flickr photo shared by Blue Mountains Local Studies under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license
I guess this is the week where we do the “library day in the life” thing where we blog about what we do during the day. It’s meant to highlight the diverse work libraries do and how we’re all busy doing a million things. I was going to blog on Monday, but I was too busy. Yesterday was equally harried. Today… a little calmer and I’m writing this as I quickly eat my sad work salad at my desk. I keep saying I’ll leave my office for lunch, but it hasn’t happened this week and it might not. I’ve resigned to that. This is my normal as a solo librarian right now. (See the previous post for more on that.)
The one thing that has been really apparent this week is the real struggle to compartmentalize and prioritize. Thing I need to get done in the moment and trumping things I want to get done. I would love to focus on cool, important project but I also don’t want to tell some confused and eager undergrad, “Sorry, I can’t help you request those books from storage because it’s not important to me.” That would be crossing a horrible line and we’re not there yet.
I can quantify my week
- correspondence – lots of small urgent emails
- processing – copy cataloging and indexing
- meetings – conference calls abound
- service – people still have research questions
- circulation – our student employees help, but they can’t do it all
Projects are hard to carve out. I spent most of Monday afternoon trying to install and configure a wiki for a committee. That was frustrating and fun. There’s some other stuff I owe people, but in a few minutes I need to go be in the library and well… it’s hard to get much done beyond short tasks.
I feel like the cat in this picture.
That’s my life.
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