Travel Planning

Patron help of the day: Last week a lady came in seeking advice on how to digitize her personal document collection. I was working in the computer lab at the time, so I could not devote my attention to her. She came in today and realized how crowded our library was since 40% of the Town was still without power. So very considerately she made an appointment to come see me next week. Two appointments in fact. I’m a little nervous about spending four hours with one patron, but at the same time, I think it will allow me to produce a guide on how to teach digitization and digital preservation for the average public library patron. Hopefully I can turn this into a class for our Adult Technology Classes. As well, these two sessions with her might be the first stepping stone towards creating a true archival program at my library.

Speaking of which… I don’t recall if how I decided to not run a PhotoStory class and instead decided to focus on creating a job program/promotion thing with our reference department. I am required to spend nine hours a week in the computer lab helping patrons. Most of this time is spent showing people how to fax using our three-step method, how to print, answering questions about why so-and-so isn’t friending you on such-and-such social network. However, I also get to see what our real patron needs are. One of them is that many of the people who come to our computer labs are looking for work. They ask me questions about how Microsoft Word or Google Docs works and I am often witness to their less-than-ideal formatting of cover letters, resumes, and emails. It weighed on me that I would be doing them a disservice to promote a fun but silly software program when there are people who need help competing for work.

I still need to pitch this idea to the reference department now that their head is back, but I think we can work out something that will be beneficial to our patrons. Another random insight is that we REALLY need wireless printing. My coworker would probably be the one responsible for this, but his plate is very full at the moment.

Summary of the rest of my day:

I got the technology classes listing posted today on the website. I picked apart the PHP code that controlled the appearance of the unformatted View I was working on for awhile until I got stuck trying to get the labels to work properly or get lines of text to indent. When I tried, I ended up knocking the right-hand sidebar below the main content area. At some point I came to my senses and thought “well, it might not be the prettiest thing ever, but I now have a workable registration system” and started tweeting about it.

I got an interesting email about how to use a few different systems to send text messages based upon Google Form submissions. Since my email count was still low, I sent out a few inquiries looking for other people who may have written me but their email was lost while the server was down.

Then I spent half an hour teaching my coworker how to edit an image and turn it into a template which she can use for the monthly newsletters. After lunch, I noticed an instant message from the reference department to which they did not respond to my reply. So I went upstairs and quickly got involved with a long spur-of-the-moment meeting with the head of reference. She gave me a bit more of her vision for how to make our library’s website more academic and what things she needed from me. I supplied her with updates on the website project and sought answers for her questions.

Oh, yes. I also booked my plane and hotel for Internet Librarian. I am shocked by the cost of it since the only conferences I paid to attend as a student were free or < $20. I look forward to producing some good results in the next year so that hopefully I will have something to share at a conference soon!