It’s hard to believe how fast this week has passed. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the momentum continues. And that my fingers stop burning from the peppers last night. Man, that stuff is potent.
8.15 – I got into the library this morning and found this hilarious video in my inbox. Embedding doesn’t seem to be working, but I don’t have time to troubleshoot that today. WordPress and video embedding always seem to have a funny relationship.
8.45 – Finished the Serials Solutions record update, Phase I, by doing a global change on the records so the location reads eLink. This project took much longer than I anticipated. I am not looking forward to doing it all over again, but at least I had time to read more CiL articles about library automation software and whatnot.
11 – Talked to the College IT department about some problems we’re having with one of our resources being routed through the proxy server. They have to set up an SSL certificate or some jazz, and we’ll also be upgrading to the next version of the proxy server and will need to test it. I am so, so glad I get to work with a competent IT staff. I certainly couldn’t figure all this stuff out on my own. At least not yet.
11.30 – Created a review file of archival finding aid records in the OPAC so we can delete the few that are currently in the system and replace them with a complete set of updated records. This seems to be a pattern this week.
12 – Lunch, and contemplation of what to cook for dinner when my co-worker comes over Saturday night. Indian food, perhaps? But that requires a lot of ingredients. Hm…
12.45 – Emailed a fellow consortium member about their solution to a problem that involves our consortium lending software, our LDAP server, and what to do with “adopted patrons.”
1 – Walked through our Summit/ILL workflow with our access services manager and a student worker. We recently switched to new software that apparently isn’t as streamlined as our previous software. I’d like, at some point, to make our various systems talk together more better, but that might be out of my hands or beyond my capabilities. We shall see. Summer months are slow here, so there wasn’t a ton to observe in Summit processing. But I feel like I have a better understanding of the process. As far as process goes, it’s much easier for me to understand it if I can see it in action.
1.15 – During a recent weeding project, there was a handful of bib records that couldn’t be deleted from the system, so my boss asked me to check them out. For some odd reason, the order records had to be set to status On Hold in order to delete them. Weird. But I did manage to delete them, and in the process find yet another book that I had to check out so I can read it immediately. The dangers of working in the library.
2.40 – Killed time before a meeting to read the emails to the IUG Listserv.
3 – Met with the archivist to talk about loading new finding aid records into the OPAC. I’m always interested in talking to him because he has some great and forward-thinking ideas about bringing together all the bits and pieces of information in the library, like digitized objects and metadata, to give all these bits context and make things more findable.
3.30 – Time to put my XML skillz to use (or at least find out if I actually gained any in my XML class last spring): The finding aids have to be converted from EAD XML to MARCXML and then to regular MARC before they can uploaded into our system. What would be awesome? If our system could deal with XML files. Hm, open standards. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could use them?
5 – Finished loading most of the finding aids into the system, except for two for which the conversion process from EAD to MARC failed. Remind self to tell the archivist about them, and also to ask him which location these records should be given. The 856 fields came over correctly, but no call numbers, so we’ll have to talk about that, too.
Very tempted to skip yoga tonight. It’s going to be about 700 degrees in my house and I really just want to read the Sex and the City book that’s in my bag, and have a beer. Quite wishing I could do that at the Jeanie, back in Boston, but alas, living across the country makes that a bit difficult.
Another varied day in which I’ve learned yet more stuff about this monster machine that runs our library. I’m still adjusting to working on Fridays, so I keep forgetting that I have to work tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll get used to that eventually, right?