Librarian by Day » librarydayinthelife

Library Day in the Life Round 7 Will Run July 25th through the 31st #libday7

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:58:58 +0000

It’s hard to believe but Round 7 of Library Day in the Life Project will run July 25th through the 31st.

What is the Library Day in the Life Project?

It’s a chance to share your day, or week, with other librarians and hopefully the public at large. It started when I come discovered someone had searched “What’s a librarian’s day like” to find my blog so I wrote a blog post suggesting that we blog what we do all day at work. Then we (and maybe patrons) could see what we do all day. Some people blogged a day, others like me blogged a week. Then it took off.. Last round there were just under 250 people signed up on the wiki. There were over 800 people participating via Twitter. It has grown to be an international project with participants from the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, France, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore. Participants are from academic, public, college, special, school libraries, professional organizations and library vendors. Thanks to Emma Cragg and Katie Birkwood it was mentioned in an article in The Guardian.

How do you participate?

Go to the wiki
Create an account (it’s free), carefully read the instructions for adding your content.
On the 24th start recording your day or week.
Bloggers, Flickr & YouTube users tag your posts with librarydayinthelife. Twitters use the #libday7
Add your Flickr photos or videos to the Group on Flickr and/or join the Facebook Page

You don’t have to write a blog post or tweet, you can document your day with words or photos or video or a handwritten love note or a cartoon.

Why should you participate? Meredith Farkas offers an excellent explanation of why she did. The Project has turned into a great resource for students, instructors, staff and patrons.

Need some inspiration?

Check out entries from previous years.

Check out this amazing video Ned Potter created for Round 6

Browse the photos on the Flickr pool.

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Library Day in the Life Project In The Guardian #libday6 #echolib

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:19:48 +0000

I was thrilled to discover the Library Day in the Life Project was mentioned in a recent article in The Guardian for a couple of reason. First it awesome to see it mentioned in The Guardian!

Second, Emma Cragg and Katie Birkwood have written a great article highlighting what it takes to be a librarian today. Beyond books: What It Takes to be a 21st century Librarian: From Connecting With People to Keeping Up With the Latest Technologies, There is a Whole Lot More to the Job Than Stamping Due Dates:

As well as being good communicators with people and active adopters and exploiters of technological developments, librarians need to have detailed specialist subject knowledge to pass on to library users. Librarians provide training to show people how to search for information and evaluate what they find. These information skills sessions are now expanding to include digital literacies such as how to stay safe online, the use of social media sites and online collaboration tools.

Third, The article also includes mention of Ned Potter’s Library Routes Project which accepting participants, so if you haven’t blogged your library route or roots do it today!

The idea is to document either or both of your library roots – how you got into the profession in the first place, and what made you decide to do so – and your library routes – the career path which has taken you to wherever you are today. As well as being interesting of itself, it will also provide much needed information and context for those just entering the profession or wishing to do so..

Fourth, the article is a great example of librarians and The Library Day in the Life Project escaping the Echo Chamber in libraryland.

Well done Emma, Katie and Ned!Similar Posts:

What is Library Day in the Life and You Should Participate #libday6

Bobbi Newman — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:20:59 +0000

The Fabulous Librarian (and fashionista, seriously. she has awesome fashion sense) Daenel over at Living Outside the Stacks created this video explaining the project and why she’ll be participating next week. Check it out!

Not only is the video a great intro to the project Daenel has a lot of followers (both on her blog and on Twitter) who are not librarians, so the project is escaping the echo chamber (echolib). Awesome! Thank you Daenel!

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Library Day in the Life Round 6 Begins January 24th 2011

Bobbi Newman — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:40:18 +0000

It’s hard to believe but Round 6 of Library Day in the Life Project will run January 24th through the 30th.

What is the Library Day in the Life Project? It started when I come discovered someone had searched “What’s a librarian’s day like” to find my blog so I wrote a blog post suggesting that we blog what we do all day at work. Then we (and maybe patrons) could see what we do all day. Some people blogged a day, others like me blogged a week. I did a week because I felt like I have no average day so a week would better represent what I do.

If you are wondering why you should participate Meredith Farkas offers an excellent explanation of why she did. The Project has turned into a great resource for students, instructors, staff and patrons.

You don’t have to write a blog post, you can document your day with words or photos or tweets or a handwritten love note or a cartoon.

How do you participate?

Go to the wiki
Create a PB Wiki (pbworks?) account (it’s free)!
Add your name, your job title (so we can see what you do at a glance) and a link to your blog. Ater you’ve documented your day or week go back to the wiki and add a direct link it
On the 24th start recording your day or week.
Bloggers, Flickr & YouTube users tag your posts with librarydayinthelife. Twitters use the #libday6
Add your Flickr photos or videos to the Group on Flickr and/or join the Facebook Page.

Similar Posts:

Library Day in the Life Round 5 at a Glance #libday5

Bobbi Newman — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:40:13 +0000

I took the transcripts from What the Hashtag until about 12:00 today stripped out RT, library, librarians and day and this is the results.

For this one I took the usernames, stripped out spam and me, removed underscores so usernames wouldn’t get broken up.

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Round 5 of Library Day in the Life!

Bobbi Newman — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:20:14 +0000

July 26th 2010 will start Round 5 of Library Day in the Life Project.

What is the Library Day in the Life Project? well it started with this post suggesting that we blog what we do all day at work. Libraries are changing so rapidly and we all know no ones is reading books, despite what the public may think The idea being that you’re sharing an average day, so many of us don’t have an average day though so a lot of people did a week, me included. I maybe just do a day this time though, we’ll see.

So how do you particpate?

Go to the wiki
Create a PB Wiki (pbworks?) account (it’s free)!
Add your name, your job title (so we can see what you do at a glance) and a link to your blog.
On the 27th start recording your day or week. It doesn’t have to be a blog post it can be photos, podcasts or videos
Tag your posts, pictures, videos, podcasts with librarydayinthelife.
After you’ve finished your first day come go back to the wiki and edit your link to link directly to your tagged blog posts, videos or photos.
Of course read along!

CC image courtesy of dev null on FlickrSimilar Posts:

Thank You to Everyone Who Participated in Library Day in the Life #libday4

Bobbi Newman — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:05:24 +0000

I rescued this email from my Spam folder last night. How awesome is it that someone made this & sent it? So to everyone who participated in anyway, every way – Thank you!Similar Posts:

Day 2 in the Life of a Librarian #libday4

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:54:19 +0000

View from the stage at Kiwanis

I took these notes today as part of The Day in the Life project, if you would like to read more please see the wiki, if you’re interested in how it all got started read this post

My title is Digital Branch Manager, I work for system that serves 4 counties with 8 branches (9 counting mine).
7:00 overslept despite having my alarm on. I check it, yes on, no idea why it didn’t go off. This throws my whole day off because I have no time to
8:15 review Kiwanis presentation
9:45 attempt to track down a kindle to take with me for Kiwanis presentation
10:00 make note to redo library’s overdrive page
10:15 panic when I think I lost my library card
10:16 find my library card
10:30 provide new cellphone recommendation for my mom – work is making her upgrade her blackberry
11:15 print handouts for Kiwanis
11:30 Meet head of Popular materials in the lobby to ride with her
1:45 back to the library
2:00 downstairs to get a demo library card
2:15 talk with director about midwinter
3:00 attempting to record instructions of loading Overdrive ebooks on to Nook & Sony eReader,
4:00 run into issues with Nook and begin researching, problem (more later)
4:45 chat briefly with coworker about plans for staff day
5:00 Back to Nook issues
6:00 downstairs to drop off magazines and chat with Head of Reference on my way out.
7:00 exit building
8:00 home, make dinner, walk dogs, watch Castle

Also done but time(s) not noted – remove spam from the Day in the Life wiki, curse jerks who are posting it & remove access, check in on Twitter, glance at facebook briefly, answer emails and update websiteSimilar Posts:

Day in the Life – Monday 1/25/2010 #libday4

Bobbi Newman — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:06:04 +0000

I took these notes today as part of The Day in the Life project, if you would like to read more please see the wiki, if you’re interested in how it all got started read this post

My title is Digital Branch Manager, I work for system that serves 4 counties with 8 branches (9 counting mine).

In the morning before work with coffee in hand I turn on my PC to check Facebook, Twitter & my gmail account.

I see a trackback to my transliteracy page so I check out the post, Sunday Night Ponderance from Andy Woodworth. I leave a comment with my 2 cents and resolve to finish the new transliteracy slideshow by the end of the week so I can post it next Monday.

I proof read my post on the echo chamber, set to publish later in the day.

First thing I do at work is review my notes from last Friday and create the day’s to-do list.
I then proceed to:

update the website including adding job seekers page, created by staff
hand out monkeys
email director about borrowing her nook to make videos on using ebooks
check on day in the life – wow! holy hash tag on twitter!
work on Kiwanis club presentation for Tuesday. 15 minutes to talk about digital services.
answer a lot of emails
sketch out plans to do screen-casts of downloading Overdrive ebooks & eaudiobooks
turn in an invoice to be paid

At 3:30 I’m driven home by terrible headache blame attempts to kick my diet pepsi habit. I rest until 6:30 then time to get back to it. I put the tea kettle on and:

check gmail, answer & send emails
response to blog comments
peruse #libday4 tag on twitter, realize so many people are participating there is no way I can keep up and respond to all of them.
looked a pool on flickr
looked at Davids post on foursquare. Realize despite having no interest in anyone knowing exactly where I am ever, I should check it out. I sign up for an account and install it on my Pre. It can’t find my location. awesome. I give up and get back to work on my presentation for Kiwanis.
chat with another libraryland person about the connection between place of employment and personal blogs.
chat with a different person about upcoming interview & give what tips I can
text back and forth with yet another person about transliteracy

At 10 I turn off the computer and phone and put in some down time before bed.Similar Posts:

Why did you particpate in the Library Day in the Life Project?

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:03:16 +0000

Was is self promoting narcissism? Desire to share the most boring mundane details of your life with others (wake up, make coffee)? Or something else.

Sarah Faye Cohen shares why she didn’t participate and she’s wondering why others did. A legitimate question, actually one I’m curious about myself. The first two rounds of Library Day in the Life were small, I think less than 30 people total, then somehow this one took off, I’m not sure if it was David’s post or the mention on LISnews or what, but all of a sudden there were loads of people I’d never interacted with doing it (over 200 last count). Whoa. Awesome. Scary. Exciting.

I can’t speak to why everyone did it but I can speak for myself.

“who we are writing these memes for.”

Well, the whole thing started because I look at my blog stats and the search terms used to bring people there, the most popular ones were: librarian’s day, what it like to be librarian, what’s it like to work as a librarian, you get the idea. I assumed, because how could I know, that these were searches done by people considering librarianship or just curious. So I thought I should blog my days, give the people what they want right? But there are so many of us doing so many things, my days wouldn’t be a good representation, so I tried to start the meme. I didn’t give it a lot thought, I just picked some people doing new and interesting things and linked to them. I hoped people would share what they did and give insight into all different aspects of libraryland and they did!

So I wrote this meme for the people who wonder what a librarian’s day is like. Who are those people? I don’t know, I generally don’t ask patrons why they want information, I just give it to them.

I wrote the meme for myself too. I wanted to know what other librarians were doing, there are so many new exciting positions out there, I wanted to know how are they spending their time? I’m selfish like that.

After the first round I got a lot of email from professors, librarians and lots of other people saying what a great resource it is. Lets face it if you’re considering being a librarian today there aren’t a lot of resources for you, the last book is from 2003 and my job didn’t even exist in 2003. I’ll admit some of the blog posts are more informative than others and I’ll be suggesting a better format if there is another round. But over all it accomplishes what I’d hoped for; a wide range of library people, not just MLS holding librarians you don’t have to have an MLS to work in a library, writing about their average day.

She next says:

But this meme leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth in part because I don’t see the meme itself having a role in our relevance, or our creativity, or out sociality (is that a word?!).

Who says that was the point? There are a lot of people working hard on our relevance, creativity and our sociality, I like to think I’m one of them. But the purpose of the meme was to share what our average days were like, with each other, with students, with potential library workers everywhere. It did that. Doing this meme didn’t stop me from working on our relevance, creativity or sociality, and in face it might have helped me do those things better. I understand Sarah and Amanda’s point, but you can be talking about something AND doing it at the same time, the acts are not mutually exclusive, but that’s another blog post.

I could go on and on but in I think Meredith Farkas has written a reply that covers most of what I’d say and I’m sure she’s written it better than I could.

But at the end of the day, in a nut shell, why did I do? Because its my blog and I could.Similar Posts: