Oh, the Dread

I’m dreading going to work tomorrow. This is rare. This is very, very rare. I love my work. There’s always something to do and to learn. I love being around my co-workers, and I love being around people learning. But Monday will be different. All but one of the librarians in my department are at ALA having a grand old time and meeting all sorts of cool people. My one co-worker, AZ, and I have been rattling around in the place realizing that we’ve become too conditioned to constant interruptions and constant multitasking to be able to concentrate well when there are NO students and NO coworkers around. We were a little too un-interrupted for our own good. (Leave it to us to complain when it’s busy and complain when it’s slow…)

Not only that, but it was WAY too quiet. Our main floor of the library is not noise-restricted, and we feed off the energy of all the discussions that happen all around us during the school year. (Side note: In our library, which is built into a hill, you enter on the fourth floor and then descend through gradually quieter and quieter floors until you arrive at the first floor, were those who wish to can study in almost complete silence.)

So if why am I dreading Monday so much? Because on Monday AZ is taking the day off. I’ll be ALL ALONE in that huge, empty, silent fourth floor. If I thought I was starved for human interaction on Friday, Monday will be the library equivalent of solitary confinement.

To try to make this day more interesting, I’m planning to start a wiki! I’ve signed up for a wetpaint wiki called the Pegasus Library (thanks for the tip, Nicole). I’ve written before about our library’s ideas for building a research portal that acts like a furl/wiki/blog/database/evernote web service for our students. Well, I’m going to start doing “research” for our development plans by wiki-fying the subject guides I need to update anyway and then playing around with possible configurations. Hopefully I’ll be able to see what works well in a wiki subject guide and what doesn’t so that we can start learning what specific functionality we want from our portal.

So if you’re at work on Monday and feel like checking up on my progress, or just saying hi, please feel free to email or IM me. I’ve got about a million IM and email accounts, but gmail/gtalk is probably the easiest to get started on: ijastram [at] gmail [dot] com. By checking in you might just be saving me from entering a catatonic state or from some ill-advised project (like ordering all the reference books by color, or cataloging my coworkers’ mail).