A week in the life of a librarian, day 5
Friday!
6 am. The alarm goes off. I usually get up early and run or walk with the dog a few times a week, but this week the dog hasn’t wanted to go out in the snow and ice, and I’m resting up for an indoor mile race tonight. While I’m eating breakfast, I spot a couple article I want to post to my work blog. I hope I can remember them when I get to work.
8 am. Arrive at the office. Check my email, respond to one, and look for the articles I wanted to blog. I find one, but the other does not seem to be available in the online edition of our local paper, so I use Google News to find another version. I need to call a foundation and ask for their annual report, but they are in Chicago so it’s still too early to call out there.
Noon. Checked some of my literature search RSS feeds. This is tedious so I try to check them fairly frequently and import the relevant records into EndNote libraries. While I am waiting for each record to load (I am very impatient) I browse through a publisher catalog and select a few items to add to our collection. Answered a cataloging question from a staff member. Signed off on a book purchase. Requested funds to attend the Population Association of America meetings in April. Received another search request. Now eating a sandwich at my desk and catching up with Facebook, Twitter, and Bloglines.
The afternoon got busy, with trying to finish up a search by the end of the day, working on our difficult document request a little more, talking to our programming manager about our fledgling intranet, and answering a couple drop-in questions. (We generally operate via email and phone, so drop-in questions are a nice change. We don’t have a reference desk in our tiny library.)
4 pm. I leave early to head to my club track meet. I like that my job is pretty flexible so I can do things like this once in a while. Then after the track meet, it’s home for a quick shower and then off to the pub for dinner.
