This morning I felt really sick to my stomach and dizzy, so after helping to get Reed dressed, Adam ended up taking him to daycare. I spent 20 minutes lying in bed after they’d left before I headed to work (arrived at 7:40).
I was tied to my desk this morning since I was on-call for reference until noon (which means checking email, being available on IM, and being available for anyone who needs research help). Spent most of the morning working on course guides for upcoming Asian Politics, American Politics and Intro to Political Science classes. When working on the Asian politics guide, I realized that, while we had a ton of books on China and on Islam in Asia, we didn’t have so many on Japan, India, South Korea, etc. We’ve been doing a lot of purchasing on China because of a new Chinese language major and a new concentration on Chinese history, but I don’t want to see the other areas suffer. This took me off on a tangent to find the best recent books on politics and economic policy in other areas of Asia.
My director asked me if she should count research consultations she’s doing with Sports Medicine students as reference or instruction. Good question! I asked folks on Twitter how they record statistics on individual consultations and libraries seem to be pretty divided on how they handle it. I like the idea of counting it as reference, but in a separate category of reference. Emailed Head of Reference to ask her to add that to the agenda for our next meeting.
Helped a faculty member request a journal through ILL.
Our distance learning librarian asked me if I knew how to change certain content in Drupal for our website and after digging for a while, I realized that I had no idea. I asked her to contact the librarian who built the site for us to find out how we can change this block content since we can’t actually find where it’s being generated from. Talked with her about that new online program we’re concerned about being able to support as well as library instruction, and I ended up giving her another one of my History 108 classes since she’s interested in getting more teaching experience.
Adam called to see how I was doing (so-so, still haven’t tried eating) and let me know that Reed was happily crawling around at daycare when he left. That’s good, because he was in one heck of a bad mood this morning between the gum pain of teething and the runny nose. Poor little guy!
Taught a student, via IM, how to find a specific journal article online from a citation.
Eating lunch (Nilla Wafers since I’m feeling so poorly) and catching up on feeds. Just got an email that I was accepted for the Program Track of ACRL Immersion this summer, which is conveniently located in Burlington, VT. this summer. AWESOME! It’s going to eat up my entire professional development budget for the next fiscal year, so it’ll be a bummer that that’s the only thing I’ll be able to attend from June 2010-May 2011.
Met with librarian whose class I observed last week to discuss my evaluation of her teaching. We discussed possible ways she could improve her delivery and make the class more engaging.
Posted to my SJSU class site about the Library Day in the Life project so students could get a sense of what it’s like to work in a library type or job they might be interested in.
Recorded statistics from instruction sessions I’ve taught and tutorials I’ve created over the last two months. Bad head of instruction!!!
Lots of little things. Took a walk around the library since I’ve been sitting at my desk WAY too long and caught up with several colleagues along the way. Emailed my slides from yesterday’s talk on Drupal in education to a faculty member who’d requested it. Sent the woman coordinating my travel for the conference I’m presenting at in Buffalo in May information on the flights I’d like to take. I hate flying US Air, but the flight times were the most convenient for being away from the family as little as possible.
Did a little more work on the course guides before leaving to pick up Reed from daycare. The women at daycare told me that he’d needed Tylenol during the day, so clearly he was not having the best of days. He vacillated between happy and hysterical all evening and fell asleep around 7:30, though by 9pm, it was obvious that he was not going to sleep well since he was rolling around in his crib and banging into the bars. We ended up taking him to bed with us, which was better for him, but not so good for us. No one in our house ended up getting a great night’s sleep.