How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
Bobbi Newman, Librarian by Day, sparked interesting conversation and action with her recent blog entry, encouraging librarians to describe a day in their professional life. Lori Reed and others have taken off with this idea and have created a wiki to help track the activities. Some people have already posted a log of their daily activity. I really like this one by Gina Persichini at the Idaho Commission for Libraries. Gina is a Networking Consultant. One of the things I am intrigued by is her creation of a daily to-do list on an index card. We have discussed time management here in the past (that was in response to a Librarian by Day post, too!). Here's what Gina says about her list:
7:45 AM ... "My to-do list has the 6 most important things I need to do today and was created before I left work yesterday. It is taped to the desk in front of my computer."
End of day ... "Made my to-do list index card for tomorrow (bright pink!)"
I like that she keeps it to six items, that she creates it the day before, and that it's on a hot pink index card ;) !
At the MaintainIT Project, we're all about capturing the stories of what librarians do in the field. We interview hundreds of librarians about their challenges and successes with public access computing. In addition to those interviews, I think it would be cool to do some sort of ethnographic study, where we spend time in libraries documenting the activities of an IT manager or a one-person librarian or any individual working in the library whose work involves public access computing. Reading Gina's blog record of her daily activities is an example of how we juggle so many things in our roles. What could we learn by even more carefully documenting that over time? ... about time management? about best practices?
If you would be interested in sharing a day (or week) in your life, check out the Library Day in the Life wiki and add your name to the growing list!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tell us about your daily routine maintaining public computers, or a moment when you were particularly proud. Don't forget that what might be "that's nothing" to you may be an "aha!" to someone else!
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I'm so excited
i LOVE this idea!
When I remember to create a list of to-dos before I leave for the day, I'm a smarter and stronger Sarah when I arrive to work in the morning. I think maybe the hot pink notecard suggestion might just be the ticket for me to actually do it each night!
Great ideas, and I'll be checking out the "librarydayinthelife" tag. Very cool!