library day in the life 7.5

Or, TGIF!

I'm writing this post really late, and I've forgotten most of what I did on Friday, really. But it was an exhausting week, not only work-wise, but also with the writing of these posts. (It was taking me 3 hours to write these posts, so I was going to bed after midnight, and I wake up just after 5.) By Friday night, I just didn't have the energy anymore. Anyway, here it is for what it's worth. Hopefully, some pictures will make it more interesting. :)

Here's a very approximate breakdown of the day:

• 3 hours - email/social networking/feeds
• 4.25 - serials review
• 1 hour - lunch
• .5 hour - chat with colleagues
• .25 - added pictures/modified libday 7.4 post

Getting There

I thought I'd share more pictures for this day's post. So this is what happens before I get to my office.

As I mentioned at the end of Day 4's post, I'm on vanpool. If you don't already know, traffic in LA is atrocious. I hate to drive, and being on a vanpool is the only thing making the commute somewhat bearable. The UCLA Vanpool is a university-sponsored service. Each rider has to pay a monthly fee, and the drivers are also van riders. My van meets at the far end of a K-Mart parking lot, 5 miles away from where I live. (There's actually an earlier pick-up that's about half the distance but, since the pick-up is earlier, I usually go to this one instead.)

And this is my van. It seats 11 people. Vans used to have the UCLA logo on them, but these were taken off because people--mostly those who are anti-animal testing--were vandalizing them.

It takes about 30 minutes to get to campus, which is 17 miles away. (Going home is a different story, though. It takes the van anywhere from 35-90 minutes to get back; the usual is about 45 minutes.) Since the drop off is at the southern part of campus, I have to walk another 20 minutes or so to get to the library.

As I also mentioned in Day 4's post, the main floor of my library is under renovation. Here's a peek (sort of) -- that glass room is where the reference reading room will be.

Everything is really still blocked off, so I couldn't take many pictures really. But you can see many, many more pictures on our University Librarian's blog. If I ever get a tour, I'll be sure to take my own pictures. :)

Down the stairs, you'll see another common area (sorry for the fuzzy picture). We have a limited number of computer terminals here, plus a couple of microform machines. At the bottom of the picture is the reference desk for microforms. The green covered drawers are some of our more commonly-used maps. You can't see it, but there are big round study tables by the windows.

At the Office

This is the door to my office. On the door are 2010 census posters in Khmer, Lao, and Thai that my student worker at that time got for me. Those flyers, etc. on the side of my door are messy because the nameplate just got put there, and the workers moved them around. I haven't gotten around to fixing them.

I didn't take a picture of the interior of my office as it's a mess. But here's what you see from my door: the hallway leading to the reception area. These shelves are mostly for area studies and government documents librarians.

In the Stacks

As usual, I spent the first couple of hours or so on emails and feeds. Today, more time was spent on emails than on reading my feeds. Specifically, I had to write a lengthy feedback for one of my committee's report/workplan.

Then, it was back to serials review. I had mostly finished going through Burma serials the day before, so I just had to finish it in the morning. One of the last things I had to do was to look at a particular title (to see if we want to keep our subscription), which is in the stacks. I thought that would be a good opportunity to show you our stacks. This is the view of the 3rd floor stacks from the elevator:

Here's another view, this time in the Asian history section:

This was the title for which I was looking. The verdict: keep the subscription.

One of the things I like to do when I'm in the stacks is to check in passing the titles that are in the sorting shelves or the return shelves, so that I can see what topics folks are researching. Somebody appears to be doing research on war in Asia and the Pacific or Australia's involvement in it.

Rest of the Day

After Brunei, I worked on the Malaysia titles. It was very disheartening to see that there are a total of over 1300 titles. I probably only got through about 150 titles. So more serials review on Monday.

I actually ate lunch away from my desk on Friday. My friend, who had been away from work all week, was finally back, so we ate lunch together and talked. In the afternoon, we also had some mochi ice cream. Also in the afternoon, I chatted a little with another co-worker.

So, that's my Friday. If I feel up to it, I would like to write a post about this whole Library in the Life Project experience, but we'll see if it will happen...

library day in the life 7.4

Or, A Day for Details

Today was supposed to be a day to buckle down and focus on my Southeast Asian serials review. And I did do that. But I also didn't. I had a hard time getting started this morning. In my usual check of various email accounts and social networking sites, I was seeing so many great links to blogs and articles that I spent a little bit more time on it than I've been doing during the earlier part of this week. Then, I started really chugging on the serials, though there were some minor distractions here and there.

Here's the approximate breakdown of my day:

• 3 hours - emails / social networking / feeds (including during lunch & snacktime)
• 4.5 hours - serials review
  
• 1 hour - reference desk (brought circulars)
• .25 - stretching (am), looking for snack (pm)
• .25 hour - student consult

The Main Road

Serials review was the order of the day. It was extremely painstaking work; it involved:

• looking at last year's list and transferring notes for the titles to this year's list
  
• looking up all the titles on LC CAPSEA (Library of Congress - Cooperative Acquisitions Program for Southeast Asia) site, including those not on the list (just to be sure), to a) check if other institutions have cancelled and b) see if the publications are relatively current
  
• looking up our catalog records for titles we're supposed to have and see if a) we have a record for them and b) if our holdings match what LC has listed as sent to us, then writing notes for each title on my Excel spreadsheet
  
• looking up on OCLC for titles we don't have and check the holdings of other institutions, especially UC Berkeley, as well as to find out subject headings for titles that I don't already have notes for
• checking list sent by the University of Washington for titles that they are cancelling
• deciding whether to keep, add, or cancel, then writing notes on the spreadsheet
• adding totals to another spreadsheet that's keeping track of budget for both monographs and serials
  

I didn't get very far at all. It took me 2 hours to finish Brunei, and that's one of the easy countries to do. I worked on Burma for 2 1/2 but didn't quite finish. There has to be an easier or smarter way to do this. I do believe, though, that once I do all this heavy work for all countries, then it will be much, much simpler work in subsequent years.

Side Roads

Though I had a clear project, I needed to work on, I also had to do a couple of things, such as:

• reference desk - It actually was very quiet because a) it's summertime and b) our main floor is being renovated and the reference room is so hidden that you really have to be determined to get there (or, more often the case, you really want to borrow a laptop, which is in the same area as the reference desk). To get to the desk, you have to go down the stairs from the ground level and go down this hallway. (Follow the light...)
  
  When you reach the door, you see our fancy sign.
  
  This is what the inside of the temporary reference reading room looks like.
  
  This is the view from the reference desk.
  
  
• circulars - For some countries, LC CAPSEA sends out circulars, or lists of titles; these come monthly. Since I knew the desk was probably going to be quiet (and it was to hard to do my serials review over there), I brought along circulars for the Philippines and Vietnam. All I did today was to go through the list and cross out the ones I already know I don't want, based on title or brief description. (Afterwards, I give it to my assistant or student to search on our catalog and OCLC for UCLA and other UC holdings, as well as to get subject headings and/or descriptions (since most of these are in languages I can't read) before I then make my decisions.) A note about Vietnam circulars: They are especially challenging because they do not have diacritics, and the Vietnamese language is all about diacritics. So, searching for more info is very difficult and time-consuming. I am really missing my student assistant (as I'm sure my staff assistant is), who won't be back until the winter quarter.
  

Off-Road

In addition to the things mentioned above, I also ended up doing other things, because a) I needed a break and b) I needed to deal with it right then before I forgot. These activities included:

• reading social networking posts/feeds - I get so much info through FB and, now, Twitter, especially related to libraries and librarianship. Examples from today include:
• Shepard Fairey, street artists brighten West Hollywood library - on a local library
• Are You Reading YA Lit? You Should Be. - on my favorite kind of literature
• Bravery based librarianship is the (only) future - on the need for pattern disruption in librarianship
• What Librarians Do - an infographic on the myriads of things librarians do (I do almost everything on there, except for the very technical stuff, such as actual preservation, cataloging, and creation of systems.)


• sending an email to the Preservation Officer - I saw him in the office, which reminded me that I had a couple of old materials in my possession: a set of ledgers and letters from early 20th century Philippines and an old Indonesian book of unindentified script. I want to add these to our collections, but they are in pretty bad shape, so I want to see if they're salvageable. He had to rush off to a meeting, so I sent him an email instead.
  
  This is the cover of the Indonesian book. I think it's leather.
  
  These are letters of previous owner (?) trying to ascertain the script; there is also a reply from a some expert -- he didn't actually know the answer, but he thought it was some sort of bastardized Arabic.
  
  And here's the actual content of the book. Do you know what script that is?
  
  This is the packaging for the Philippine materials; they belonged to a Mauro Tayko of Dumaguete. Have you ever heard of him? I wonder if it was sent by Donn V. Hart, well-known anthropologist and Philippine specialist.
  
  These are some of the papers on top, including a telegram (remember those? I never did get a chance to receive a telegram) receipt and a letter, both written in Spanish.
  
  Also included are ledgers, like the one below. As you can see, it's in terrible shape.
  
  
• look up classrooms for an instruction session - I know I'm supposed to do an instruction session in a week, but I actually hadn't thought about the details (too many other things to think about!). An email from the instructor nudged me, and I started to see if our classroom is available. However, it will all depend on how many student there will be -- I might have to book a classroom that requires permission from other people, so I started looking at possibilities. As this is a summer course, I realized that this might be a session that's more than an hour -- that's going to require more thinking/prep work. I sent an email to the instructor; I can't really move forward until I get more info. (Just got an email from the instructor: one hour is fine--whew!-- and 25 students--have to book a bigger room.)


• impromptu student consult - Okay, I admit it. I don't like it when students show up and think that I automatically have time to meet with them. I usually don't. I have other deadlines, and I have a lot these next two weeks. I especially don't like it when they show up 10 minutes before I have to leave work. (I am on a vanpool, and I have to leave exactly on time, or there will be 10 ticked off people waiting for me.) I asked if it was something that can be answered in 10 minutes, and they said it was just a quick question. Of course, it wasn't.
  
  The quick question was: where is the section for Filipino materials? The answer: there is no one section; it would depend on what your specific topic is. They didn't really know, so I told them to do some exploring first. I quickly showed them the library website (which they've never been on), the library catalog, and a federated search tool for general databases. Then, I said to make an appointment for additional help. I have to say that they were quite appreciative, so I'm glad I saw them after all.
  

So, that was my day. It was tiring; my back was aching by mid-morning. By late afternoon, I needed a little something sweet to reward myself and to keep myself awake, but I went searching for it too late; the store next door was already closed. Fortunately, there was a little bit of leftover ice cream from last week's retirement party. Yay! I was winding down my day with some ice cream and reading of emails/feeds. Until the students interrupted me, that is.

But it's all good. I had a good evening. I'm going to bed late again, though, writing this post. Tomorrow, more serials review. Oh, joy.