Digital Projects Manager for the Kansas City Public Library
7:45- Arrived at work, settled in, finally added myself to the Library Day in the Life wiki.
8:00- 9:30 Email, mostly project related as usual.
9:30-1:30 Researched “market research” to help me figure out how to write an internship description that I hope to post soon. I’m looking for a marketing/business intern to join us for the summer to help us learn more about how our patrons are using technology and their views of libraries. We have an great resource at the library, the H&R Block Business and Career Center, so I went up there to see what they had that could help me out. They have a whole index of generic job descriptions- AWESOME! In the middle of writing a draft of the description, I was interrupted and took some time to arrange the last minute details for a conference call between vendors tomrrow the morning. As soon as I got back to working on the draft, I had to stop again to write some content for a web form for another contractor (a follow up from the Monday 9:30 meeting). From 12:15 to 12:40 I took a break for lunch. When I returned I finished the web form content and then finished the draft job description.
1:30-1:45 Back to email, replying to the messages I recieved during the course of the morning.
1:45 – 2:10 Took a call from a community member interested in our Civil War project. She shared a lot of family information and asked me some targeted questions; for example, which side of the Missouri- Kansas border I’m from (answer? NW Indiana- whew, dodged that one!) and other questions meant to suss out how we’re planning on framing the project. I assured her that we’re working with organizations from both Kansas and Missouri, and that one of the main objectives of the project is to unite both histories and share primary sources reflecting a diversity of views on the conflict.
2:10 to 4:00 Continued to progress on workflow issues I started addressing earlier this week. I identified a possible solution to one of the problems I was having, but, not being a server administrator (which, trust me, is a good thing), I couldn’t test my theory. I also came up with a solution to the other issue I identified yesterday, but I’m not sure if it will be practical to implement since I can’t see how it can be done without changing thousands of records by hand. We shall see.
4:00 to 5ish Final email round up for the day. One series of emails led to an interesting phone conversation on patron privacy issues. I rarely work directly with patrons, so I enjoy talking with other librarians that do.
5:00 to 6:30 Stayed late to attend a program, attempted to catch up on blog reading and drafted the first part of this post.
6:30-8:00 Attended fantastically entertaining talk by Jill Lepore on her book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History at the library.
Jordan Fields 