All Good Things Must Come to An End

Every story comes to an end.  I haven’t been posting much at all because life and work have totally trumped blogging. I wish I could have found more time to write about the library-related thoughts that have been swirling around in my head these past few months, but I just didn’t have it in me.  For this reason, and another that I shall reveal in a moment, I have decided to end Circ & Serve.  I really feel strongly about ending something once it feels like it is over, and really with the lack of new content here, this is over.

The other reason behind this decision:  I am very pleased to announce that I have accepted the position as Assistant Dean of the University Library at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.  I begin my new position there on October 1st.  My last day at NCSU Libraries is September 3rd.

This was a difficult decision to make as I have enjoyed my time at NCSU.  The four years I’ve spent here have been an incredible learning experience.  I learned something every day from every person I had the good fortune to work alongside.  It is an incredible library and I will always be grateful for the opportunities I had while here.

I am tremendously excited about joining the library at Pacific.  I loved everything I felt and saw while there.  The campus community is incredible.  The library is doing fantastic work and is committed to providing the best services possible to students, faculty, staff and the community.  My new colleagues have gone out of their way in making me feel welcome and I can’t wait to begin collaborating with them.  While my work will still involve oversight of access & delivery services, my portfolio will expand  and I “will work with University Library administration, staff, and faculty in the development and implementation of effective management strategies and innovative collections, services, and programs, across all areas of the Library, to provide the best user-centered environment for the Pacific Community.” I am thrilled.

So, I’m moving to California!  Which is something I never, ever thought would happen, but in less than a month all of my belongings will be packed up and on a truck heading west.  It’s a new chapter in my life and I’m grateful to again have a wonderful opportunity.

Thank you to everyone who has read this blog and who have inspired it.  Thank you to everyone who I’ve met at conferences or meetings and have talked access services with these past 4 years.  And a big thank you to my staff and colleagues who have made me a better manager, leader and person than I was when I took this position 4 years ago.

I have been working in libraries for 11 years, 10 of those have been in access services and 8 of them have been as a department head.  I am very happy and looking forward to taking this next step in my career.  I’m sure it will be full of surprises and learning experiences!

Change is good…..for us too!

As managers we ask a lot of our staff.  We ask them to roll with changes in processes, services, work spaces, sometimes even the department or units they work in.  We ask this and expect them to receive it with grace, flexibility and a smile.  If you’re a good manager you’ve planned ahead and are offering the support and resources required to make changes like this successful and as pain-free as possible.  If you’re working in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment, you’re making these decisions fast, with little to no time to really plan ahead as thoroughly as you’d like.  More and more the latter seems to be the norm and that is fine, as long as we remember that we still need to provide resources, support and guidance to the people these decisions and changes affect.

So we ask a lot of our staff.  We ask for their patience.  Their understanding.  Their cooperation.  Calmness.  Flexibility.  Maturity.  The list goes on and on and on.  But what are we giving them in return?  What are we changing?  In my experience when we ask our staff to accept changes we expect a level of self-awareness and actualization in order to make the process successful.  We expect people to be able to articulate their needs and wants in order to make a transition go smoothly.  But are we asking the same level of self-awareness from ourselves?  Are we moving outside of our comfort zone?  Are we adapting our management styles and strategies to respond to the constantly changing needs and wants of our staff, our patrons, our libraries?

It is very easy to find ourselves in a rut.  We stick with what works.  What is comfortable.  What we know well.  Unfortunately, what worked last year or last month or last week or Hell, what worked yesterday, may not be what is going to work today and tomorrow.  Can we recognize that?  Better yet, once we recognize it, can we make the changes?

We tell our staff that change is good.  Change is necessary.  Change is constant.  But are we walking that walk?

I feel like I’ve gotten off track the past 7 months.  I’m stuck in a rut.  This is me admitting that I need to change my approach to certain management issues.  This past week reminded me of the type of manager I strive to be.  It also made me realize that I got so caught up in one aspect of management that I lost sight of the big picture and the larger goal.  I’ve been thinking about this all week.  More importantly I’ve been asking questions and listening to the answers I’ve been getting.  I’m taking this information and doing a bit of a self-inventory.  Standing in front of the mirror and taking a look at things from a different angle.  I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t room for improvement.  I’d also be a terrible manager if I thought everything looked great.

My point is this: change *is* good.  For everyone.  Including those of us in charge.  Great managers and leaders are constantly examining how they approach challenges and obstacles.  This does not mean you have to change your values or beliefs, but you may have to change how you embody them.

We all know that people change.  Yet we forget that fact when we manage performance.  Here is my reminder to myself of that fact.  It is also a recommitment to my staff.  As you all strive to do better, so will I.  Together we will do great things.

When Life Changes Hurt

I’ve not been posting a lot lately because life has trumped blogging more than usual.  My grandmother (Nannie) passed away last Tuesday night.  It was the end of a long 6 months of rapidly declining mental and physical health.  The truth is, my Nannie mostly left us this past summer.  Her mental state was quickly deteriorating along with her physical health.  Regardless of whether she was having a “good” or “bad” day, she never forgot who I was and always smiled when she saw me.  I was fortunate that even though I live almost 600 miles away from my family, I was able to see Nannie several times before she passed and while she was in relatively good health.

My Nannie was the center of our family.  She leaves behind two daughters, two son-in-laws, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.  She loved all of us very much and went out of her way to make everyone feel like they were a part of our family.  She was everything a grandparent should be and I am truly blessed to have had her in my life.

I had the honor and painful task of giving the eulogy at her funeral Thursday night.  I’d like to share it:

I feel very out-of-place as I am usually better prepared when I stand in front of a group of people to talk, but I was thinking about what I wanted to say and kept getting stuck, and then I would cry and ended up with nothing written.  In my thinking I always came back to the same thought:  Nannie taught me how to drive.  Nannie taught me how to drive because no one else would get in the car with me.  So for three years she let me drive to and from school every morning.  It’s funny because I didn’t even get my license until I was 21, but she still taught me.  What I don’t think anyone knows since I know I didn’t tell anyone, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t either; is that I almost got into my first car accident with her.  We were driving to school one morning, it was winter and the road was icy.  I lost control of the car and we went skidding off the side of the road almost hitting another car.  Luckily I managed to stop the car before we hit anything.  Now when we stopped I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly and then I bursted into tears because I was so afraid.  I turned and looked at Nannie and she was laughing hysterically at me.  And that is what I remember.  That she was silly.  I don’t think many of us think of her as silly, but she really was.

I work everyday with students and I have a large number of coworkers.  Sometimes we get into conversations about our families and I always sorta feel alien when the subject of grandparents comes up.  Most people talk about their grandparents in terms of people that they see maybe several times a year or monthly or maybe once a week.  It seems sort of unusual that Nannie was there everyday.  I am grateful and I feel very blessed that I had my grandmother in my life every day for 30 years.  Dad and I talked earlier today and we figured that she lived with us for at least 25 years.  Every day of those 25 years she was in my life.

Nannie taught us a lot of things:  Red birds are evil and mean something bad.  Newlyweds can’t make their own beds and someone whose father has passed can’t for them.  If you’re a maid of honor you must have a red ribbon shoved down your cleavage (I won’t talk about how I found that one out).  And our favorite: If you laugh on Sunday, you’ll cry on Monday. Well it’s Thursday and I’m crying. Lots of great things….but seriously….she taught me that your family is the most important thing you have.  No matter how frustrated or angry or upset they make you, they are still your family.  No matter what decisions they make, even the ones that you may not agree with (like moving to North Carolina or telling someone that you are actively praying that they don’t get that job in North Carolina) they are still your family and they love you.  She also taught us to treat everyone like family.  I am reminded of how when I was younger I’d have sleepovers and she would make breakfast for all of us, telling my friends to call her Nannie.  She treated everyone like a member of our family.  Even if you weren’t you were treated that way – sometimes better than those of us who were family.

People talk about unconditional love and they usually refer to the parent/child relationship, but I really think that if you want to see the true definition of it, you should look no further than the grandparent/grandchild one.  She loved us unconditionally and let us do whatever we wanted.  All she wanted was for us to be happy.  She was very fortunate as she lived to see her children and grandchildren grow up and be happy and successful.  She was surrounded by love.

So she could be very silly.  She wrote me this card, which is really just half of a card because she recycled it.  But I know she sent it because the front is in the shape of a house.  She wrote this note on the back [reads note]..she was very sweet, but the real reason I kept this, aside from being a packrat, is because the house has windows on the top of it, like a second floor, and she drew a picture of herself looking out the window.  And that is how I will remember her – living upstairs from us.

When I called my boss to tell him I would be out this week, he must have called our director and let her know.  She sent me a very kind email and in it she said: “Great relationships between a grandparent and grandchild can be
difficult to continue into adulthood so those that do are so, so precious.  They provide great, great joy, but their loss brings a terrible grief.”  I’m 34 years old, so I guess I’m an adult, and I can tell you that what she said is correct- this is incredibly painful and I am so sad.

I love my grandmother very much.  I don’t know what else to say except that I miss her very much.  This is kind of morbid, but I can’t help laughing and thinking as I look at the pictures we hung, that there is one hell of a party going on up in Heaven.  Nannie is up there with her husband and her sisters and friends and family and I can’t help thinking that they are having a good time.  I’m sure they are eating really well and being very loud and possibly annoying the rest of the dead people.

I’m so grateful that I had her for as long as I did.  I love her very much.  I miss her.

I don’t usually get very personal in this space, but I feel like this is such a life changing event for me that I wanted to share it.  I absolutely equate her death to that of a parent.  My grandmother was everything to me and such a center of my family’s universe.  Sometimes situations like this change us.  I do feel a change, though I have not yet put my finger on it.  My attitude is definitely being adjusted – for the positive I believe.  I’m still processing all of my emotions, but I’m certain that they will manifest somehow in my attitude towards my work and my approach to management and service.

Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

I am the oldest of four children.  I have one sister who is three years younger than I am, and two female cousins, one 4 years and the second 10 years younger than myself.  I say that I am one of four because in grand, old school Italian style, our families (my mom and her sister) lived very close to one another and my grandparents.  We were raised as a four-pack and did everything together – vacations, birthdays, weekends, weekdays, after school, Sunday dinners, you name it, we did it together.  When I was 13 our grandmother moved into our house and still lives with my parents.  Us kids thought this was great because now we had Nannie’s cooking every night and she dropped us off and picked us up from school – no more bus.  This also meant that at any given time there were 5-8 people in our house.  It was fun, but insane, and very, very loud.

Sometimes stereotypes are so dead-on that you laugh when you read about them or see them portrayed in movies or on television.  The stereotype of the loud, everyone talking at once, everyone has an opinion, everyone’s opinion is correct, and whomever is the last one talking wins all happening around a table of food is very true, at least it was in my house.  If you put any stock in birth order, you’d know that first born children tend to be more conscientious, more socially dominant, less agreeable and less open to new ideas than later born children.  Add a huge dose of Italian upbringing and this pretty much summed up my personality up until I was 22 years old.  You could not tell me anything.  I had an opinion and you were going to hear it.  I was right, you were wrong and that was the end of the story.  It was my way or the highway.

I took this personality to college with me and surprisingly did very well.  I had my mind opened much more than I had before and became a more tolerant person.  I began college as pre-med.  I wanted very much to be a doctor, but life had other plans for me and after my sophomore year, I transferred schools and found myself as a history major.  I graduated and then on the suggestion of a librarian I worked with, decided to go to library school.  She swore up and down that I would be a “fantastic librarian.”  I am still not sure if she was correct, but I am enjoying figuring it out.

This seems like a very long winded story and way to talk about stepping outside your comfort zone, but there is a point I promise to make.  Being a doctor would have been a great job for me and my domineering personality.  I wanted to be an ER doc, which would have been fantastic since I could bark out orders and work in a high stress environment.  But, that did not happen.  What did happen was during my first year of graduate school I accepted a management position at the library.

Looking back on that time, I can safely say that I was not a glowing success in that position.  I actually had a supervisor tell me that they thought my personality was not suited for management and that I tended to get very upset when I did not get my way.  I wish I could say that I disagreed with that assessment, but I knew then and I know now, that was a dead-on appraisal of my management skills.

When I accepted my first professional position I made a promise to myself that I would work on developing my management skills.  There was not a lot of opportunity to attend formal professional development classes for this, but I found ways that I could improve my skills.  I started very simply, I listened to other people.  I really listened.  I considered other people’s opinions.  I worked on having better discussions about projects or issues.  I engaged others.  And, more often than not, I took their advice or suggestions and put them into practice.  I also learned how to accept criticism and feedback.  I learned to listen to it and accept it with grace and then work on improving the problem.  When receiving criticism and feedback I practiced what I like to call “generous listening.”  To me, that meant remaining calm, not interrupting, not arguing, asking for clarification or suggestions, and then thinking about what I was just told.

Do I need to explain how difficult this was for me to do?  Me, the gal who won every argument by yelling the loudest.  The one who would sit at a table of 10 people who were all talking at once and was still heard.  The oldest child who’s way of doing things was always the right way.

The point I am getting at, rather circuitously, is that doing that self-reflection and work was difficult and at times extremely uncomfortable.  Being honest with yourself, the type of honest where you admit you have faults, is painful.  However, it is also invaluable to our development and improvement and when you are committed to changing, the results can be life changing.

Being a good manager requires constant self-assessment.  It requires adapting to your environment and those who you are interacting with on a daily basis.  Learning how to communicate.  Discovering how to motivate people.  Realizing what you are doing that may be ineffective and sometimes damaging.  In short, it requires you to go outside your comfort zone on a continual basis.

The good news is that once you regularly go outside your comfort zone it starts to become familiar and comfortable.

An interesting side note: the three remaining in my four-pack (my sister and two cousins) all became teachers….and married teachers.  I find it funny because the classroom, at least as I remember it, is not a democracy.  You do what the teacher tells you.  This is even more funnier after I tell you that they are all math teachers.  There are no gray areas in math. The answer is either right or wrong.  This is the perfect place for our types of personalities.  I’ve been a manager for almost ten years.  When I come home for holidays, events or vacations and we are all together (now our numbers seem to have doubled) I get teased because I am the “quiet one” who “never argues” anymore.  I just smile and tell them that I am listening to them. 🙂

ALA 2008: Let the Recovery Begin!

I returned from Anaheim last night and plan on spending the next four days recovering and digging out from email. This was my first ALA annual conference and it lived up to my expectations of being somewhat chaotic, overwhelming, fun filled, loud and large, and most importantly a great opportunity to meet all sorts of wonderful people.

Like all trips it helps if you have a travel companion who likes to have fun and laugh a lot, Maurice York (get a web presence already!!!!) was mine and he kept me laughing the whole week. The funniest part of the whole trip is now being home seeing people’s pictures from the conference taken at events that we both were at, and only seeing him in them. I have no idea how I did it, but I pretty much avoided all photographic evidence of my existence and attendance. Kinda funny because that never happens to me.

My schedule was sort of all over the place. I didn’t do a lot of pre-planning, I just sort of knew the few places I needed to be and then flew by the seat of my pants. My biggest criticism about the conference itself is the insane overbooking. There were so many concurrent sessions that I wanted to attend and in the end had to make some tough decisions. I wish there was a little less happening at the same time.

A couple of thoughts and observations before I give my blow by blow account:

1. I know everyone who knows me is going to roll their eyes as they read this, but I am really not a great social extrovert when I first meet people or don’t know anyone at all. ALA was a bit intimidating at times because I found myself in social situations where I knew people (through blogs or twitter), but wasn’t entirely sure they knew me and I always feel like such a dork when that happens. There were many people who really went out of their way to make me feel warm and welcomed or took the time to share a lot of laughs (Paul Sharpe and Meredith Farkas I am looking at you). Everyone I met and hung out or chatted with was wonderful. I would go just to hang out with great people.

2. Twitter is where it is at! So much being twittered, so many twitter folk everywhere. Although I was unable to make it to either of the two Tweet-ups, it was so great to put names with faces. Librarians love to Twitter and following the conference happenings via Twitter was great.

3. Web presence in general is important. I witnessed so many “I love what you wrote!” or “I read your blog/twitter feed/live journal, etc…” that it is becoming apparent that a lot of great networking is facilitated through having some sort of online presence.

4. For reasons that I rather not blog about, I paid particularly more attention to my health and wellbeing at this conference. For me that meant going back to my hotel room and crashing as early as 9:30pm if necessary. If I didn’t get the chance to see or hang out with you, I apologize. I was trying to be kind to myself this trip. A first for me.

And now onto the details:

Thursday, June 26:
Arrived in Anaheim at around 11:30am. Checked into hotel, laughed that we were staying in a castle. Went out to look for food. Managed to find food choices and a large number of places to purchase alcohol, including the gift shop of our hotel. Bonus! Met up with friend and had wonderfully delicious dinner at Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion. Since I don’t eat seafood, I chose the braised short ribs. They were fantastic. Sake was excellent and all tales tell that the seafood was also quite tasty.

Friday, June 27:
I spent all day Friday in the Emerging Leaders pre-conference meeting and poster session. I know a lot of people have been waiting to hear my opinion on the Emerging Leaders program. I loved my project group. They were great to work with, fun to laugh with and had wonderful attitudes and personalities. It was a pleasure working with them this year and I think we really pulled off a great project. As for the program itself, I think it is a really good idea, but it has not found the right implementation. Our group had very minimal interaction with our mentor and our project was sorta undefined. We ended up creating what we thought it should be, and in the end it turned out great and got a good deal of positive feedback, but it was not the experience I expected. If anything, I walked away, particularly after Leslie Burger’s session with the ELs, that the upper echelons of ALA have no clue about the reality of being a new librarian.

After being sprung from the EL all day session, I met up with Maurice and we headed over to the LITA happy hour. It was held at the Hotel Menage- the farthest hotel from the convention center. We were troopers and hoofed it although I was fairly certain a tragedy was going to occur when trying to cross the freeway on-ramp. Once there I met up with a bunch of awesome folks and had a few drinks before finding Maurice again and heading out to dinner at Mccormicks. Then walked back to hotel and passed out.

Saturday, June 28:
I love committee meetings at 8am. It is the best part of the conference. I drug myself out of bed to make it to several committee meetings. I ran into my boss by the convention center and chatted with him for awhile, texted Maurice to let him know that I was still alive after narrowly avoiding a large disaster, and then made my way to some sessions. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about RFID in large libraries. I filed all of that info away in the hopes that when I need to think about it in the next year it will magically reappear.

I then attended what I thought was the best session I went to all conference, “Stretching Existing Staff: New Service Delivery Models.” This was a panel presentation featuring librarians from the San Jose PL, Queens PL, Richland County (SC) PL, and the Atlanta-Fulton PL. The topic was delivering library services and rethinking service delivery models without an increase in staff. This was so great and so on my mind lately. The level of enthusiasm from the speakers was palpable and they are all doing such wonderful things in their organizations. It was just the kind of shot in the arm that I needed to hear. I tip my hat to all of them.

After breaking for lunch I attended a session on library space design and redesign. It was a bit dry, but very informative. Lots to think about and keep in the back of my head for the coming building project we are currently in at MPOW.

After that session I headed back to my hotel for a nap before dinner. I wasn’t feeling so great and the quick nap helped. I went out to dinner with a former colleague and an eclectic group of librarians, OCLC folk and a vendor or two. It was this total hole in the wall Mexican restaurant and the only thing more eclectic than the guest list at dinner was the menu at the restaurant – beef stroganoff? chicken teriyaki? Need I say more?????? The food was excellent and the 8 pitchers (you read that right) were delicious. Fortunately our hotel was right next door so no long walking involved in order to get back to the room and sleep.

Sunday, June 29:
Made it to my committee meeting and then met up with Maurice at convention center. This would be the moment in my conference experience where I would begin to refer to myself as “Maurice’s Bag Bitch.” Because when you travel with three laptops, someone has to keep an eye on them all and that is what I did for the rest of the trip. I watched him prep for the Top Tech Trends panel while sitting in the back of the room chatting with Meredith and Adam and then stayed for the presentation. This was my first TTT and I enjoyed it. It was interesting to hear what everyone had to say, and I liked watching the activity in the chatroom and reading comments on twitter. I did feel that the chatroom was a bit distracting from time to time, but it worked. Maurice did an excellent job as moderator (he got the biggest laughs of the afternoon). My only criticism was that I would have liked to see a bit more enthusiasm and sense of humor from the panel. I tend to really enjoy sessions where I feel the presenters love what they are doing and talking about. That was lacking a bit for me, but overall I think it was a success.

I then hung out in the room, being the best Bag Bitch ever, until the LITA President’s Program with Joe Janes began. He was excellent. A very dynamic speaker. Very optimistic and positive. He was able to chide just a little bit without being painful. His take home message was dead-on: we need to do better in the online environment. Lots of great thoughts and ideas to think about as we go into our building process. I am so glad I attended this session.

I followed that up with a trip upstairs to the OCLC Blogger’s Salon where I met up with lots of names I recognized from the blogosphere and Twitter. It was great to put names to faces and have some laughs and good conversation. We then made the greatest escape ever with some pals and had dinner at the Marriott.

Monday, June 30:
I needed to catch up on my sleep, so I slept in a bit. Headed out for lunch and then visited the exhibit hall. After spending almost two hours in there we hit the mother load for history geeks. A small press, whose name escapes me at the moment and whose receipt I don’t have in front of me, was selling their editions of American historical documents and literature at ridiculously low prices. For example, Maurice purchased the entire US constitution and related documents, a 5 volume set, for $30. I purchased the entire Federalist for $5. We spent about $70 for what was probably well over $350 worth of books. We did exactly what we said we wouldn’t which was buy a ton of books, but at those prices we could not refuse. I also bought the greatest children’s book I have ever seen for $3 from a publisher who sold it to me on the sly. I literally pulled out 3 dollar bills and she was like take it!

Then Maurice went to the UPS store to ship our treasure home and I met up with a director friend of mine for a drink in the Hilton bar. 45 minutes later, Maurice joined us, regaled us with his adventure in the line at the UPS store, and then we went back to the hotel before meeting up with friends for dinner at Buca. Dinner was great, I was exhausted from walking all over the place, so it was back to the hotel and bed for me.

Tuesday, July 1:
We took a little trip out to Cal State Northridge with one of our colleagues to see their ASRS (Automated Storage and Retrieval System) and the library. In order to get there we rented a car and ended up with a convertible because that was all that was available. This was my first time in a convertible and unless the next time is in Alaska at night, I will never do it again. The sun and LA traffic do not make for a fun ride in a convertible. The folks at Northridge were very friendly and they have a very nice library. Tons and tons of public computing, very impressive. It took us almost 90 minutes to get back and we needed to get ready for the Inaugural Ball that night. Maurice and I were attending in support of our former colleague, Andrew Pace, becoming the president of LITA. We had a lot of fun. Librarians and dancing is always a treat. The “band shouldn’t play to an empty room” rule was in full effect and we totally closed that party down. It was the most fun I have had in a while and I laughed till I almost passed out. Upon returning to my room after midnight, I quickly did pass out in anticipation of getting picked up by our airport shuttle in 5 hours.

We spent all day Wednesday on planes and in airports. I was pretty much cranky and delirious by the time we were picked up. I plan on using the next couple of days to recover and get back on Eastern standard time (so far it is not working).

This was my first ALA and it was a tremendous amount of fun. I owe Mo a big thanks for being the best partner in crime ever, and I am glad that my Bag Bitch services came in handy. I want to thank everyone I met and talked to. It was great to meet so many wonderful people. It feels so weird being home and not surrounded by hundreds of librarians. Even though I am exhausted, I feel inspired and rather optimistic about the profession and all the good things that are to come. Thanks for being awesome, everyone!

A Day In the Life…For real!

I sort of kept an activity log for Monday. My Monday resembled this:

8:20am: arrive at work

8:20-8:30am: talk to day supervisor about the morning and what was happening that day

8:30-10:00am: revised position descriptions, scheduled three meetings, updated gaming tournament, worked on poster for conference, read and responded to email.

10:00am-11:30am: met with department librarians for weekly meeting, worked on position descriptions, talked about activities, problems, planned services.

11:30-12:00: ran back and forth between office and circ desk to solve some patron problems and discuss strategy with circ/reserves supervisor.

12:00-1:00: continued working on position descriptions, conference poster, fielded staff issues, scheduled another meeting.

1:00-2:00: met with my supervisor to discuss issues, items, etc.

2:00-2:30: read and replied to email, met briefly with asst. dept. head and circ/reserves supervisor to address a problem with schedule.

2:30-3:30: met with colleague to discuss and arrange travel plans for ALA mid-winter, modified my hotel reservation, re-worked travel request form. Talked on phone with microform reader/scanner vendor and then with campus purchasing department. Phoned security supervisor about shuttle service and set up meeting.

3:30-5:30: finished first drafts of position descriptions, worked on committee charge, set up committee meeting, finished conference poster. Worked on statistics. Checked in with circ/reserve desk and ILL staff. Read and replied to email.

This was actually a pretty light day, as it was not back to back meetings. But, it was long and I got a lot accomplished. It was hard to capture all the informal, “in-between” meeting with various staff that takes place all day. If I listed every time I was asked a question or needed to make a decision, it would be a very long list.

I’ll probably do this again in a few weeks. I hope it was somewhat helpful.

Tag, I’m it!

I just realized that I have been tagged with the 8 Random Things meme by Chris over at Fifth Law.  Since he asked, here are my answers:

1. I have an embarrassingly large collection of True Crime novels.  I wish I had a good reason for the collection other than it is a guilty pleasure, but I don’t.  I just like reading them.
2. My favorite movies are “All About Eve,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Doctor Zhivago,” and “Phantom of the Paradise.”  Favorite TV shows: “Lost,” “Scrubs,” “South Park,” “Daily Show,” “Colbert Report,” “Penn & Teller’s Bullshit,” and “Top Chef.”  Favorite book: Pride & Prejudice.
3. I will just about obsessively collect anything I think is cute, cool or fun.  I am not a weekend collector, I am full throttle.  I will have all I can find.  This is probably a bad trait.  My collections include: bobble-head dolls, lunch boxes, seven inch records, yarn (this serves a dual purpose obviously), paper (stationary, which does get used a lot),  and movie memorabilia.
4. I think the Muppet Show is still one of the greatest television shows ever created.  Spider Jerusalem is my favorite comic book hero and I think Dr. Cox from Scrubs is the mac-daddy.
5. When I am not working, sleeping or eating, I am most likely knitting.  It is one of my favorite things to do and it helps me burn up all of my nervous energy.  However, you won’t find me knitting during presentations at conferences because even though I know it helps me pay attention and stay focused, I believe that it may be perceived as rude.
6. I hate flying.  I have an intense fear of it and I will drive over fly any day.  If I can drive there in 15 hours or less, I will.
7. I sing in the car, shower,  my office, kitchen, etc.  I don’t care what I sound like, I just do it.  Sometimes there are hand gestures and possibly some dancing included.
8.  I have a handbag problem.  Currently, I have almost an entire walk-in closet devoted to storing them.  I will change my handbag every day to match an outfit and I usually buy one everytime I go shopping.

I am going to tag anyone who stumbles across this and reads it.  The next post will be about all the reasons I am not going to ALA next week – it will be full of snark and hopefully a couple of ideas will spring from it.