With many of my colleagues on vacation and no students around, this isn’t the most exciting time to be recording my time at work. I will definitely do something similar during the Fall or Spring semester when I’m knee-deep in instruction.
8:00 am – arrived at work and checked email. Started creating a basic wire frame of what one of the program-specific landing pages might look like on our newly-designed Drupal website.
9:00 Talked to Director about our Freshman orientations. Normally, we have 1 hour and 15 minutes for each group to share between the library and museum and each group is usually 20-25 students. Now schedule is saying we have that amount of time to share between the library, museum and the Academic Achievement Center and we’ll have 40 students at a time. There’s no way we can do the active learning stuff we did last year (which students loved) under those conditions. Director has a call in to the office that created the schedule to discuss. Also showed Director my wire frame and she liked the idea of a landing page for each academic program.
9:15 Talked to Head of Reference about a distance learner who seems to not be understanding the instructions she’s trying to give her. Gave her some advice on handling the situation. Also talked about reference scheduling for Fall. Looks like I’ll just have an evening shift, which is good since I’ll be so heavily involved in instruction. Made the case for our Humanities librarian/Head of Digital Initiatives to have the same since he does at least as much instruction as I do.
9:40 Talked to our Office Manager about the Freshman tours and scheduled the Multipurpose Room for our civilian tours (which usually come in larger groups).
10:00 Emailed our soon-to-be distance learning librarian about the library website redesign to get her 2 cents on it. Even though she doesn’t start until August 17th, I want her to have as much input as possible.
10:30 Emailed the drupal web designer we found with my wire frame and some basic ideas.
11:00 pumped and caught up on feeds.
11:25 Started answering on emails missed since Friday.
11:30 Met with Head of Academic Computing and one of the instructional designers at Norwich who had some useful suggestions for our web portal redesign. While we were planning to make our portal visually consistent with the course management system, student feedback has shown that they want the CMS to be visually consistent with the norwich.edu website (they want to feel a part of the University). So it probably makes more sense to make the portal visually consistent with the norwich.edu site. They also let me know that new students no longer recognize the abbreviations for their academic programs (which are not being used much anymore), which completely screws up my idea for the site nav. Sigh… Still, a useful conversation, because I didn’t know all that.
12:00 Talked to Director and colleague about the meeting and my now total bewilderment regarding what the design of the site should look like. Got some ideas from talking about it out loud.
12:15 Wrote to Administrative Dean of the school of graduate studies to ask what her preference would be in terms of the design, since she’s the one holding the purse strings.
12:25 Ate lunch. Soup is a really bad idea on a hot day when you’re trapped in an un-air conditioned office. Very sticky!
12:50 Got email from Administrative Dean. She said that not only should it look like the regular norwich.edu website, but they are going to be redesigning the CMS to look like it as well. Well ok then.
1:00 Revised wire frame in light of changed look and need to spell out program names.
1:30 sent email with revised wireframe and revised information about the look to our designer.
1:50 Answered emails from faculty about journal cancellations, book purchases, and link problems.
2:00 Heard from head of Academic Achievement Center that the schedule for Freshman orientation is incorrect and we all have the same amount of time as last year. Still haven’t heard back from the office that created the schedule though, so I’m waiting for additional confirmation. Emailed the Museum Director to coordinate the civilian tours between our two facilities.
2:30 Watched Brett Bonfield’s adorable video promoting his library’s 5K race. Nice job!
2:35 Went around to colleagues to ascertain who would be around to help with library orientation week. We have 20 separate groups coming in for our orientation/scavenger hunt, so it’s going to be hectic.
2:45 Answered email from faculty member about instruction session for Fall. Continued email collaboration with Museum Director and Archivist about the Freshman orientations. Received email back from soon-to-be Distance Learning Librarian who had some excellent feedback on the library website redesign (that’s why we hired her!).
3:15 Pumped and caught up on RSS feeds.
3:40 Answered a few more emails.
4:00 Left early since hubby is leaving tomorrow for a business trip and needs to get ready (which means I need to take the munchkin). By this time it is so hot in my office that if I actually wore makeup, it would have melted off my face, so I’m relieved to be leaving early.
Not a particularly exciting day, but at least I made some headway on some important projects and didn’t die of heatstroke.
Thanks for participating Meredith, last year we did another round in 6 months, end of January I believe to give a different perspective for academic and school librarians so keep a look out around that time.