic document delivery patrons ended up in the wrong part of our shared ILL management system. The net result of our new document delivery initiative is that the various participating Harvard libraries now work more closely together than ever before. As the chief training and support contact for this service, I now find myself with campus-wide troubleshooting duties in addition to my local responsibilities. Fortunately since our successive launch the demands of this enhanced role have dropped off significantly, but as we gear up for a much larger public launch of the service in the Fall I fully expect it to take up a large portion of my workweek. I'm glad that I have good staff to rely on when I'm out on troubleshooting calls!

6pm- One last glance at the email inbox and TweetDeck and I'm done for the day at last. Although I have an hour-long train ride back home, I try not to bring any work with me unless I'm under a serious deadline. And so tonight I'm able to settle into a good book and unwind a bit before we begin this crazy dance anew on Tuesday.

And that's my Monday!