Aye right
A day in the life of a library: Thursday
Me: Gill
Working as: Systems Librarian
At: National Library of Scotland (NLS)
- Arrive at work 0800, clutching coffee. Plug iPhone in to charge. Open email
- Remember from email I have to fix the rapid timeout problem on Signet Library OPAC. Try to fix OPAC. Use iPhone as alarm clock to test length of timeout. Can’t fix it. Decide to “sit on it” for a few hours awaiting telepathic transfer of answer from Voyager Technical manual to brain
- Our Unix engineer Dave wonders if NLS has the book Good Company Of course we do but coz it’s a national library can’t borrow it [sigh]. But the local city library has a copy (the building is 100 metres away) and I tell him I will pick it up for him after work.
Continue with the Digital Archive to Aquabrowser data mapping. This takes most of the day …..
- - prepare document that explains the fields we use for our Solr Indexing XML files
- - write document explaining the terminology and vocabularies we use in our Digital Archive. They include LCNAF, LCSH, TGM I, TGM II, TGN and AAT
- - tidy document that advises how to index key fields like title, place, year etc
- - correct document that explains how to map data to the Format, Author, Subject, Year facets
- - write rules advising how to ingest book collections and a separate rule for ingesting visual collections (photographs, posters, maps)
- - tell Meindert the Aquabrowser engineer that the records are available
- check Yammer - colleagues are quiet.
- check Twitter - colleagues are noisy with Repository Fringe #rf09 event in town. I have to temporarily UnFollow (you know who you are!) them.
- Edinburgh University having problems with their Voyager system after upgrade. Looks similar to problems we experienced last week (we upgraded too). Tell my colleague we has similar and their engineer fixes everything pronto.
- have Voyager upgrade debrief meeting with Information Systems team so we can fine tune our Upgrade checklist. We upgrade so infrequently (usually annually) we can never remember how to do it, so we keep an extensive checklist
- upload (during tea break obviously!) photo on my iPhone of dead seagull to Tumbler, Twitter etc. Don’t ask! OK, do ask! http://twitpic.com/c3zqw
- go see boss to get permission to renew annual travel business insurance.
- Print documents for Legal Deposit meeting with British Library tomorrow. We’ll be exploring metadata and resource discovery issues surrounding legal deposit of electronic materials.
- Colleague at Edinburgh Uni tells me how to fix timeout problems on OPACS. She’s genius and far superior and much nicer than a manual.
- Arrange pre-meeting for the above meeting in Library cafe tomorrow. Meetings like these always require ingestion of caffeine and cake beforehand!
Have lunch. Go on Facebook. Listen to Spotify. Take photo with iPhone of my Moo cards
-Have philosophical discussion (hardly) with colleagues about how we should record format of items in Digital Archive. All the items are digital representations of physical items. Decide we will indicate format of physical item e.g. photograph AND that all items in the Digital Archive will get additional format of Digital image
- Fret with my colleague Tony about the grouping / FRBR-zation of records refering to the same title from our website, Digital Archive and main catalogue in Aquabrowser. Come up with cunning plan!
- Write to do list for tomorrow:
- - buy business travel insurance
- - advise Director of progress on Flickr Commons
- - update Voyager upgrade check list
- - advise boss about newspaper project
- - finish the gazillion things I should have done today but didn’t have time for
- Unplug iPhone
- Go to public library to pick up Dave’s book
- Go home and write this while watching Primal Scream
