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.

So, if you read this, I want to apologize. I’ve been so consumed with other things I’d almost forgotten I had a blog to attend to! However, the semesters at work and school are over and I’m moved in (in the sense that not only are we moved, but we now actually have furniture and our stuff is out of cardboard boxes). For the first time since I was a child, ALL of my books are shelved. That’s right.. in one place, not in boxes, but on shelves. It’s weird, but I like it. Now I am going to start cataloging them so I can lend them out more often. (Just like a librarian…)

I’m going to begin blogging with more regularity again. I plan to return to more library-related content as well… so in honor of that, I’m going to discuss something I don’t see addressed often enough. If there are a ton of blog posts or articles about this, please send them to me!

I’d like to muse a bit about the state of Library blogging. I’ve read a number of articles discussing what library folks do with their blogs: knowledge creation, networking, best practices sharing, etc. What I don’t see a lot of is personal reflection and theoretical discussion.

Often when I read disparaging comments about blogs, I think to myself, “hey that’s what I do with my blog.” I don’t write with a lot of evidence. I basically rant and blow off steam and hardly ever edit and certainly don’t try to be “professional”.

Why?

Well, partly because I’m not really interested in people taking a social medium and turning it into another exclusive intellectual playground. It really bothers me that people only value blogs for that reason because I think that there is value that can be gained from people sharing their feelings, their struggles, their unformed and undocumented thoughts in an attempt to build towards greater specificity. However, it’s chilling to speech if you feel that everything you “publish” (an over-used word in my opinion) has to meet some lofty standard that includes not hurting anyone’s feelings, not offending future or current employers, and always formatting and documenting every post as if it were an article for publication.

So, if you have a brief thought or an unformed idea that you want to explore or develop where can you share it? The original purpose of blogging was an online journal– do you always compose your journal entries?

Now, I’m not one of these people who feels that each medium should remain for only one purpose.. I think it’s fantastic that blogging is done for “professional” as well as personal reasons. I just think it’s a shame if we all start feeling like EVERY blog has to be for professional purposes. I think it’s a shame if we feel limited in our expression because we’re afraid of what people might read.

With that in mind, I’ve read a number of posts about the Biblioblogosphere that suggest that this is exactly what is going on… People are afraid to express anything controversial and are feeling pressured to “never say anything you wouldn’t say in person.”

Well, then what’s the point in having multiple mediums if they aren’t to be used in different ways? That to me is internalized censorship. I should be able to post unformed thoughts and ideas. I should feel free to pontificate and rant… why? because we all should feel free to.

Does that mean we should use our blogs to insult someone personally or to threaten them like Kathy Sierra? Hell no! But if I did. That’s my problem… I’d just be an asshole for doing so. All the reader who didn’t like it would have to do is click somewhere else. Simple as that. If you don’t like what you read in a blog post, it wasn’t forced on you, you can just read something else.

If you want to argue with it, then fine… Try and keep it to a level of useful debate. If you say to somebody, “well, I don’t think you’ve thought through the consequences of what you’re saying” then perhaps something can come from it. If you’re going to say, “that’s a dumb idea” well, something still might come from it in the sense that the author at least knows that somebody out there is not liking what’s been said. It may cause them to invesigate further (it would me).

But if you say, “you dumbshit, you should stop writing this crap.” Well, it’s a little hard to separate the message from the insult. So why bother? Is your life really so empty that arguing online in ways that aren’t constructive or purposely trolling is going to fulfill you? Actually, wow… now that I bring it up in that way… if your life really is that empty, my gosh, if arguing with me or insulting me will bring you some joy– please feel free to use me for that purpose. I feel sorry for you.

But I digress… I am all for *voluntary* civility amongst bloggers, but I don’t think that we should have to feel the need to produce an professional article every time we write and I don’t think we should be or feel stifled from merely expressing opinion. There is value in venting as much as gushing with excitement.

Remember, this medium started as a journal. I want to keep mine for that purpose. I want to reflect, recant, be wrong, be misinformed, develop my ideas, and maybe eventually learn and share and perhaps even teach something along the way. Even if nothing beyond, “Hey, don’t feel so uptight”.

I hope that somebody out there (ACLU are you listening?) is working on preventing online searches from being considered as part of job interviews. I mean, if what I post on MySpace when I’m 14 can affect my job prospects at 22 then what is the point of education? What is the point of learning from our mistakes if we never are allowed to make any?

I think beyond the library blogosphere, beyond the Internet, that this has extremely dangerous social implications. So, if you’ve EVER done anything taboo or embarassing or unwise, you should be hounded by it for the rest of your life? Is that any way to live?

MDH out