Woke at 6 am – read/respond to emails… check Twitter feed

6:30-8:00 get myself and kiddo ready, leave for work

8-9:00 is my first email block, I do a poorly managed version of the “inbox zero” and I try to keep two email blocks throughout the day—the first and the last hour. Whenever possible, I try to leave work early enough to get a workout in for the day. I’ve found that it really does make one more productive! However, I don’t have my daughter on Mondays, so I tend to work late those nights. Of course, like most anal er… “driven” librarians, I work a lot from home at night and on the weekends, too.

Checked in on Foursquare

Get to work—open up Outlook on one monitor, Firefox on the other—use App Tabs to keep Gmail, iTweet, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader and Hoot Suite open… but I rarely click over to them (sorry to anyone who tries to ping me during the day).

Plug in my iPhone for music.

Fielded question about constantly replacing headphone on patron internet machines—looking for a source of good, cheap headphones (difficult balance).

Called friend and former colleague, Jack Maness to confirm lunch

Set up Digital Services Team meeting for 9am

Posted picture of my desk on Twitter

9-10:00 met with Digital Services Team. This is my Systems guru, Jon Solomon and my Drupal master, Chris Evjy. We discussed the movement to the newest version of Web Pac Pro, new headers, integrating Library Thing For Libraries. We discussed Summer Reading program, looked at different software products and campaigns, set firm deadlines for the various elements. Discussed Evanced stylesheets and the development of a Feed plugin for Drupal to ease the display of Evanced information. Discussed our developing Intranet – production environment up. Broke down the tasks and discussed who does what and when.

10:00am – Filled out time sheet, generated the report for my staff and turned it in.

Looked into the myriad of suggestions for headphone replacement from Twitter. Many good suggestions – brought these ideas to our Assistant Director and discussed some of the pros and cons of each approach. We decided to take question to the Leadership Team later this week

Checked in with Finance Manager for library on the progress towards a contract with PingV, converting ArtsResource website migration to Drupal. ArtsResource is a web site paid for by the Boulder Arts Commission that we maintain at the library. It provides profiles with samples (audio, video, photographs) of work for local artists as well as art-related events listings. We are working with PingV to convert it over to Drupal from the legacy content management system it’s currently built in.

10:15am Did morning walk-through of the library – I try to do this twice a day so my experience of the library isn’t all just virtual. I stopped in the children’s area and discussed a recent hacking incident that unfortunately resulted in patron shoving our security guard when confronted. Further discussion with children’s staff about other recent security issues and our Leadership Team/Commission’s emphasis as top priority for the coming months.

10:30 – 11:00 Worked on IT governance meeting, implementing a Change Management group as per ITIL principles. I’ve been slowly adopting much of the ITIL stuff in one form or another since I came on board about a year ago.

Then Chris (the web guy) interrupted me and wanted to know where Drupal was installed on the new production server… also needed user permissions fixed. I tweeted about my frustrations with Linux file permissions.

11-11:30am, more follow up on Change Management

11:30 – gave up on Change Management and moving on to making some phone calls… Eric Sissler of the Westminster Public Library, Carson Block of the Poudre River Public Library District, Susan Staples of the High Plains Library District. Working on some Colorado Association of Libraries’ “Network Systems Interest Group” stuff.

Noon-1:30 – I try to make myself have lunch with a friend twice a week because the rest of the time I just eat lunch at my desk while answering email. Twice a week it’s good for me to get away from the screen. Today I had lunch with Jack Maness, Head of the Engineering Library at the University of Colorado up the street. We talked a lot about ALA Emerging Leaders, Technology in Libraries—cool stuff about Data Curation mostly. We talked career development and a *lot* about what we’ve learned and are learning being relatively inexperienced managers. Jack has been a huge influence and inspiration—I can’t say enough good about the guy.

1:30-2:00 check email, Twitter, Facebook … helped out Chris AGAIN with Linux stuffs.

2:00-3:00 It’s all about the performance reviews. I have one for myself due so I needed to prepare materials for my supervisor, and I have a staff member due soon as well. I did a little of both.

3:00-3:30 Got a call back from Eric Sissler and discussed the details of Reading Record, a Free and Open Source (hosted, no less!) summer reading tool that he developed. We’re thinking about participating with the larger Colorado Community in using this software this year. Also, discussion of Rsync and virtualization in libraries and setting up a time for him to come up and see our data center and geek out even more together.

3:30-3:45 Afternoon walk-through – this time of day has a totally different crowd (after school) and I like to check in with Circulation and see how things are going. Have they had a lot of questions or complaints about the system today? I also use the time to do an environment scan in general. What areas of the library are people using? How many laptops? What are they doing? Who looks lost? I try to overhear whatever questions they are asking our desk staff. I always peek in the teen room and see who’s using what in there as well. Then I headed through children’s to see what’s most popular there and observe the age groups.

3:45-4:00pm – Related to children and computing, I came back to check on the progress of getting our new multimedia touch screen computers set up. We’re going to deploy Windows 7 and a whole slew of new software for a wider range of ages. Currently our children’s PCs run Windows 95 and are installed at tables that are only appropriate for 2-5 year olds. The software selection is equally geared for little ones and out of date. Soon these cool HP Touch Smarts will replace them! Really excited about this…

4-5:00 it’s all about inbox zero, baby. Will I make it today?

5:30 – I have *not* reached inbox zero… far from it. I look at the Facebook photos of the After Hours social at ALA Midwinter. Wish I could have been there. Now I want to go home—so back to email! I WILL PREVAIL!

6:00—Inbox Zero achieved. I does a happy dance.

6:00-6:25 – I gather my notes and write up this post. I will then head home but my day isn’t over—we’re doing some system testing later tonight about 9:30pm.

All in all, a pretty typical day except that I normally have a *lot* more meetings.

ADDENDUM: Running the new backup script hung on an SQL table tonight at about 10pm and our server crashed. I emailed back and forth with my Sysadmin for a while before finally deciding I needed to head into the office. He and I were there until about 10 minutes ago– 2:00am. III is still working on the problem as it turned out to be a Millenium issue rather than a Linux issue that he or I could fix. And THAT is a day in the life of this librarian…. luckily late night calls are *very* atypical.

Shhhh…. don’t tell anyone. I’m not starting up the Brewin’ Librarian again or anything– but I *will* be participating in Librarian Day of the Life again this year. This meme was started by the always amazing Bobbi Newman (@Librarianbyday). Later today, I’ll write up a full post about what I did today. And of course, you can follow me on Twitter– although I can’t guarantee that I’ll post much throughout the day.