Will Riker Syndrome and its discontents

Although most of the civilized world is still mad at Netflix for their ill-considered pricing changes, they're still coasting down a mountain of positive karma in my book for adding the entire catalog of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes for online streaming as of July 1st. Like many a geek from my demographic, the Trek relaunch in 1987 provided some serious formative stuff for my late teen and early adult years, its archetypes and tropes hammered home again and again with every rerun thanks to television stations such as Boston's WQTV (which showed five hours of Trek-- classic and TNG-- every night starting at midnight, a young nerd's dream come true!). Indeed, it wasn't until recently, when I started re-watching some of my favorite episodes on Netflix, that I realized how deep an imprint that Trek had left on my psyche.

When I was younger, I had always fashioned myself after Wesley Crusher; I imagine that many brainy kids my age did the same. Ensign Crusher was a rare thing in the late 80's popular culture landscape: an unambiguously positive nerd archetype. While movies such as Revenge of the Nerds (1984) had begun to point in the direction of a cultural paradigm where the freaks and geeks would in fact inherit the earth (see also any movie from this decade directed by John Hughes or starring John Cusack), it wasn't until TNG that we received our first "post-stereotype" nerd, a kid from the future who presumably didn't get slammed into so much as one locker for being smarter than everyone else in his Area Code. To get a sense of just how revolutionary this was to the children of the 80's, compare Wesley Crusher to Steve Urkel, who was on the air at the same time.

(Okay, in the Ugly Sweater category, it was pretty much a draw!)

If it weren't for Ensign Crusher, I would never have applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I know it sounds stupid, but Wesley Crusher made me believe that I was special like him, a boy genius with a whitebread haircut and a very sad wardrobe. Like Wes, it was just a matter of time before someone recognized my singular talents (like the Traveler did in Episode 1x06, "Where No One Has Gone Before") and whisked me away from this painfully mundane world where kids like me got randomly beaten up in the boys' locker room at high school. If only I had known though that MIT was populated entirely by Wesley Crushers-- not boy genius wannabes like yours truly, mind you, but real live socially-challenged misfits who placed out of all of their prereqs in Junior High and solve quadratic equations in their sleep-- I probably would have run screaming for my parents' basement.

Somewhere along the line, though, I realized that I had more in common with the First Officer of the Enterprise-D than I did with its resident geek. Will Riker seemed to me to be an unlikely role model until I found myself more or less in his shoes (and sporting a beard, no less!)-- a young and ambitious professional whom Fortune had favored with a position aboard one of the most respected institutions of its class. Whereas Commander Riker had ended up on the Enterprise, flagship of the Federation's Starfleet, I landed my first job as a librarian working in one of the largest university library collection in the world. A dream come true, right? Absolutely, yes. But just as Riker struggled with leaving to take his own command, when the time comes to take the next step in one's career, exiting the nest can be a daunting proposition.

I'm trying to remember how many times Will Riker was offered his own commission during The Next Generation's 7-year run, but it was enough that even by halfway through the series his obstinate refusal to leave the Enterprise for the captain's chair elsewhere was raising eyebrows in the ranks of Starfleet (as well as becoming a running joke for the character). I can all too keenly appreciate Will's predicament, however. How do I leave my dream job in order to start from scratch somewhere else? If Commander Riker had his druthers, he would have happily sat on the right-hand side of Captain Picard until he retired... just as would I here at the Big Library. But as Picard himself points out-- in some of the series' finest writing-- that's no way to learn how to be a leader. On the eve of receiving yet another commission (Episode 2x14, "The Icarus Factor"), Riker receives the following advice from his Captain:

I can spell out for you, albeit crudely, what you're choosing between. As the First Officer of the Enterprise, you have a position of distinction, prestige, even... glamor of a sort. You are the second in command of Starfleet's flagship; but still second in command. Your promotion will transfer you to a relatively insignificant ship in an obscure corner of the galaxy. But it will be your ship; and, being who you are, it will... soon be vibrant with your authority, your style... your vision. You know... there really is no substitute for holding the reins.

At the end of the episode Riker decides he's going to stay on the Enterprise after all-- when the Captain asks him why, he responds: "Motivated self-interest. For now the best place for me to be is here." But is it, really? This, folks, is Will Riker Syndrome in a nutshell. To be sure, it's the Mother of All First World Problems (tm), but I can't help but feel Number One's pain. I mean, not only does the guy have to constantly agonize about whether or not he should leave the Enterprise, but even when he is finally handed the Captain's chair (in Episode 3x26/4x01, "The Best of Both Worlds"), his first serious order is to try and destroy his Borgified former boss. Talk about a total mind job!

Lately, however, I've found that I'm making peace with my internal Will Riker. In fact, as soon as Netflix started streaming TNG the first episode I watched was not any of the above but Episode 6x15, "Tapestry," in which a dying Captain Picard is given a chance by the omnipotent trickster Q to relive a fateful moment in his life and perhaps make a different decision than the one he'd actually made as a brash young Starfleet cadet. But when he does end up choosing a wiser and safer path, Picard learns to his dismay that by doing so he had unwittingly deprived himself of learning from one of his greatest failures, with the result that when Q magically transports him back to the present day the Captain finds that he is no longer a Starfleet Captain at all, but a rather shiftless Ensign with little if any prospect for advancement.

It's a fantastic episode, one which I seem to get more out of with repeated viewings. I suppose as one gets older, it becomes tempting to second-guess the decisions which have determined the course of one's career and/or life-- I know that I increasingly feel this way myself. "Tapestry" challenges this impulse, suggesting that we are shaped as much by our failures as we are by our successes (perhaps even more so), and that any attempt to tease the one out of the other nullifies what made us who we are in the first place. For if ultimately we are defined by that which we fall short of, maybe the real problem is that we are not aiming high enough.

So keep your eyes on the stars, my fellow Trekkies/Trekkers! Ugly sweaters optional.

Your commute is *how* long?

My friends often tease me about my commute, which is something of a doozy-- about 4 & 1/2 hours round-trip (and that's if I'm "lucky" and the MBTA gods do not compound insult with the injury of delayed an/or disabled trains).  As I did my best to try and stay awake on this morning's ride into town my friend Genie couldn't help but comment:

"That would actually be my game plan if I had a commute like you do. I would get dressed, bring a pillow and go back to bed on the train."

While the thought of getting an extra hour or two of sleep in every day is tempting, the fact that I snore like a forest full of jumberjacks would probably result in my being 86ed from the train at the behest of my aggrieved fellow commuters by the end of the first week!

But it's not all bad.  Unlike sitting in a car, where my options are listening to the radio, talking on the phone, or raging out on the jerk who just cut me off in traffic, traveling from Gloucester to Cambridge via public transit gives me a nice mix of long uninterrupted stretches of time and opportunities to stretch my legs and get some exercise.

I start my day by leaving the house around 7 o'clock AM and walking down Stacey Boulevard along Gloucester Harbor to the downtown commuter rail station, which is a smidgen over a mile away.  Depending on the time of year and the weather there is almost infinite diversity in the views I get treated to every morning, so I always try to take a picture or two if I can capture one of the many familiar landmarks along the way in a new light.  I also like to trade pictures of the sunrise with my dad, who takes morning walks of his own down at the Jersey Shore or at his winter digs on the Florida Panhandle.

With any luck I'll get to my train in time for its 7:34 departure and settle in for a little under an hour of writing time.  I try to be as disciplined as possible about devoting the morning commute to writing, as I've always done my best writing when I'm still not quite awake enough to be too critical of my own creative efforts.  Also, it's easier to secure a good seat for writing on the inbound trains, whereas the return trip is more or a crapshoot.

Assuming the train is on time, I will arrive at North Station in Boston a little after 8:30.  At this point I have a choice-- jump on the Green Line to Park Street and switch to the Northbound Red Line for Harvard Square, or walk from the station up through Boston's former West End and catch the Red Line at the Charles/MGH stop.  If the weather is even remotely nice I like to opt for the walk, which at 3/4's of a mile makes a decent counterpart to the first leg from my house to Gloucester Station.  There's also no guarantee that taking the trolley to Park Street will save me any time, as I learn time and time again to my chagrin.

Whether I take both the Green and Red Lines or just the Red, the subway is my reading time.  I've found that there's nothing better than taking advantage of the spare minutes of my day waiting for trains to arrive, depart, or sit on the tracks idling by reading.  Most of the time I'm passing dead trees for Kindle editions, which I just find increasingly more convenient, especially in situations where I may not be carrying around my backpack but I do have my smartphone handy.  I try to alternate my guilty pleasure fiction reads (Right Now: A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin) with some edifying nonfiction titles (Last Book Read:  Reality Is Broken- Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal).

Finally I get to work, usually a bit past nine.  Then I pretty much reverse the route around 5:15 or so, which usually gets me back to the homestead in Gloucester by half-past seven every evening.  Fortunately I get a ride home from the commuter rail station, as my wife and daughter come to pick me up-- always a welcome sight for someone who's been gone for more than half the day at that point.

As I mentioned before I don't always get a chance to secure a nice quiet seat for writing on the train home, and most days of the week I'm usually still a little too wound up from work to manage any decent writing even if I do manage to score a good place to sit.  What I usually do with the evening commute, then, is make sure that I haven't left any lingering problems or issues at work, answering what email I can using the commuter rail's crappy wifi, and then generally winding down so that when I do get home I can my family my undivided attention and not feel burdened by anything back at the office.

Well, there it is- how to make the most out of four-plus hours of captive time every day.  It certainly doesn't work for everyone, but I think I've made it work for me...  on most days, at least.  There will always come a time in the summer (oh, say around now!) when I think of what else I could be doing with that lost 16% of my day and I start to feel a little caged in by my commute, but that's easily solved with the occasional "gone fishin'" day here or there...

Albert Einstein famously once said:  "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."  While I can't vouch for math, rest assured that there's someone out there with a more heinous commute than yours-- and that person is in all likelihood me.

This just happened

A conversation with my coworker here at The Big Library:

"Happy New Year!"

"Same to you.  How was your holiday?"

"Nice.  I very much enjoyed doing nothing this year."

"You didn't travel?"

"Nope, first time in years.  You?"

"Yes.  I went home to New Jersey."

"I didn't know you were from Jersey!  What part are you from?"

"South Jersey."

"Me, too.  Where in South Jersey?"

"Oh, right across the river from Philadelphia."

(Pause)  "Me, too."

(Additional pause)  "Really!.  What town?"

I say my hometown.  She laughs.

"I'm from X," she says, naming the town just down the road from mine.  "Did you go to Y high school?"

(Astonished)  "Yes!  You did too?"

"Yup."

"Did you have Mrs. Z for Latin?"

"Yes!  You too?"

(Nods)

"Okay, this is just bizarre."

"It sure is.  How did we never figure this out until right now?"

"No idea."

"Well, at least now we can gossip!"

"Yep."

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!

No time to photoblog even!

This is a picture I snapped of Harvard Yard this morning that I completely failed to post to the blog, for no sooner had I arrived for work than I was sucked into a vortex of student training that only just spit me out a little while ago. I guess it's only appropriate, though, that I find myself in a frenzy of activity as the Fall semester approaches and signs of student life return to the Yard. Classes won't start in earnest here at Harvard until the end of September, but already the atmosphere has changed to a distinctly autumn-like feel. Even the morning light has a crisper twinkle to it as it streams through the picturesque campus' venerable trees and the ubiquitous haze of midsummer morning grows less and less with every passing day. Maybe I'm more mindful of this seasonal change because the arrival of our new boss next week heralds myriad other changes in its wake, ones which I can only hint at right now with a nod, a wink, and an enigmatic smile...

May I have another week?

Sheesh. It's only 1 o'clock and I already feel like I never went on vacation...

So much for hitting the ground running upon my return!

Vacation, all I ever wanted

Rather than fritter away the four floating holidays I earned by working between Christmas and New Year's, I've decided to take them at once for a change and make a proper vacation of it. Intercession is right around the corner, which means it's a snap to arrange coverage for the desk, and after a Fall of nonstop travel I'm looking forward to several days of sitting on my ass and doing nothing.

Well, not quite nothing -- I'm hoping to turn my four-day minivacation into an editorial marathon session, during which I hope either to finish the second draft of "Confessions" or get enough of it done that I'll be inspired to work my way through to the end in time for my self-imposed February 28th deadline. Hopefully I'll be able to work some nice walks downtown in as well, weather permitting of course.

So now all I have to do is make it through another week of work, give or take. Wish me luck!