Every Monday morning the IT Department, which I am a part of, has a meeting at 9:30am. Today, it was pushed back to 10:00am. Then, we received an emergency helpdesk call in the middle of the meeting. It's always tough to get all 6 of us together. The department is made up of:
- IT Manager/Deputy Administrator - Bill Hudson
- Assistant Manager - Mark Sandblade
- PC/Systems Specialist - Jordan Binkley
- PC/LAN Technician - John Ditmore
- Webmaster/System Specialist - Jeff Somerfield
- Training Coordinaotr - Stephanie Zimmerman (hey, that's me!)
We have a lot of projects going on right now, so it's always good to get together and figure out where everyone is and what needs to happen next.
I helped someone unlock a record in our Millennium ILS (Integrated Library System), helped someone figure out how to edit a header in a Word document, then off to lunch. I try to go home as often as I can over my lunch hour to spend some time with my daughter, Xia.
When I got back, I did some prep work for a web conference I'll be running with the rest of the PA Spanish Outreach team this Friday. We're going to be using WebJunction's Horizon Wimba client and I'm really enjoying that system. Our state coordinator realized she had some LSTA monies left over in her budget, so we're going to offer some mini grants out to people who come to the web conference. There are lots of criteria to work out and it has to be done quickly, but this is a great incentive for people to come and a great way to reach Latinos for our state's libraries. I will be creating a survey in surveymonkey that they will use to submit their proposals.
So now it's 3:30pm, and as soon as I post this, I'm off to work on getting ready for Outlook Exchange Training for our first library that is going to be migrated at the end of this month. For some reason, I am finding this to be more difficult than when I had to create training materials for Millennium! The main hurdle is that I really have to create a training plan and brief documentation for 2 separate groups. One group will ONLY use the Outlook Web Access 2007 interface. The other group will use Outlook 2003 on their desktop with Outlook Web Access 2007. What's so frustrating is that the interface for OWA for those who DON'T have Outlook 2003 on their desktop looks and acts differently than the OWA interface for those that DO have Outlook 2003 on their desktop. Go figure! If anyone out there has lived through this already, PLEASE share with me how you did your training in the comments.
See you tomorrow as you journey with me in A Day in the Life of a "Librarian".
4 comments:
You're having user confusion around logging in to MindTouch Deki? Is it a custom skin? Would making a modification to the skin lessen confusion? Also, you may consider using LDAP or Active Directory. With the NTLM support MindTouch Deki offers you can have users automatically logged in after they authenticate against your AD or LDAP domain.
Thanks for the input Aaron. I have forwarded this along to our tech team. I think we are looking into a custom skin and we are using Active Directory to simplify. This is what is confusing everyone as not all staff have their own computer to log into. So, if you have your own machine, you are told to choose your library from the list and then login with the same username and password you use on your computer. For those without a computer but who have email, they are set up with an AD account and given a password to login and use the first part of their email address for their username. For volunteers with no computer or email, they are told to use a LOCAL username and password set up for each library. You can see how this is quite confusing! I would love if this happened automatically for those of us with machines and hope our tech team can work that out.
Stephanie - make sure when people are accessing web mail they use IE and not Firefox. In Firefox you do not get the full features of Webmail--it looks like the old version.
Thanks Lori, that's on my list of things to be sure to point out!
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