yikes! Usually I write my post as the day progresses, but that didn’t happen today.
Started the day like all the others, with email/Friendfeed/Twitterness. After that, I met with my supervisor for a bit so she could hand off a new project to me. yay! We have a queue in ILLiad that has all the requests that our ILL staff can’t find and need further investigation, and I will get to monitor it. This means I get to play detective. love it! So I spent a big chunk of my day in ILLiad – resolving a few things that were in the queue, and also processing a whole slew of requests for items we aren’t buying that we need to try to ILL.
Also related to those last requests, I readied up a cart of patron requests that we are buying and sent that to the Acquisitions dept. I have one last batch of patron requests for items found only in Amazon/other sources, and then my small backlog will be caught up. But really, I’ll never be caught up on patron requests.
We also still have an old-school paper form that patrons can fill out to request either specific materials or general subjects they’d like to see. They still filter through once in a while, and I reviewed one of those today, saying no to both. One was out of print and only available through used booksellers, the other super expensive and only owned by academic libraries.
That pretty much sums up my day, other than more email and routine stuff.
Oh! Off and on through the morning/early afternoon, I also checked in on the Handheld Librarian online conference, both through directly and through the backchannel on twitter. Heard some interesting things. Some provocative statements I don’t necessarily agree with about the future of libraries – which is okay, because it’s spurring conversation. And seeing questions from some of the librarians attending was a good reminder to me that not everyone is as techie as me and the people I surround myself with, so the basics of some of this tech stuff, like SMS, are still necessary.
And even though I have left work, it has followed me home tonight. I have a tab open for TitleSource and will be working on some selection for the opening day collection for the new branch while I play on the internet this evening. Always the multitasker.
