A Day in the Life #3

Helpdesk Wednesday. Yep, today was my day to cover the helpdesk. We usually get this duty once/wk within the department. We have an email address that all member libraries use to submit their helpdesk requests. So once/wk one of us monitors all the incoming email and then logs the information into our help desk management solution called Track-It! We haven't gotten to the point yet of having the member libraries do the submitting themselves through the online client, though I sure hope we do some day.

The issues that came up today varied from, all Millennium ports being used, an OPAC not working, how to set up a vacation message in our IMail system, adding a laptop to a networked printer, etc. Needless to say it's hard to focus on a project with all the interruptions that come in on your helpdesk day, but hey, it's only one day a week.

Still finalizing some parts of the ppt we'll be using for the web conference on Friday. Met with our PR Coordinator and will get to create yet another survey in surveymonkey. She is going to survey all of the staff and volunteers of the libraries to find out what types of database and OPAC trainings are needed to help us better serve the patrons. I think this is a very exciting initiative. I also hope there will be time some day when I and the system staff have enough time for me to train them how to do this themselves. For now, it's faster for me to just do it for them.

I entered in some names to our training database as I was getting a little behind from the last month's worth of classes. So that's now all up to date.

Had a discussion with the IT Asst Mgr, Mark about all of the details he has learned about Exchange this week. Lots of confusing stuff to sort out. My goal now is to just learn the whole thing inside and out and be ready for the questions rather than try to create some big training document. It's too big to do that. I hope to just make some quick job aids people can refer to for the basics and then serve as a resource for the more complex stuff. This first wave of training is just showing people how to send/check mail and manage contacts, we'll delve deeper later.

Lastly, I've been meaning to try out ping.fm and there was a post about it on techsoup so I finally went over there and realized I needed a "beta code" to get in. The site states "Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap". Wanting to get this off my checklist today, I threw out a share on FriendFeed and literally within 5 minutes got the code from David. Thanks David. If anyone else needs to know, for today it is pingbewithyou. So now I can just post in one place and it goes out to all of my social networks. Pretty cool. Just another example of how social networks DO help you. I can instantly get answers to my questions without using email - do you need more incentive than that?

Lastly, I am doing some contract work on my own time for the PA Commonwealth Libraries and the invitation to come to a Web2.0 Hands On Workshop went out to the PADLC and PASYS listserves today. I'm very excited to be able to do these workshops across the state as I've been waiting a long time to be able to train on Social Software. My goal for the workshop is to begin by creating a blog in Blogger; then create an account in Bloglines to subscribe to the blogs we created; then set up a del.icio.us account for social bookmarking (and show how to incorporate that into the blog) and show a little Flickr and YouTube along the way (also incorporating that into the blog). I haven't been able to do such a workshop at the system as this will be a full day workshop (my trainings aren't to go over 3 hours at a time) and there are other projects that have always taken precedence. So, I'm burning a lot of midnight oil to do something I love :-) By the way, if anyone in PA reading this wants to register, please check those listserves for the post sent today from Bonnie Young. This is the only way to get at the registration form. They don't have online registration :-(

Well, that's a wrap for the day. I didn't get to go home for lunch today as my husband and daughter went to the wonderful Family Place program at the Quarryville Library. She LOVES that. You can see how much she loves it here.