This week librarians all over the internet are keeping track of what they do in a day and blogging about it for Library Day in the Life. This happens a couple of times a year and I decided to participate even though I’m not working in a library. My job title is Systems Librarian though, so here we are. Following is what my day looked like.
5am – Woke up. Not technically part of my “librarian” day but a side-effect of my awesome girlfriend being a baker who starts work at 6am. So I was awake at this point. For about 20 minutes.
7:30am – 8:30am – Woke up for real. Checked emails and twitterfeeds from my social media class, which have all been active because of the timezone lag between Sydney (Australia, where I am) and Vancouver through Charlottetown (Canada, where most of my classmates are).
8:30am – 9:00am – Arrived at work and made coffee in our espresso machine. Since I have learned not to try and steam milk, I didn’t have to clean up any dairy explosions. Today.
9:00am – 10:30am – Emailed a couple of client libraries about upgrading their services to Koha 3.2 from 3.0. Checked to make sure this wouldn’t cost them anything from us. Also talked with my boss about the futures of distributed library services and how software requires good support, especially regional-specific support. Puttered about with writing a case-study on parliamentary libraries for IFLA.
10:30am-11:00am – Went through a library’s system preferences to assess how best to instruct the (not-terribly-technical) staff in creating user logins for their patrons, then wrote up an email detailing those procedures.
11:30am – noon – Started working on finding the spot in Koha where it isn’t grabbing the AnonymousBasketLogin OK bit of information to export Carts to email properly in MS Visual Studio.
noon – 12:30pm – Reference checked a template design for discrepancies between how an email appears between different email clients so the webdesigner can fix up the stylesheets by 2:00pm.
12:30 – 1:00pm – Went back to fiddling with Koha code. Realized I could make it do what I wanted if I switched a 1 and 0 in a file…
1:01pm – but that change broke practically everything else. Hooray for test systems that don’t inconvenience actual users!
1:01pm – 1:15pm – Back to the code, where I tried to figure out what was going wrong originally.
1:15pm – 3:00pm – Brought the problem to my boss who spotted a possible flaw in the code (in an area I hadn’t examined). I came back to do some testing.
3:00pm – 5:00pm – Worked on our sitemaps for Google so they can index our clients’ OPACs.
5:00pm – 7:00pm Went home and made dinner and checked on the library school happenings from the day.
7:00pm – Wrote a blog post about #libday7.
This wasn’t my most busiest day or anything, but it felt a little bit more typical than yesterday when I went down to the Parliamentary Library for NSW to interview their staff about using Koha and DSpace.
Filed under: library, school, tech Tagged: #libday7, australia, charlottetown, code, coffee, day in the life, digital library, dspace, email, google, ifla, ils, koha, library school, librarydayinthelife, nsw, parliamentary library, programming, sitemap, sydney, tech support, vancouver, visual studio
