A Day in the Life #2

Helloooo Tuesday. This was quite an interesting day. Let's see what I can remember of the day...

• more email to sift through as usual


• helped organize some training dates for new staff coming to the Pequea Valley Public Library's new branch, Salisbury Township


• blocked some dates for a new Branch Manager that will be coming to the Mountville branch of Lancaster Public Library.


• stayed in for lunch today as Grammy is taking care of my daughter today


• watched my favorite video blogs during lunch:
  Tekzilla Daily
  Rocketboom
  Mobuzz TV
  Geekbrief


• Also followed an online chat during lunch hour from Philanthropy Today titled "Building Your Online Presence on a Tight Budget". Didn't get to follow it too well and hope to read the transcript at another time.


• created the survey for the mini-grant being offered by the PA Spanish Outreach mentioned yesterday.


• received approval for the final version of the ppt we will be using during Friday's web conference and sent it off to the Webjunction folks


• chatted with Lori Reed about Outlook training


• figured out I DON'T have to train two different versions of Outlook Web Access - just one! A consultant was in last week and got rid of some legacy stuff so what I was actually seeing was OWA 2003 interface and in reality EVERYONE will now see OWA 2007 interface. Yippee! I'm so glad I hadn't done too much documenting already

Hope you'll stay for the ride for day 3 tomorrow...

RSS FWD

This is a really cool site for those of you who don't want to learn how to use an RSS Aggregator (like Bloglines or Google Reader). You:

1. enter in the URL of the site you'd like to subscribe to - THEY find the RSS feed for you.
2. Enter in your email address and choose your delivery preferences.
3. Preview what the RSS email will look like and subscribe!

It doesn't get any easier than that, folks! So stop checking websites every day that have feeds, get the info delivered right to you.

(I still think taking the time to use an RSS Aggregator is better!)

Thanks to David Bigwood who commented on Nicole's post and pointed me to this great resource.

A Day in the Life #1

So, welcome to Monday. The day always begins with a catch up of all the email that came in over the weekend. First task, help a few people learn how to log into our intranet, LILLY. We use Mindtouch's DekiWiki for our intranet, and this is still a fairly new process. Now everyone can comment on pages or even create their own pages. It's a great way to exchange information and build internal communication. However, you must log in to use it, and a lot of people are still struggling with how exactly to do that. I'm hoping we can create a screencast that we can post on the entry page that demos how it's done.

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".

A Day in the Life of a Librarian

Well, I'm not a librarian, but I train a lot of librarians. Taking a cue from Bobbi Newman at Librarian By Day, I will attempt to give you a picture of my days next week. She proposed that librarians out there bust open the myths of what librarians REALLY do (NO, they don't sit around and read books all day!) by having librarians blog about what it is they do. So those of you who care to know what it is I do will get a picture by reading about it next week.

Would you like to join us? Check out the wiki put together by Lori Reed and read her directions of how to use it here. Hope to "see" what you all are doing next week :-)

Genious Way to use del.icio.us

I stumbled on an amazing way to use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us the other day. In addition to being a trainer, I am also a new mom and new to this whole cooking for a family thing. Simplemom, a mommy blogger, decided to use del.icio.us to create her meal planning. See how she did it here. See her del.icio.us food planner here.

This is truly genious! It's times like this I'm sad that I don't work directly in a library. What a wonderful program this would be to present at a library. Do a hands on class to teach people how to do this themselves. Sure hope someone will try this out and if you do, PLEASE tell me all about it!

Medicare and Medicaid Services Toolkit

From WebJunction:

"This extensive toolkit will help librarians direct Medicare beneficiaries/seniors to the right place when needing help regarding Medicare issues. Resources are provided in both English and Spanish."

Go and get it today!

Library2.0 Roundtable: Virtual Cafe Archive from ALA

Go over to WebJunction and check out the archive of the Library2.0 Roundtable - Virtual Cafe. Lots of great information on how your library can apply Library2.0 concepts. I think this experiment went very well. Way to go WebJunction!

100 Awesome YouTube Vids for Librarians

Thanks to The MLxperience for pointing out this great list. Don't think YouTube is relevant to libraries? Think again!

Proof I was at ALA on Saturday

Thanks to Lori Reed for taking a shot of my virtual presence at ALA on Saturday. It went very well and I'm anxious to see the archive at WebJunction.

The Girl Effect

Another great post from Techsoup. They talk about a video that the Girl Effect put on YouTube which went viral. A simple, clear message with some nice music and text. It's powerful and made me log into their site. Imagine doing something like this to market your library. How information found in the library or with the library's help can CHANGE the world. Go ahead, do it and when you do, PLEASE share a link to the video with me. Or, maybe you already have done it - then PLEASE share a link to the video with me :-) Here's the video: