First Week of Classes

Monday:

• Printed out signs for the new always-on computers
• Set up greeting table in the front lobby
• Sent out a plea to please sign up for greeting shifts (only 6 of the 21 had been filled)
• Answer about a million emails
• Take a shift at the greeting table
• eat lunch
• answer about a million more emails
• go to opening convocation
• skip the post-convocation reception to go back to my office and work, but realize that if I sit down at my desk I’ll explode from overwhelmedness
• go home… answer about a million more emails

Tuesday

• Class prep
• email
• lunch
• Reference shift
• class (The Shakespearean Film Scholar’s version of the library)
• Greeting shift
• Fix one of our microfilm machines (turns out the poor library technologist and our IT department had been working on it for quite some time, but I’m the only one on campus who knew the fix. Too bad I hadn’t come over earlier to see what was up.)
• Plan evening student worker training (yes, that was last minute) and throw together some illustrative stats for them so they can see what they do here.
• Set up for training
• Train student workers
• Snacks with newly trained student workers
• Dinner with some friends followed immediately by bed

Wednesday

• email
• get to work
• more email
• class prep
• course research guide creation
• greeting shift
• lunch
• more class prep
• Marvel that it’s not Friday. All of a sudden if felt like Friday. I so wish it were Friday.
• class (The German Literary Scholar’s version of the library)
• prepare for student worker training
• Talk to co-worker about her upcoming class
• more email
• train student workers
• snacks with newly trained student workers
• Go home, keep all the lights off, and watch a DVD of Big Bang Theory in bed. Supper? What supper? Supper requires sitting.

Thursday

• Departmental meeting, at which we learned that the network had gone down the night before, which meant that the evening shift librarian had to call the emergency on-call guy and be walked through the process of bypassing fried systems and their fried back-up systems.
• email
• class prep
• lunch while playing Carcassonne on my iPod (lovely brain break)
• email
• Course research guide creation (only 3 more requests to fill!)
• Run around helping people close down the 4th floor computer lab (all the computers in the reference room) because the IT department has to swap them out for the computers in the language lab (long story).
• Class (team-taught with the media librarian — finding sources on Shakespeare and film)
• Meeting with an English prof to discuss learning goals for his class and how I can help his students meet them. And plan a course guide.
• email
• Research guide creation
• Wait, it’s not Friday yet? Longest. Week. EVER.
• class prep
• Write a thank you note to the library staff for helping out with our greeting project this year
• Hear that the print management system also crashed this evening — be glad I don’t work for IT
• Dinner with a couple of other friends — bed

Friday

• Finally. Friday. Whew.
• Get to work via the detour around a broken gas line and milling crowds of evacuated college staff.
• Class (importance of scholarly book reviews, finding book reviews, and why citation is more fun than it seems)
• email
• research guide creation
• lunch
• Evaluating a potential online resource
• class prep — so tired of class prep… But yay for generous colleagues who take my reference shifts for me so I can prep
• omnipresent email
• Pub night with friends! Followed by BED … I think I’ll sleep for the next 48 hours.