Another Day in the Life of a Periodicals Librarian

Today is the first day of the semester at my university.  Students will not arrive back for classes until next Monday, so this week will be full of meetings and planning for the semester ahead.

7:00 a.m.  Check email from home.  I can’t decide whether this practice is worthwhile or just discouraging but I just can’t stop myself.

8:00 a.m. Arrive at the office, grab a mug of tea, start editing documents for presentation later today to our department chairs about our institutional repository, MINDS@UW, and green OA.

9:00 a.m. Hear back from vendor that access to one of our journals, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, has mysterious changed from 1987-present to 2004-present.  Dig through voluminous email files on this title and realize that the publisher actually never nailed down access dates.  Curious.  Spend the next hour on the phone and email trying to resolve the issue.  Sinking feeling that resolution will involve me purchasing journal archive for said title.

10:00 a.m. Start posting this update.

10:25 a.m.  More tea!!  Sat in on staff break time.  Always good to catch up with colleagues after the long break.

11:25 a.m.  Back to FAQ page on green OA.  Heavily influenced by Peter Suber’s A field guide to misunderstandings about open access, but with a lighter, more positive tone.

11:40 a.m. Colleague dropped by to see if I would support a semester-long trial of EBSCO’s new discovery resource.  In a heartbeat!  I love the idea of searching all our content through one interface.  Even more exciting is the speed through which this dream may become reality.  Now the final challenge: funding the dream.

12:00 p.m. Lunch at my desk; spicy Thai noodles…yum.

12:25 p.m.  New drafts of OA presentation and handout sent out for review.

1:00 p.m. Handouts made, prepping for presentation.

2:35 p.m. Back from presentation – I think my colleague and I generated some interest in green OA!!  Adding handout and PPT to web page and sprucing it up a bit.

3:30 p.m. Ready to start porting some old ASP pages to ASP.net

4:00 p.m.  The first day back always goes quickly!

January 19, 2010. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News. Leave a comment.