Day in the Life of a Librarian (part two)

Getting Started

As usual I checked email and made some tea when I got in. Then I saw the ominous email from circulation telling me that if I didn't return that overdue board game sitting in my office (it was from an event we held a few months ago) I was going to be charged something like $100. So. That got returned. Contrary to popular belief, librarians often don't return books on time.

Research Survey

Reviewed the text of a survey I'm conducting to find out how people use government documents at Grand Valley. Need to email the person in charge to add one little thing, but other than that, it's great! Now to put together my package of materials to have sent over to the office that actually generates the emails and sends them out. This is a project I've been working on for almost 6 months and that required me to go through IRB approval. It was really challenging, but I'm excited to see what I come up with. I'm also excited that I have something I'll be able to write/publish about.

Lesson Planning

The rest of my morning will probably be taken up by lesson planning. We are just starting to get into the busy part of the semester for library instruction, so the next two weeks are going to be very busy. I'm going to try to get two political science classes planned, and review the presentation I made for our 100 level writing class. We all share instruction and I have one on Monday.

Library Guide Maintenance

I'm in charge of several library guides, including twin guides for International Relations and Political Science. They're a little weird because the guides are exactly the same, unless I made a mistake and forgot to update one of them. Consequently, I have to go in on a regular basis and double check. It is not my favorite task, since it's tedious, but it's absolutely vital. Otherwise I start having broken links and very confused students.


Reference Question

I got a really good reference referral from our health sciences librarian. I don't get to do much research with congressional documents, so this was fun and challenging. A student wanted to compare Obama's health care reform to previous iterations including Clinton and FDR. So I got to wander through websites and presidential libraries and databases looking for bill text. I did find it, which is fun, although she also contacted a colleague who got back to her faster, so technically it was all for naught.

Grand Rapids is Dying!

My city was named one of the top 10 dying cities by newsweek. Everyone has been freaking out. So I wrote a blog post showing that, based on a bunch of other indicators, Grand Rapids (the city) is probably doing no worse than the country as a whole. Sometimes being a government documents librarian is explaining where numbers are from and that they aren't as simple as they might seem.