It’s hard to believe I’m already half way through the week. But at least I have a new coffee grinder, purchased at the very odd Shopko, and I got to have my coffee immediately upon waking. Life is much better that way.
8.15 – Arrived at work and checked the emails and RSS feeds, as per usual. Now that email from the Innovative Users Group listserv is filtered into a separate folder, I tend to forget to read it, so I had about 25 messages in there this morning. Nothing pertaining to any immediate problems we’re having, but I like to skim them to get a general sense of what people are encountering as they use the same ILS.
8.45 – Started loading more Serials Solutions records. Each batch of 1000 takes about 10 minutes, so this can be a very time consuming process. I found all the back issues of Computers in Libraries in the stacks to peruse while these are uploading. And all the issues were out of order, so I, of course, had to re-order them. We only have up to March 2009 in the stacks, so the more recent issues must be out on people’s desks. I scanned through the issue on selecting an ILS vendor while records uploaded.
10.45 – Nearly done loading new Serials Solutions records when my supervisor and the cataloger came in to talk about the suddenly-full-of-duplicates Heading Report. We talked about why there are duplicate records: Something I assumed was set up for a reason is, as it turns out, not. Contacted Serials Solutions to find out about changing our Customizations and having a new set of records created. Deleting all SS records again. Reminded by my supervisor that I should question everything and, as he puts it, probably consider “blowing everything out of the water” and starting over.
11.45 – Finished re-creating our Customization Form. But now I have to figure out how to change our customized load profile in the ILS, and that I think I’m not supposed to do on my own. Time to contact III.
1.00 – Headed to the Washington State Office of Licensing to get my WA drivers license. Apparently, they don’t really have the equivalent of a DMV here–you go to the licensing office to get your drivers license and the County Auditor’s office to register your car. Convenient. Back in the office at 2, which is way faster than it would have been were I in the MA Registry of Motor Vehicles.
2.00 – Contacted the guys in the registrar’s office about a project we’re working on to load patron records into the ILS, rather than keying every new student by hand, which is how it’s being done now. We really don’t want to be doing that anymore.
2.30 – Researching the possibility of having multiple searchable call number fields in bibliographic records in the ILS. This doesn’t seem to be a problem at all: The call number field is repeatable, and it looks like it will be indexed no matter how many times it occurs, so we can have as many call numbers as we want. I think.
3.00 – Final tweaking to the library PR document, incorporating more of the library’s mission statement.
3.30 – Loading the remaining 6,000 Serials Solutions records while we wait for our changes to be made on the vendor side, at which time I will delete them all over again and reload. Lesson learned? If I suspect something should be done differently, I should ask before I start doing it the way it has always been done, because chances are we really should start doing things differently. That’s a way better lesson than the reverse. I think I’m going to like it here.
4.45 – Right before I left I got a message from the archivist that my apparent solution to the multiple call number situation was incorrect. Looked into it and realized the call numbers he was talking about were in a different MARC tag field than the call numbers I was talking about. Will have to look more deeply into the situation tomorrow. Thank god for my Cataloging class, and the wonderful Candy Schwartz, for helping me to actually understand what the heck I’m looking at!
Headed to the gym, headed home, made spicy pepper tacos (and burned my face off after touching my face with peppery hands). Weeded and watered the lawn. Now I’m updating the other blog, and then I will probably start reading Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire before heading to bed, to prepare for another day as a newly minted librarian.