Category: Random Thoughts

Spring term starts on Monday after two full weeks of what most people choose to call “Spring Break.” Clearly, I must not understand the meaning of the word “break,” or else it means something other than it has meant for the rest of my life. This was not a break. In fact, it was probably at least as tiring as peek weeks of the term. Here’s a sample of what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks:

• Helping to plan a conference.
  (This has been quite a learning experience, I must say. It’s fun to watch people who’ve done this before thing through possible scenarios, brainstorming, and problem solving. I don’t have any expertise beyond knowing what kinds of sessions I’d want to attend, but I do have a network, which I have exploited to the best of my ability. Thanks Twitter People!!!)
• Interviewing librarians
• Presenting to our college InfoServices group
  (I presented on things to think about when inhabiting online social networks.)
• Dealing with preparations for the impending implementation of print management in the library and in all campus labs.
  (Unfortunately, this became inextricably entwined with a project to implement ID card access to printing and copying as our coin-operated copiers left us and as we tried to figure out how non-Carleton-affiliated people would be able to print once print management went live, and this is the part of the project that has taken the most work recently. This has been by far the most stressful part of the last few weeks, but I’ve learned some valuable lessons about working on projects that have crucial components parts grounded in various offices on campus. I’ve also worked to create policy and procedure documents, handouts, brochures, and anything else that’ll help people feel like this will work smoothly and be successful.)
• Fixing dead links on my research guides
  (and realizing that a few of them will need major over-hauling as soon as I have the time for it.
• Drafting a proposal to acquire and implement federated search.
  (This has also become a major project beyond what I’d imagined possible. I’ve had to be in contact with vendors to see what goes into actual implementation and what timelines are possible and gaze into my crystal ball to figure out exactly how people might use the tool and how much time librarians will spend making it work well. I tell you, it’ll take me longer to draft my portion of this proposal than it’ll take for me to learn and implement the tool itself.)
• Scheduling classes for early Spring term.
  (And feeling guilty about not prepping for them now, before students start invading my office on a regular basis.)
• Work with professors on their copyright questions as they prepare reading lists for their upcoming classes.
• Troubleshooting Moodle issues.
  (Which reminds me… I was supposed to talk to our web dev people about something. I guess that’ll have to happen on Monday.)
• Driving home to visit my family for Easter
  (and [sniff] leave Pippin with them for the next month or so to simplify life just a bit. By all reports, Pippin is having the time of his life. There are birds to watch at several bird feeders, and there’s a big and gentle dog to torment.)

I’m sure there was more, but those are the biggies. Can you see why I don’t think “break” adequately describes the last two weeks? (Of course, we won’t even mention how un-spring-like it is, still…)

And now may I please have a spring break?

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How many bagels do you suppose it takes to stock a 2-hour study break in the library on the last day before finals at a college with just under 2000 students?

… Yes, I want you to guess…

…

… No really. Pick a number…

…

…Got one?…

Ok. Campus Activities bought 20 dozen, and it didn’t turn out to be way too many. TWENTY DOZEN.

Also, free massages, coffee, juice, and board games help make the event fun.

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I always used to think that calendars were simple affairs. You’d either write appointments and deadlines into a paper calendar, or you’d write them into an electronic calendar. What could be simpler? Well, apparently even the enigma that is The Research Process is easier to get right than a process for simultaneously keeping track of my affairs and advertising my availability for research consultations. Here’s how it’s worked for me for the years that I’ve been a librarian.

2005-2006: My palm kept me pretty much on track with my own schedule. I could sync it with my work desktop and my personal laptop, take it with me to meetings, and generally keep up with my life. To broadcast my availability to students, I’d make up a new printed calendar each week and hang it outside my office, just like my co-workers did. This was kind of annoying, and felt like duplication of effort, but it seemed like our best option at the time, even though they’d get out of date really quickly.

2006-2007: Weeeee!!! Google Calendars made it easy to feed a pretty looking calendar to an HTML page. At this point I retrained myself to keep track of my schedule on my palm, and then publish an “Availability Calendar” which, instead of saying when I was busy, said when I was available to meet. This took off almost immediately. Students who had been shy about adding to my full-looking (and full-feeling) days were now much more confident to ask for times that were clearly designated as being for them. They also grasped the analogy to faculty office hours much more readily. My co-workers and I noticed that the number of surprise drop-in appointments dropped as students started emailing us to reserve slots from the “available” periods, and this not only reduced our stress levels and helped us provide better service, but it also just gave us more control over our work days. Of course, the down-side was that we were each still maintaining two calendars: Google and Palm.

2007-early 2008: Enter Zimbra. We couldn’t sync Palms anymore, but if we wanted to be able to schedule meetings with each other we’d have to use Zimbra and not Palm. I sure wasn’t about to maintain THREE calendars, so something had to go. Clearly, the Google Calendars couldn’t go. They were our one best option for working out logistics with students. Therefore, we retired our Palms. This left us with no portable calendars, so a few of us actually bought paper calendars to take to meetings. I rather stubbornly refused to go that route, though. If I wasn’t prepared to maintain three electronic calendars, there was no way I’d maintain two electronic calendars and one paper calendar.

The rest of 2008: But today I finally sat down and put the latest upgrade of Zimbra to work for me. It’s finally able to publish calendars just like Google Calendar can. (Well, almost just like… but enough for my purposes.) I created a new calendar within Zimbra, designated my “Available” times, and published it to my web site. Today I’m officially down to one calendar for the first time since I’ve worked here. Of course… I still can’t take my calendar with me to meetings unless I shell out for some wireless device or other (or better yet, my library supplies us with them). So maybe it’s time to start thinking about that paper calendar…

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… apparently. Which is perfectly fine with me. I actually don’t like calling people. How do you know if they’ll be there or not? Or if they’re busy? IM and email work best for me because I can decide how my message will arrive and whether or not I care that it’ll arrive when the other person can deal with it immediately or put it off till it’s convenient.

Well, today I retired my very first phone log. This is nothing fancy. It’s just a little pad of paper where I’d write down the date of in-coming and out-going calls, and relevant notes about date/person/subject and such. What makes this moment significant is that it took me three and a half years to fill up a little pad of lined note paper. That’s not a lot of calls.

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