The randomness that is life...

Migrating

2012-06-30T13:20:00.001-04:00

Hey everyone.

I'm migrating my blog over to Wordpress, so please update your links!

http://slmcdanold.wordpress.com/

Cheers!

ALA Annual 2012 Anaheim

2012-06-18T10:37:00.000-04:00

Later this week I'm off to Anaheim, CA for the ALA Annual Conference 2012. I'm looking forward to catching up with and seeing my colleagues from all over the country. :) But per usual, I need a clone. There are far too many sessions going on concurrently that I want to attend!

Here are a few highlights:

The Library Code Year Interest Group inaugural meeting!: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/651
Kuali OLE (learn about the project; FYI, MPOW is a development partner): http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/260
Continuing Resources Cataloging Update Forum: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/378
Quality Standards in Batch Records and Adventures in Cooperative Cataloging: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/380
CONSER/BIBCO/SACO At-Large: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/1166 (agenda: http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/PCC-At-Large-Agenda-June-2012.doc)
PCC Participants' Meeting (undifferentiated names in the LC/NACO Authority File): http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/261 (agenda: http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/PCC-Participants-Meeting-2012-Annual.doc)
RDA Meetings (thank's RDA Toolkit for the list!): http://www.rdatoolkit.org/blog/392

For anyone wanting/needing to track me down at ALA, here's my full ALA Annual 2012 Anaheim schedule (subject to change at any given moment leading up to the start and as the conference progresses):
(link: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/user/30698/schedule-embed)

Update (6/19/2012): My colleagues and I have enacted a "divide and conquer" approach. Thus for the time slots with multiple items they are ranked in terms of priority, with the High designated sessions being the ones I said I'd attend. Unfortunately, the "priority" status isn't visible in the public version of my calendar. Boo. At any rate, DM me via Twitter (@slmcdanold) or text me if you're trying to find me.

Library Code Year Interest Group at ALA

2012-06-04T08:55:00.003-04:00

The LITA/ALCTS Library Code Year IG will be having our first meeting at ALA Annual 2012 (#ala12) in Anaheim, CA and we need your help. We are looking for speakers to give lightening talks!

Call for Speakers

What strategies, or roadblocks, have you found in learning to code? How have you used programming to improve library service models or workflows?

The Library Code Year Interest Group seeks speakers for lightening talks (5 minutes) on any aspect of coding and libraries, including projects you have completed, your experience learning to code or thoughts on projects you would like to see in the future. Speakers at all levels of coding skill and from all types of library backgrounds are invited to participate.

Our meeting at ALA Annual in Anaheim will be Saturday, June 23, 1:30-3:30pm at the Doubletree Suites (Tuscany AB). You can find it on the ALA Scheduler here. The inaugural meeting of the Library Code Year Interest Group will provide an opportunity for members to discuss how they have used what they have learned through Code Year in their jobs and to discuss roadblocks they have encountered along the way through a combination of lightening talks and roundtable discussions. Attendees will learn ways that the code they are learning can be used in libraries and have a chance to share their experiences learning and using code. We will end with a brainstorming session on how the IG can support members’ efforts to learn and apply code in libraries.

Feel free to contact me with any questions at slmcdanold@gmail.com or mcdanold@pobox.upenn.edu or post your thoughts on our Connect page.

Even if you don't want to give a talk, I hope to see you there!

Learning Python

2012-02-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

Last September I participated in a one day full day basic Introduction to Python for Women workshop sponsored by PyStarPhilly. It was good exposure, but it didn't stick all that much.

Fortunately, they decided to hold the workshop again (details here), and this time made it even longer, starting on Friday night and all day on Saturday last weekend.

Friday night started with making sure the Python install on my machine I did last September was still OK, and that Notepad++ was up to date. And making friends again with my cmd window, which I also use to run the Perl scripts at work. Whee my cmd skills are rusty. But between work and this workshop, it's all surfacing from the deep recesses of my brain.

The rest of Friday can be summed up thusly: practice practice practice. The PyStar ladies have posted a series of exercises to practice the basics of Python on CodingBat. These exercises reinforce the concepts covered and force you to think through things.

Saturday morning began with completing Friday's CodingBat exercises and working through some Saturday morning review exercises. Practice practice practice!

A few things I learned while working on the exercises:

spaces don't matter so much, although including spaces makes the code more readable
punctuation matters!
capitalization is noticed, so A =/= a, in other words, machines are very literal!

It is definitely sticking better this time. Between more coding stuff at work, plus Code Year, it's all starting to come together in my brain. I got farther with the exercises this time, and was able to reason through (or talk myself through) when I got stuck.

After a bit of warmup practice, we had a morning lecture. The goal of the lecture was for us to be able to write simple scripts on our own by the end of it. We reviewed the material in the morning exercises (equations, functions, etc.) and covered loops, while loops, input statements, dictionaries, more detailed functions, modules and packages. Also a brief description of libraries.

And then it was back to practice practice practice.

Another challenge I discovered: indentations. Where your indentations are impacts what your code returns, so you have to be careful what you embed under other things, versus what you want to do at the end. Often I wrote the code correctly, but indented it too far relating it to something it shouldn't be related to, producing no result, not even an error message. At one point I nearly created a recursive loop by indenting too far. Oops.

After lunch we had a few lightning talks, where people shared various code they're written for projects. It's encouraging to see what people have built; even more so that I can read and understand the code they wrote! The talks involved editing images (adding text), predictive puzzle solving (the Tower of Hanoi puzzle), and a very cool project working with 7 to 13 year old girls and the Tropo simple API. We also looked at a very neat page of data visualization and graphical plotting options using Python at matplotlib.sourceforge.net.

The talks also include some more learn to code resources. I'll be posting the new ones I learned about to the catcode wiki resources page.

After the lightening talks, they gave us a project to work on (in addition to the CodingBat exercises) involving using Twitter's API to call recent tweets and trending topics. Challenging but so satisfying when you get it!

Why am I learning to code?

2012-02-06T20:57:00.001-05:00

Why am I learning to code. I get asked this a fair amount these days. Why would a librarian want to learn to code? What good is it for my job?

I alluded to it in my first post on the catcode phenomenon: "Catalogers work with massive amounts of curated bibliographic data, and being able to manipulate it in new and different ways and in ever increasing amounts is key as we move forward into the bibliographic future and the world of linked data and the semantic web."

But that's a pretty generic statement. And doesn't explain much. I usually end up giving some examples of how coding would be (or already is) used in my current day to day work:

1. Editing of record sets prior to loading - beyond MarcEdit

All of our batch loads of MARC records for various collections go through a basic editing process. We have a standardized set of edits that all of our records go through to normalize certain elements and insert local-specific notes about access restrictions and our licenses. These edits are all combined in a script to facilitate the process. All sets are quickly run through the script as a first step of the loading process. Currently when something changes (like a change to MARC coding or the need to add something or add a conditional for another format such as images), I have to ask our systems folks to edit the script, I review it, we test it, and then it's put into regular use. If I could make the edits and test it myself the process would be much more efficient.

Often I have very large sets and potentially complicated edits that need to be made. MarcEdit has a script editor that allows me do make a series of basic conditional edits, but for more complicated things I'm still limited to asking our systems staff to write a script.

For example, our records from ProQuest for the online version of our dissertations come in with subject codes that are proprietary to ProQuest and their indexes. For these to be useful for our users for searching, they need to be mapped to valid Library of Congress Subject Headings. I can build a cross-walk in a spreadsheet for the mapping, but I need a script to run the records through a process to actually match on the codes in the records in the file and insert the LCSH heading.

2. Reports from our system (or from any large file of records)

The only mechanism for getting a report from our current ILS (Voyager) is via script. There's no reporting interface. Like with script editing, I have to pester systems folks to help me. And it can be a tedious process. I tell them what I need (being as clear and specific as possible within the bounds of how confusing MARC is and the myriad of exceptions/variations that exist). They then take my request, and turn the query into a script (interpreting things in the process), run it, and send it to me for review. If we're lucky, we get it right the first time. More often than not, there's errors, and exceptions, and quite a bit of back and forth before we get it right.

If I could gain some experience in coding, I could hopefully reduce the back and forth and write the exceptions and variations into my query request, essentially cutting out the middle man interpretation. Having a better understanding of what is possible to write into a query based on the data and how "clean" it is (or isn't) is invaluable.

3. Batch editing of records already in the system

Just because something is already cataloged and loaded doesn't mean you can ignore it. Records require maintenance. Rules change, headings change, tags change, new fields and subfields are added, etc. etc. MARC as a standard is changing regularly. Names are updated in authority files, subjects are created, collapsed, divided, etc. And we have to keep our data up to date so it's actually useful to our users and so relationships are maintained. All of this updating requires editing a very large batch of data. It starts with getting an effective/accurate report of things that need updating, and then telling the system what needs to change. A big thing that would be useful to articulate more clearly is conditional edits...add this field but only if these things are true. But if your instructions to the system isn't clear you end up with a big mess that you have to undo and try again, which is time consuming and most likely also problematic for user access until you clean things up (or undo). Once you have a better understanding of how to write the instructions, the number of messes decreases exponentially. And less mess is always a good thing when dealing with data that potentially impacts user access.

4. Loading of records in bulk

There are set of profiles used for loading records into our ILS. Distilled down, they are a series of scripts dictating the modification and creation of bibliographic, holdings, and item records. The specifics of each load determine which profile is most appropriate. I don't have a good understanding of these profiles because my understanding of coding is still limited. I'm hoping learning coding will give me a better understanding so I may better advise which profile is more appropriate.

A good example of why this would be useful. A few months ago we tried to load a set of records into our system. Both the colleague in systems and myself being unfamiliar with the profiles, we picked the one we thought was correct. Well, given her unfamiliarity with MARC and library records, and my unfamiliarity with coding and in reading the profiles, we blundered and used the wrong one. We made a bit of a mess of things in our production catalog (hello error message displayed to the public) and had fix things after the load, once we figured out what we did wrong, of course. Our blunder created quite a bit of extra work for both of us.

5. System design / user interface design / etc.

We're currently in the process of redesigning our public interface to our catalog (our OPAC). This means dealing with indexes and the underlying data in different ways. Having a good solid understanding of the data means I can explain what data is useful and what our data can and cannot do. Writing functional specifications for the use/manipulation of the data so the coders can go to work. Having a solid understanding of how systems talk to each other and where data lives helps immensely. Learning to code helps me do all of that.

I think an overarching theme of all the above examples is communication. To be able to explain things to coders, and to understand the questions from coders, and explain things to catalogers, and non-catalogers, and effectively talk/explain my needs to the systems themselves, I need to have a better understanding of how it all works. Learning coding helps with that. It's like learning another language. If I can be even semi-fluent in coding, things will be much clearer for everyone involved in the conversation. Even if I don't become a full-fledged coder, the exposure I'm gaining from participating in Code Year and workshops on Python and attending project nights and talks about various coding languages and systems is already proving to be invaluable.

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 5

2012-02-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

Friday, February 3, 2012

I have much better luck making the bus this morning, but I forgot my travel mug full of coffee. I make a small detour between the bus stop and the library to buy coffee, again.

8:05am - Arrive at desk, my precious brew in hand. Login to the work network. This is followed by logging in to email, my work calendar, Voyager and Connexion, opening GTalk, opening a browser (Firefox at work, but Chrome at home), and logging in to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Check calendar to find out what's on today's schedule.

Walk over to supervisor's office to check in on a couple of backlog clean up projects we are working on: catching up on the Hebrew and South Asia materials.

Email off weekly timesheet report for staff to Library HR office.

Earlier this week the slate for the NASIG 2012 elections were announced. I'm up for secretary this year. We'll see what happens this time around as I've been on the slate before, but not elected. And apparently my opponent has friends that have volunteered to campaign for her! Oh dear. I better get on that as the ballots go out Feb. 27th. (hee!)

10:00am - Meeting to discuss preservation issues for serial back volumes.

Brief break of about 20 minutes between meetings to check email.

11:00am - Meet with serials acquisitions librarian to sort out some issues with Hebrew serial titles that have been identified as our Hebraica cataloger makes headway on the backlog. Non-Roman scripts can cause confusion and things get linked to incorrect records, issues get skipped because of lack of proper title Romanization, etc. So we're clearing the confusion the best we can when we find the problems. Fortunately this takes all of 15 minutes to walk through and explain them and we can both move on to other things.

Since I have some unscheduled time that on my calendar looks like I'm occupied, I spend some time on that list of "web" location holdings that are problems. Turns out there's more than just the reserves issue that has shown up on our report. We also have random duplicate holdings, missing subfields, mysterious "web" holdings on print titles, and more. So it looks like we're going to have to go through all 269 titles one by one and by hand to fix them.

Noon - LUNCH.

12:30pm - I get some excellent news that the "new" workflow for individually purchased ebooks is up and running! We have it set up now that when an ebook is purchased, a brief record is put into our catalog so the payment record and invoice can be created. This payment record is suppressed. Once access is turned on, the payment record is unsuppressed, the URL from the vendor for our access is added to the bib, and the now unsuppressed brief bib is picked up by a daily report so it can be fully cataloged. Since we're adding the access URL to the brief bib, the public will have access immediately so if there's a delay in cataloging there's no impact on access. Now I just have to train myself to go retrieve the report every morning...

Send a few emails regarding the LITA/ALCTS Library Code Year Interest Group. We have approval from both ALCTS and LITA so we're legitimate!! YAY! ::Kermit flail:: Our ALCTS approval is conditional on some wordsmithing and revisions to the group purpose, but they approved us so we can move forward due to some impending deadlines. We're submitting our A/V and meeting room request for ALA Annual 2012 in Anaheim, CA! Watch the catcode wiki, catcode Twitter list, and the ALA Connect Code Year space for details. And don't be afraid to sign up (whether you're participating in Code Year or not) and join us in learning to code or improving our coding skills together.

Back to the spreadsheet of "web" location holdings. It's like I have 269 problem children who need individual attention. I do filter as much as possible, but I still have to check each and every one.

It's been a long day of staring at a screen full of MARC code and spreadsheets.

2:00pm - Meet with colleague to put together the charge for the subgroup to investigate the various metadata schema available that can accommodate preservation, descriptive, structural, and administrative elements for a wide variety of types of materials that may be included in the digital repository.

Give staff person the monthly report of items that are officially declared lost.

3:45pm - Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:00pm - Shut things/programs down and log out from work network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work.

I have to get out of here a bit early today as I'm attending an "Introduction to Python" workshop (more coding!) tonight and all day tomorrow sponsored by PhillyPUG / PyStar Philly. I need to get home to pack up my laptop and head out so I'm not late tonight (especially given my bus karma this week)! I did the intro to Python class last September, but it didn't really stick. So when the opportunity to take it again came up, I jumped at the opportunity. I'm hoping my Code Year work has helped so it sticks better this time.

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 4

2012-02-02T17:30:00.000-05:00

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 3

2012-02-01T17:15:00.000-05:00

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 2

2012-01-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See the Library Day in the Life wiki for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday8.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I get to my desk around 8:05am, login to the work network. This is followed by logging in to email, my work calendar, Voyager and Connexion, opening GTalk, opening a browser (Firefox at work, but Chrome at home), and logging in to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

While everything warms up, I compile the paperwork and receipts to submit for reimbursement for ALA Midwinter. Must remember to turn these in TODAY.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Check calendar to find out what's on today's schedule.

Send out finalized version of one of the three sets of minutes I typed up on Sunday.

Send request to load update file for one of our ongoing ebook collections. We subscribe to regular updates of MARC record files for quite a few of our ebook collections. Mostly these are science publications, or conference proceedings type resources. Each time an updated file is posted, I send a message with instructions to our systems folks that there's a file ready for loading. They run it through a couple of scripts, both the generic one standardizing certain fields I described previously, followed by a script we wrote summarizing any additional edits for that collection specifically. These edits are typically things like additional title access points per request from our collection development librarians. Once the file is loaded, I'm emailed a report that all is complete and if there were any errored records or problems. All in all it's a fairly seamless workflow.

I also make sure I update the two spreadsheets where we track our bulk loads. One is the "master" that tracks all the collections and what the status is for loading MARC record sets. The other is just a summary count of the number of records loaded for each collection broken up by fiscal year for reporting purposes (statistics, y'all).

In cleaning up my inbox this morning, I realized I went right past an email sent out yesterday afternoon about access to Lynda.com. They have great technology training and I'm excited my library has purchased a site license! I did a bit of exploring, and discover they have a 4 hour session on programming fundamentals among many other interesting options. Professional development opportunity FTW!

9:10am - Start work on troubleshooting an error file from a recent record load. 169 records loaded fine, but 16 of them errored out. I have to figure out why and then re-load them by hand. With any batch load, there's always the possibility of records that error out. The issues can be anything from record length (too long and the batch load process hangs and spits the record back), diacritics problems, MARC field validation issues, to complete mysteries. Sometimes the records load fine by hand even though they errored on the back-end batch load. For these 16 records it was three things: a random floating empty subfield b in the 300 field, an indicator error in a name entry, and a random character string ({A0}) inserted at the end of some of the subjects.

9:25am - Chat with my supervisor about a bizarre record display resulting from an e-item created for reserves module purposes. We don't create items for our online stuff, because there's nothing physical to track. For reserves, however, they create a "temp e-item" to put things in a professor's class list. Theoretically the item is removed later and all is well, but we've encountered a few irregularities in displays.

My morning so far can be summed up thusly: ebook record troubleshooting. Good times.

10:30-11am - Bi-weekly check-in meeting with 1 of my 4 staff. This is the other half of my staff meeting for this week. Next week I'll have my meeting with my remaining two staff.

More email and ebook troubleshooting.

11:30am - Meet with a colleague to discuss some issues that have arisen regarding e-items and the reserves module. This is the follow up from the earlier conversation with my supervisor. The reserve module and that workflow isn't part of technical services, but the access services department. So to fix the issues we're seeing of floating holdings records, e-items attached to incorrect holdings (and titles), etc., it requires a bit of inter-departmental cooperation and troubleshooting.

12:15pm - LUNCH. I need to eat a good lunch today before I donate blood so I don't pass out. I speak from personal experience that I need to do this when I donate...no donating before I've had at least 2 good meals that day.

12:35pm - Phone call from a colleague about getting together to write a charge for a subgroup for a committee I'm on. [Note: this is the same colleague that called me yesterday right before I had to leave to be somewhere. He swears he's actually trying to time his phone calls for the 10 minutes before I have to leave my desk. :cP] We have a group that's working on creating (from scratch) an digital repository (beyond our existing scholarly commons repository). We're starting from nothing, so the first step is figuring out what we need to actually store by putting together a census to interview our colleagues to find out what files they are hoarding and need preserved. Simultaneously, we're putting together a subgroup to investigate the various metadata schema available that can accommodate preservation, descriptive, structural, and administrative elements for a wide variety of types of materials that may be included in the repository.

1pm - My appointment to donate for the campus blood drive with the Red Cross. Luckily it's a beautiful day for a walk across campus to the donation site. They were a bit backed up so I had to wait a while for them to get to me. But the best thing? The after donation cookies were the mini-Keebler Fudge Stripes! NOM NOM NOM

2:20pm - After I'm done giving up a pint of my blood and am back at the library, I check email to discover that our system is kicking people out again this afternoon and had to be restarted. Sigh. I also find a request to schedule a meeting. I put together the meeting request and send it out via our networked calendar to various individuals. It's always fun to try to find an hour of time that 6 different people are available (/sarcasm).

3pm - My weekly meeting for the committee I'm on that's working on the user interface design of our new public catalog interface. We have a beta version live now (http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/franklin/) but are still fine tuning and working on getting some missing data (and indexes) into our display. In addition to the fine tuning, we're working on the next step of the implementation: the account services pieces (renew, view your checked out items, etc.). We're writing up the functional specs for various pieces including how to log in and log out of the account services, how to renew items, viewing and acting on your items already checked out, placing requests, etc. These functional specs will be used by a team of indexers and programmers to actually make the various pieces work. Writing a functional specs is an iterative process. We talk through the most straight forward process, step by step, identifying where the various pieces of data need to come from (what systems and indexes within each system, and on down the rabbit hole), how things need to be mapped (within the display and from one screen to the next), labels, and then we start introducing the exceptions, and then it blows up into a massive document with references, referrals, and more and suddenly what you thought would be simple and straight forward really is quite complicated. That complicated mess is then reviewed by systems folks (those indexers and programmers), and returned to us with questions, comments, and general feedback. We turn around and make more changes, and the review cycle starts over again. Eventually we get to a functional spec that can be used by the people to actually start the creation/programming process.

It's been an interesting (and positive) experience to be on a user interface team. I'm so used to looking at the data behind the scenes, all that underlying gibberish of MARC and codes and more (that frighteningly makes more sense and is easier to read to me than a cleaned up public display), and I've definitely had to stretch myself to look at things differently. I have to think about how the data is *used* and what is useful for the user needs (find - identify - select - obtain, hello FRBR our old friend). Our primary focus is on what displays and how the user interacts with the system. Aesthetics come in later (and are partially pre-determined). I've learned how to explain our data to non-data people, talking about what is there, what all the codes mean, data variations (both known and possible), how data could potentially be used, and explaining limitations. It's been a fascinating process and has really forced me to understand what I work with on a daily basis (data) in a completely new way and on a new level.

4:15pm - Back from meeting. Ended up spending part of the time chatting with colleague about related but not committee specific work going on. Good to get updates. And time for more email. Seven messages while I was gone for an hour. SEVEN. Yeesh.

Last major task for the day: more statistics, y'all (yes, it's the last day of the month why do you ask?). I copy the statistics for my unit from the website system reports interface. These are generic reports from the system to ensure an accurate count of items added (I have staff that barcode over 1,000 items each month, asking them to count that by hand would be just cruel), newly added records, etc. There's little (if any) context to these generic system reports, so I mesh these generic system reports with the specifics given to me by my staff each month, and then compile them all at the end of the fiscal year for use in a variety of reports on the Libraries, including sending reports to the Association for Research Libraries.

4:50pm - Manually sync local shared calendar system with my personal GoogleCalendar. Meeting Maker doesn't have a push function that plays nice, so I have to save events to an .ics file and then import them into Google. Why? Because I can't see my Meeting Maker calendar without either my desktop client or a web browser. Again, Meeting Maker just doesn't seem to play nice with things I need it to (including my Android cell phone). So I manually sync it whenever meetings are added/changed. Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

5:15pm - Shut things/programs down and log out from work network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work.

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 1

2012-01-30T16:48:00.000-05:00

It's time for another round of Library Day in the Life posts. See the Library Day in the Life wiki for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday8.

Obligatory background: I'm a cataloger at a rather large academic library. Specifically a cataloger of electronic resources (anything online, in any format), and continuing resources (serials, etc.). I participate in the PCC program, doing NACO and both CONSER and BIBCO work depending on what I'm dealing with at the time. I also participate in committee work for the PCC, ALA ALCTS, and NASIG.

I am head of a unit that handles the cataloging, maintenance and inventory control of continuing resources (both serials and integrating resources) and electronic resources (online resources) for all units of the Libraries by updating and maintaining bibliographic, holdings and item records. I have four para-professional (or support) staff in my unit. Two that work an early shift, and two that work a later shift. In an attempt to cover the most ground, my schedule says I work from 8am to 4pm, although I usually don't actually get out of the office until 4:30 or 5pm.

The majority of time spent on the cataloging for continuing resources and many online resources is maintenance work and updating of the bibliographic records to reflect current information. Changes can be anything from the frequency, to a change in publisher, to a title variation or title change. Cataloging these types of materials is like trying to hit a moving target or nailing jello to the wall. There's also the ongoing inventory maintenance on our holdings records to deal with keeping our holdings current, including withdrawn/lost/missing volumes, general edits to fix accuracy issues, etc. I also spend a large amount of time managing the bulk loads of MARC records for title-level access to online resources such as streaming media and ebooks (including batch editing the records prior to loading using tools like MarcEdit) and managing the cataloging of individual ebooks and ebooks series that aren't available in sets but require regular maintenance and updating.

Monday, January 30, 2012

I was a bit late this morning courtesy of my cat and a hairball incident. It upset my routine enough that I left my travel mug of coffee at home on the counter. I am not so much a morning person, so my routine is fine tuned to make sure I get out of the apartment in once piece, wearing shoes not slippers, and without locking myself out. I'm lucky the only thing I forgot was my coffee. So I made a quick stop before heading into the library for some coffee. Coffee is a non-negotiable morning requirement.

Once I acquired my precious brew and got to my desk, I login to the work network. This is followed by logging in to email, my work calendar, Voyager and Connexion, opening GChat, opening a browser (Firefox at work, but Chrome at home), and logging in to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Check calendar to find out what's on today's schedule.

10-10:30am: Bi-weekly check-in meeting with 1 of my 4 staff. The other staff person I meet with this week (2 people each week) is out today so we'll meet Tuesday instead. And next week I'll have my meeting with my remaining two staff. This is something I started back in July. These bi-weekly meetings have greatly improved and increased communication with my staff by having regular face-to-face conversations. They also present more opportunities to get solutions for things directly from them. I don't have to solve the problems, I just have to support the solution and the process. The feedback from my staff on our bi-weekly meetings has been overwhelmingly positive. It helps us all stay on top of things and address issues before they get out of hand and become critical. It's also helped our unit come together and work better together. Communication has improved not just between myself and individual staff, but between staff members. Our unit has really "jelled" and is working well as a single functional unit rather than individuals thrown together. It's incredibly encouraging and satisfying to see that happen (it's been a long road and a lot of hard work from all of us to get here).

And yet I'm constantly reminded that management is a work in progress, ever evolving. I try different things, some work, some don't. I'm constantly having to learn and improve as a manager. I've attended seminars and workshops, read articles, and received honest feedback from colleagues and my own supervisor, all of which have been valuable in various ways to help me be a better manager. It's not easy. Anyone that tells you otherwise is a liar.

11am: We have several new professionals. This morning was an orientation meeting between the new head of a unit in a different department and my department. Essentially we use the time to break down the relationships between units and departments and review workflows.

Noon: Code4Lib Conference online meeting for pre-conference planning. It has become clear that I will not be able to attend Code4Lib after all. The pre-conference proposal was last minute so I hadn't planned to attend and it's just not possible with everything going on right now. I tried to find a way to make it work (both financially and work related), but alas, no dice. Sometimes having to be responsible can really suck. But that doesn't stop me from finishing up the pre-conference planning. I'll still do my part and put together slides for what would have been my portion of the brief presentation. I'm seriously disappointed, but now even more determined to plan ahead to attend next year. We are exploring the possibility that I may be able to participate via Skype, and I really hope that happens. Either that or someone better figure out cloning quickly...I volunteer as a test subject!

We've been using Adobe Connect for our online meetings. It's quite powerful, and I've used it for other committee work where we need to bring people together from all over the country and for presentations/trainings since you can upload files and share your desktop. There's nothing to install beyond the basic Adobe software suite (and who doesn't have the reader these days) which has the underpinnings to run the meeting space. The connection is via a URL. No registration or passcodes needed. Which is very user friendly, especially when you are trying to throw a meeting together at the last minute. All participants need is a headset with microphone for conversation (although there is a chat box if microphone isn't an option), and an internet connection and browser. The only issue we've encountered is that it's not as reliable when someone connects via wireless, but is perfectly stable when connecting via Ethernet (a "wired" connection).

As soon as we were done with the Code4Lib meeting, I switched over to the (free!) ALA Midwinter Midwinter Tech Wrapup 2012 which started at 1pm. A panel presents their "observations and analysis of the top technology trends from the conference, and what they see as the implications for libraries". It's an interesting snapshot of all the new stuff that gets presented at ALA.

Mid-way through the Tech Wrapup presentation, I realize I haven't eaten lunch yet. My stomach reminded me with an annoyed growl/grumble. Oops. Fortunately the Wrapup is being recorded, and they will be sending out the recording and links to the slides in the next few days.

1:30pm - LUNCH.

2:00pm - A colleague sends me many helpful emails to address my need to swap Date1 and Date2 in a large number of files of MARC records. Holly Tomren is my hero today. Sometimes the best thing is to share your challenges openly and freely (and without shame). Chances are someone else has encountered it too and can either provide a solution or some helpful guidance or at least some sympathy. :)

As much as I would like to play with what she sent immediately, I have a small list of things in our catalog to clean up. Since our system has decided to be cooperative and stable today (note: our server has been cranky and the reasons for its' crankiness continue to elude our local systems folks and the systems folks at the company that owns the ILS software), the clean up edits take priority.

2:30pm - And just as I find all my notes and emails and bring up the first record, the system crashes. Dammit.

2:40pm - I try to log in to the system again and success! Edits ahoy!

2:57pm - And not so fast. System crash. I think I saved the record I was editing in time. ::crosses fingers::

3:04pm - System restarted. And we're back up. Yea gods...whiplash!

3:30pm - Editing of some of the meeting notes I typed up yesterday. It's tricky, as I'm reporting on what was said by someone else on a committee I'm not on. Needless to say the individual has had quite a few suggestions for edits to my notes.

3:45pm - Respond to an email from a colleague about loading a set of records for digitized historical newspapers into our catalog. Add the requested collection to the master spreadsheet so it can be placed in the queue by our collection development team. They evaluate priorities and determine the order of the sets that have been requested or purchased for loading into the catalog. We have a bit of a backlog, but we're slowly catching up. Some of the sets we load are quite large (the Congressional Serial Set and the Parliamentary Papers are two good examples of extremely large sets consisting of many files with upwards of 50,000 records per file) so they take some time. We can only load so many records at a time, due to system limitations and post-load re-indexing needs (re-indexing can be a demanding and potentially resource eating process for a server).

4:10pm - I had the privilege of serving on the ALCTS Continuing Resources Section Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award jury committee this year. One of our final tasks is reviewing the press releases and announcements that will be going out celebrating and honoring the recipient of the award. These are the kinds of documents I love reviewing and editing. A feel-good way to end the day.

While editing, I also get pinged via Google Talk by a colleague from another institution with a serials cataloging question. There are some complicated changes to an institution name that require edits in multiple places on top of a migration from print format to online. Serials can be complicated and tricky when they are feeling onerous. But I do love that I live in the future and such things can be discussed via online chat. :)

4:30pm - Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:35pm - Phone call from colleague asking me about next steps for a workflow revision.

4:40pm - A staff person asks me a question about some strange notes in a holdings record. We figure out the best way to edit the notes so they make sense.

4:50pm - Rush to shut things/programs down and log out from work network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. I have somewhere to be at 5:30pm and must get out of here!

[Edited to finish filling in the last 30 minutes of my day...didn't have a chance before I had to leave and it was already scheduled to publish! Oops.]

Library Day in the Life - Round 8, Day 0

2012-01-29T17:56:00.000-05:00

Cat and mouse

2012-01-28T20:00:00.000-05:00

My cat caught a mouse the other morning. She brought it to me, all proud of her new real! live! toy, wanting to show off her hunting skills. She was making her chirping meow when she's feeling playful and has "caught" a toy or caught a bug.

Naturally, I didn't realize it was a LIVE mouse. I've been in this apartment for over 2 years now with no evidence of mice or mouse sightings. So I thought it was a toy. I reached down to take it from her, thinking Capri wanted me to toss it (we play "catch").

And then it twitched in my hand.

::SHUDDER::

It was ALIVE. This was no toy mouse. It was a real live fuzzy mouse she had caught. ::GASP::

Needless to say I dropped it pretty quickly.

The cat resumed her play while I danced around shuddering and chanting "ick ick ick!!" at the top of my lungs and tried not to hyperventilate from the shock.

Once I got over it, I retrieved a few tissues and confiscated the poor creature once again. It was clearly mortally wounded, so I put it out of it's misery (kinder than letting it suffer), and deposited it in the trash outdoors. And then washed my hands in the hottest water I could stand at least a half a dozen times.

The cat watched me do this while meow-screaming at me, baffled and annoyed that I had taken away her toy. I soothed her with some cat treats and lots of praise for her skills. This was our first live mouse episode in this apartment and the first time she's caught something other than a bug, and I truly hope it's our first and ONLY mouse. The bug catching? I encourage it. Praise her for it. It keeps the flies under control in the summer when the balcony door is open. But I can live without another live mouse incident.

Capri now spends at least a few hours each day staring intently under the stove. I'm guessing she's standing guard against further fuzzy intruders.

Good kitty. That's my good little huntress. Keep the mouses away.

::SHUDDER::

Talking about Code Year

2012-01-28T12:41:00.001-05:00

It's really weird to watch yourself talk. And listen to yourself. Oh boy.

Anyway, here's a link to Andromeda Yelton and I talking about the Code Year phenomenon and what we've got going on:

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/ala-members-blog/beginning-lita-code-year-interest-group

[Note: I'm on the left, wearing the Stewie from Family Guy "OBEY ME!" lanyard.]

Watch. And then come join us!! Thanks to Tina Coleman for posting her video and sharing it. :)

We are working on making the ALA Interest Group a joint LITA/ALCTS venture. There are far too many catalogers involved fro ALCTS to not participate! Yay for dialogue between catalogers and coders!

Catcode twitter list
Catcode wiki
Code Year on ALA Connect

ALA Midwinter 2012 Dallas

2012-01-18T14:59:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I'm off to Dallas for the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2012. As usual, there's a lot going on and I expect I'll be quite busy. I'm also looking forward to catching up with and seeing my colleagues from all over the country. :)

For anyone wanting/needing to track me down at ALA, here's my ALA Midwinter 2012 Dallas schedule:

I'll be spending a lot of time in the Omni Dallas Hotel and the Convention Center this Midwinter. Yes, my schedule is full. It always is. Yes, there are conflicts. They're unavoidable. If anyone has figured out how to clone themselves, please share. In the time slots with conflicts, I will be at one of the listed sessions...I just don't know which one. You can assume I'll be at the PCC/CONSER/BIBCO stuff, anything under the type committee meeting, or anything marked private because I most likely have to be.

Drop me an email or contact me via GoogleChat or Twitter if you want to meet up. :)

Code Year, the first week

2012-01-10T08:24:00.001-05:00

Again, I am overwhelmed by the interest in the Code Year project from fellow catalogers. Kudos to everyone for taking on the challenge of learning to code. It's time to dive in and get dirty!

How is the first week of Code Year 2012 for everyone (Code Year Course list/Calendar)? Did you complete the course yet or are you working on it bit by bit (lesson by lesson) all week? Who did the Supplemental lesson?

Did you feel like tearing your hair out? Or was it fun? Or was it both?

Who got started early? I admittedly signed up for Codecademy this weekend and plowed through the first 4 lessons of Getting Started with Programming course. I'll be working on the other half of the course lessons throughout the week. I know it will help to cement it in my brain if I spread it out and have to keep going back and reviewing. I also have a sneaking suspicion I might have to create a command cheat sheet until they stick in my brain.

A trouble spot for me I've already identified: TYPOS. Lordy. Talk about error messages. I had to re-do a few of the lessons just because of typos. I know I have some minor dyslexia (spellchecker was invented for people like me, I swear it's true), and I've learned I need to be extra careful when coding or writing in mark-up language(s) (HTML, MARC, etc.) where capitalization, spelling, and punctuation are critical. That was reinforced quite strongly by a couple of the coding lessons this week (damn "ReferenceError:" returns). Clearly I have to take my time, work carefully, and can't do this when distracted or frequently interrupted so I don't lose my focus. At least not yet. Maybe when I'm more comfortable/experienced I'll be able to code successfully in my office. But for right now I need a quiet environment (no distractions) where I'm not interrupted by questions/staff/colleagues/etc.

What are your trouble spots? Does noise distract you or do you like music while you work? Does a busy environment help or hinder?

Oh, btw, I've learned that M&Ms help the coding process. ;)

Resources:

CatCode Wiki (we have a Resources page now!) - PLEASE just ask to be added. The request gateway is there to keep out the spammers. If you're not a bot, you'll be approved. I have over 110 people listed on the Code Year Catalogers post and less than 80 users on the wiki at the time I wrote this post. If you haven't signed up, why?
CatCode Twitter list - over 90 members! whoa
Search #catcode hashtag on Twitter
Code Year ALA Connect group
Lifehacker's Learn to Code
O'Reilly books and videos (try the Head First series of books, Head First Programming)
CatCode posts on this blog

CatCode is born!

2012-01-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

The number of people interested in the Code Year 2012 catcode project has grown by leaps and bounds the past few days! I'm slightly overwhelmed. I'm also stupidly excited and keep doing a little happy dance in my chair at work with each new person that adds themselves as a participant. I can hardly keep up with all the Twitter messages and post comments! To see the growing list, check out my previous post. I've been actively updating the post to add names as I receive them.

To help facilitate participation going forward, I've created a space in PBWiki for all of us to use: CatCode is born! The CodeYear project may have spawned the space, but my hope is that it becomes a more general space for dialogue and learning for catalogers and coders beyond the CodeYear project. A girl can dream, right?

Please go visit the wiki and sign up as a user (it's free!). Once your access has been granted (please be patient with me on verifying you! I'm trying to prevent spammers), please update your information on the Participants page. If you submitted your name before, I've pre-populated the participant's table with some information...please find your info and update it!

We (my partners in crime and I) are still working on setting up a discussion/q&a space. We'll post the information far and wide as soon as it's ready.

And don't forget to follow the Twitter list too! Catcode and send a message on Twitter to me to add yourself to the list. We're also using #catcode as the hashtag.

CodeYear Catalogers

2012-01-03T16:48:00.001-05:00

CodeAcademy is offering an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in getting started with coding: Code Year. Each week they'll be emailing out to anyone that signs up an interactive lesson on coding. Code Academy offers some fantastic interactive courses, so you learn in a supportive environment.

Naturally this has piqued the interest of a number of catalogers that have been interested in learning to code or want to brush up or learn new code languages, myself included. Catalogers work with massive amounts of curated bibliographic data, and being able to manipulate it in new and different ways and in ever increasing amounts is key as we move forward into the bibliographic future and the world of linked data and the semantic web.

So I started compiling names. This is my curated list of catalogers on Twitter participating in CodeYear so far:

@slmcdanold (me)
@lauramac95
@jaleh_f
@erinaleach
@HLPitts
@yo_bj (no longer has cataloger in her title but it's in her soul)
@jen_young
@cjclib
@cursedstorm
@enimsakont
@debdegeorge
@evil_jen
@chrpr (not a cataloger...but we like him anyway)
@amyrpennington
@skiddie2
@johnmac38
@wabashcanonball
@EstherArens
@lagina
@sidesmirk
@libdespot
@shelitwits
@AnneWelsh
@yanajenn
@orangeaurochs
@maryacat
@campbell_b
@strong_stuff
@dchud
@lrobare
@ahitchens
@dorevabelfiore
@kate80
@jenniferswright
@SuzanGriffiths
@lynncorrigan
@alyssa_briggs
@springyrice
@caschwartz (no longer has cataloger in her title but it's in her soul)
@HtebLuap
@prburley
@frleibo
@cololibrarygirl
@srodr2
@htomren
@shomj
@rachelmcw
@schammond
@StephenTEarly
@cindywho23
@Headstrongways
@ynde
@ces43
@infod1va
@teagueamania
@israelcsus
@meta_cat
@diriwh
@bibliosaurustxt
@pikesar
@BarbaraBrownell
@tminchew
@keribrary
@lrts
@barnlib
@adriennerad
@spaghettiwall
@zemkat
@AhavaCohen
@deans
@catlib56
@bookmender11
@diseming
@jnavia
@violibrarian
@egelliott
@koklbr
@plummerkaren
@nossis
@PhillyKatia
@jmyntti
@mrlindner
@metalib
@AllisonJaiODell
@strettoc
@bohyunkim
@wendyrlibrarian
@maggienunley
@alison_felstead
@RachaelCohen1
@bibliographics

Add yourself to the list by posting your Twitter handle as a comment. I'll update as needed. :) You can also send me a message via Twitter (@slmcdanold) and add yourself that way. Or use the newly created hashtag #catcode (thanks @chrpr for the suggestion)!

There is now an actual LIST on Twitter: catcode. Subscribe!

If you're not on Twitter, let me know where we should email you when we get some sort of wiki/webpage/IRC channel going so we can all ~~suffer~~ learn together and help each other.

Non-Twitter list:

Cecilia G. (gener002@umn.edu)
Joe O. (Joe_Orth@ca6.uscourts.gov)
Martin J. (martin.jenkins@wright.edu)
Nancy H. (nancy.hunter@colostate.edu)
Ann H. (alh5456@sbcglobal.net) [on Twitter as @alh5456 but forgets to use it. ;) ]
chrisallenstanton@gmail.com
Susie R. (sridgeway@me.com)
Deborah Tomaras (dtomaras@southportland.org)
Melodie Frances (mfrances@gtu.edu)
Linda Frankel (lf92355@gmail.com)
Leigh Billings (rednaal@umich.edu)
Bill Anderson (William.Anderson@ct.gov)
Catherine Kellett (catherine.kellett@yale.edu)
Christine DeZelar-Tiedman (dezel002@umn.edu)
Cindy (cbarrilleaux@slol.lib.la.us)
Ashley Dietrick (akdietrick@gmail.com)
Joan Milligan (jmilligan1@udayton.edu)
Chris Blackman (cblackma@williams.edu)
Kristi Bergland (krisser@gmail.com)
Euem C. Osmera (eosmera@unmc.edu)
flinchba@umbc.edu
David A. Johnson (djohnson@highline.edu)
deg7@nyu.edu
Pauline (myrtlebell@centurylink.net)
Mike Mitchell (deeptexas10@gmail.com)
R.A. Stewart (rstewart@indiantrailslibrary.org)
Melissa VanTine (melissa.vantine@yale.edu)
Tina (spielmat@uwm.edu)
Carolyn (chufford@gmail.com)
Julie (julie.howe@kctcs.edu)
Peter Rolla (peter_rolla@hms.harvard.edu)
lloydgerard@hotmail.com
kvalenzuela@csustan.edu

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 5 & 6

2011-07-30T14:15:00.002-04:00

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 4

2011-07-28T17:00:00.006-04:00

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Arrive at my desk 8:15am. Running late today. Took me three tries to leave the house as I had to keep going back for things I forgot. I'm just happy I didn't lock myself out. Also, there's a crane lift blocking the staff entrance this morning to lift materials into the construction space up on the sixth floor. I know we received an email about it yesterday, but of course I forgot until I arrived and had to backtrack to get to the alternate entrance opened instead. Sigh. I'm sure some of my absent mindedness this morning can be blamed on the 2am epic! battle! between my cat and a fly that somehow got into my apartment. Yes, I am tired.

Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Today is a mix of back to back meetings and then a lot of non-meeting time. Sometimes it's nice to have things divided into clear chunks so the day is less choppy.

I spent much of my time before my first meeting preparing for my meetings, especially the one I'm "hosting" at noon.

10:00am-11:00am Meeting of my staff working on barcoding the bound serial volumes and the staff that process things being sent to storage, which also involves a lot of barcoding. We follow the same procedures and policies for the barcoding piece of things, so everyone is getting together to compare notes and have a round robin type discussion.

11:00am-noon Roger Schoenfeld from ITHAKA gave a talk/presentation on the activities of ITHAKA for supporting teaching and learning. Unfortunately I had to leave early to open the online "room" for my noon meeting.

I inhale a quick snack before my meeting so my stomach growling doesn't get recorded.

Noon-1pm Online meeting of my PCC task group on RDA hybrid bib records. We've been meeting once a week using Adobe Connect to discuss things. As chair of the task group, I'm also the "host" in Adobe Connect so I monitor the chat, take notes, turn the recording function on/off, etc. We record our meetings so anyone that has to miss a meeting can catch up on the discussions. We're also using GoogleDocs to share meeting minutes/notes and drafts and communally comment on and edit them. Just communicating via email and document comments can be tricky, as threads get complicated and split and merge and you end up with multiple versions of documents floating around. Having a conversation once a week definitely helps us stay on track so we can meet our tight deadline of having a report ready by Sept. 1st. We have an outline for our report now, so I'm breathing a bit easier. :) Tomorrow morning I'll clean up the minutes and post them.

Once my meeting is over, I chat briefly with a colleague via GoogleTalk about editing a record to reflect changes in ownership and therefore, access. URLs are removed from the record. Done.

Now to eat lunch. Even with my snack I'm *starving* since it's after 1pm. Take some time during lunch to catch up on email and listservs. My RDA-L listserv folder is hitting critical mass on number of unread messages (over 1,500!). I think I'm going to have to spend some time tomorrow afternoon cleaning it out. Listserv folder cleaning is a good Friday afternoon activity.

Of course, since I'm eating lunch later than normal, my lunch involves multiple interruptions from my staff and colleagues. One of the hazards of eating lunch at my desk.

I manage to slip away from my desk for a break to see a friend that's stopped by with her baby girl. Squee baby break!

[Caution: MARC/tech speak ahead!] I return to the problem I started work on a few days ago: the records that errored when we loaded a record set. I identified and fixed the simple MARC error, and identified another possible culprit for the error rejection by our system: non-MARC diacritics. My colleague (rare books cataloger) let me know how to enter the superscript character directly in our system, so I know the diacritic exists, I just have to find the numeric equivalent so I can replace the errant character (or rather replace non-valid diacritic with the character followed by the valid the diacritic code or code sequence). I find the document that lists all the diacritics available and the keystrokes, but no numeric codes.

After a good hour of digging around online and through other records in our system, I finally find the code sequence used to represent a superscript (strangely: {esc}p#{esc}s is the exact sequence where # is replaced with the numeral you want as the superscript). Now comes the fun part, running through all the permutations to do a find/replace on the record file. It takes me the rest of the afternoon to find/replace all the errant characters in the file, even with MarcEdit's fantastic tools. In addition to the superscript issue, I find a few other non-MARC characters in the process (such as the infamous "curly" quotes that cause copy/paste issues in so many different situations). I really really hope this fixes the issues and when we try a re-load we don't get and more errored records back from the system. I'll check the file again in the morning when my eyes are fresh.

Sometimes I'm convinced systems/databases for libraries are specifically designed to drive catalogers nuts. I like logic and bulk editing and reports for clean up projects. These things are not easily accomplished with our current system. Sigh.

4:15pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:25pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Off to my much needed acupuncture appointment!

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 3

2011-07-27T17:30:00.024-04:00

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Arrive at my desk 8am.. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

I return to my troubleshooting for the newly loaded records that are throwing up a proxy error. It appears an errant extra character ended up between our proxy prepend and the URL somehow. I'm not sure what happened. So I send a request off to our tech/systems people to check the handle server tables to see where the extra character (quote mark) is being introduced (is it in the proxy end? or is it before the URL in the table? is it a set of quotes embedded in the URL?). After a brief email exchange, it appears there's a random number of URLs from the collection with errant quotes embedded in them. It's not systematic or predictable. I'll have to fix them by hand and then have our tech/systems folks replace the URLs in the underlying handle server table. Good times.

I also submit a request to load a new update to a collection that's ready.

Next I submit a request to run a new set of records through a script of standard edits that all our MARC record sets get before I make any additional edits/additions to the records. All of our records have a standard note added about our license as well as a unique modifier added to the 035 (system number) to make the set easy to identify for maintenance once it's in the catalog. Other modifications the script can make is to convert a set of records for the print versions in to records for the online versions. These record sets are for local use only. Frequently the use is restricted by our license agreement when we get the records direct from the vendor, so they aren't sent to any utility, which is why we can do this "quick and dirty" conversion.

9:30am Weekly meeting with my supervisor and Dept. head to talk about what's going on. I have a short list of topics to discuss with her, and she usually has updates on things for me as well.

Back from my meeting and back to email. Feedback request on proposed PCC task force gets sent off to the Policy Committee.

The report on the URLs that need editing from the handle server table is waiting for me. Less than 15 minutes later they're fixed, checked, and sent back to be replaced in the table.

I finish updating the spreadsheet we use to track MARC record sets and FTP it to the library's website server.

And suddenly it's 5 minutes to noon and time for lunch. It's Wednesday, which means the guys from Beechwood Orchards are on campus with lots of fresh, local, and delicious fruit! It's stone fruit season, and the options are overwhelming. I opted for nectarines and a pint of fantastic heirloom cherry tomatoes. They taste like summer!

After lunch I spend some time doing some CONSER cataloging. My intern (who unfortunately departed the end of June) did a lot of of work prepping a large number of records that need updating. I'm slowly working my way through the massive pile she left me. It's a mix of print serials, online databases, online books, and some other weird stuff.

I also finish up a couple of serial records for print Bengali serials on cinema. Fortunately we have a number of language and subject area specialists that work in my library. When a resource is in a language I can't read (Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, etc.), I start the serial record, and then pass it off to the language specialist who fills in the information for me from the resource and adds any fields in non-Roman scripts. I finish up the coding on the record once all the data has been transcribed (or described), and done! One record for a serial in a language I can't read. It's a very effective workflow.

2:30-4:00pm Monthly meeting for the supervisors' group that I coordinate/moderate/chair. Lots of discussion.

Back to my desk to address/answer the deluge of email messages that arrived in the previous 90 minutes. Seriously. A deluge of email. Some days I swear my inbox is made of bunnies that are spawning more bunnies faster than the speed of light.

4:45pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:50pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. A friend and I have post work plans for dinner (it's the University City Dining Days so great deals at fantastic local restaurants) and the Harry Potter movie! A lovely mid-week break in my routine.

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 2

2011-07-26T16:30:00.006-04:00

This post is part of Library Day in the Life project. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for more information. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Arrive at my desk about 8:05am. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

Surprisingly, I have no meetings, appointments, etc. on my calendar today. Quick! Hide me!

I spend some time investigating the server reference in a local handle URL (aka local PURL) that I had never seen before. [caution: MARC speak ahead!] This came up due to an email asking questions about what to do if there's no subfield in the 856 to mask the URL in the public display. The example in the email included a handle with the new-to-me handle server reference in the address. Ultimately, after asking a few additional questions, I have two new things on my to-do list that spawned from the email: what to do with things that have no indicators present in the 856 field, and I need to further investigate what things have the new-to-me server reference and whether they should even be visible to the public. If so, then we'll need to do some metadata cleanup to add some subfields to mask the URL and tell the public where the link takes them. Time to request a report from our system (all report queries to to the system server are made by our tech/systems folks - I don't have access to the report functionality).

I reply to the email, indicating the changes on the ingest/display specs for our OPAC (we're still in the development/testing phase) to answer the original question about display when there's no subfield to mask the URL. Ultimately I end up on the phone with the team leader for the user interface design team I'm on to nail down the specific language we need to use. Lots of [] statements and OR and AND boolean statements mashed together. All of this will have to be confirmed at a meeting next week, but we think our proposal will be approved with no objections.

I then return to the ebook cataloging records I started yesterday and finally finish them. I import the new records into our system and email my staff person to complete the local processing.

I remember I need to send email reminder to all librarians about a meeting tomorrow afternoon. I send it promptly before I forget again.

And all of that happened before 10:20am.

The rest of the morning is spent on work with MARC record sets. I have two sets ready for editing. [caution: more MARC speak ahead!] We usually do minor modifications on all of our record sets to add additional access points (at the request of the bibliographer), delete 9xx fields that conflict with local use, and normalize specific MARC fields so limits work properly in our OPAC. Once my additional edits are complete, I have to amend the ticket with our tech/systems folks so they know they files are ready for loading into our catalog.

11:45am A colleague stops by. Her computer crashed and when she got her new one, all her OCLC authorizations and settings were gone. This happens with surprising regularity (the loss of settings). I am the keeper of the master list of OCLC authorizations for our libraries, so after finding out what she needs to do and what her staff need to do, I write down the authos she needs.

12:15pm Time for lunch! And a walk over to the Philadelphia Runner store in search of a pair of long-ish running shorts. The shorts I've been using aren't designed for running, and well, that can be uncomfortable when they get twisted. Unfortunately, they only have the super-short summer styles in. Looks like I'll have to order a pair with a longer inseam from REI instead (bonus! I have a 20% off coupon for one full-price item at REI!).

During lunch I get notification that the URLs in the most recent collection set of MARC records we loaded are throwing up a proxy error page. Damn. Forward the email to the appropriate colleagues for proxy troubleshooting. I also get the error file from the load sent to me. In good news 1,010 records DID load. But 76 records didn't load for reasons unknown. Only 2 records have an easily identifiable MARC error...the rest are mystery errors. Now to attempt to troubleshoot/fix the errors and load the records again.

I do eventually figure out that some of the records errored because they have a non-Unicode/non-MARC8 character in a note field: a superscript. Now I just have to figure out how to fix those and figure out why the rest of the records errored. I email my colleague that's a rare books cataloger to find out how they enter superscript characters for signatures.

I spend the rest of the afternoon alternating error fixes with Program for Cooperative Cataloging committee and task group work. The PCC Policy Committee (I'm a member since I'm current chair of the Standing Committee on Automation) has a document for review. My Standing Committee has a proposal in for a task group and we need to respond to comments from the PCC Steering Committee so it can move forward ASAP. The PCC RDA hybrid bib record task group I'm chairing has several documents I need to review and comment on. It's a busy time for the PCC.

4:00pm Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:10pm Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Today I *have* to leave on time as I have to get somewhere in Center City before 5pm.

Library Day in the Life - Round 7, Day 1

2011-07-25T17:15:00.002-04:00

I realize this blog has been silent for quite some time, but it's time for another round of Library Day in the Life posts which is an excellent reason to revive it. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday7.

Obligatory background: I'm a cataloger at a rather large academic library. Specifically a cataloger of electronic resources (anything online, in any format), and continuing resources (serials, etc.). I participate in the PCC program, doing NACO and both CONSER and BIBCO work depending on what I'm dealing with at the time. I also participate in committee work for the PCC, ALA ALCTS, and NASIG.

I am head of a unit that handles the cataloging, maintenance and inventory control of continuing resources (both serials and integrating resources) and electronic resources (online resources) for all units of the Libraries by updating and maintaining bibliographic, holdings and item records. I have four para-professional (or support) staff in my unit. Two that work an early shift, and two that work a later shift. In an attempt to cover the most ground, my schedule says I work from 8am to 4pm, although I usually don't actually get out of the office until 4:30 or 5pm.

The majority of time spent on the cataloging for continuing resources and many online resources is maintenance work and updating of the bibliographic records to reflect current information. Changes can be anything from the frequency, to a change in publisher, to a title variation or title change. Cataloging these types of materials is like trying to hit a moving target or nailing jello to the wall. There's also the ongoing inventory maintenance on our holdings records to deal with keeping our holdings current, including withdrawn/lost/missing volumes, general edits to fix accuracy issues, etc. I also spend a large amount of time managing the bulk loads of MARC records for ebooks and managing the cataloging of individual ebooks and ebooks series that aren't available in sets but require regular maintenance and updating.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Arrive at work a little after 8am. Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, Voyager and Connexion, open GChat, open a browser, login to various web programs (including Evernote), start TweetDeck.

Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages.

First order of business: review minutes from my committee's meeting at ALA Annual. I unfortunately missed the meeting, so I need to read the minutes closely to catch up on what we're doing. I'm currently the Continuing Resources Section representative to the ALCTS Division-level Organization & Bylaws Committee. I agreed to serve because this committee has nothing to do with cataloging or continuing resources, so I get to interact with colleagues from other divisions and who do completely different work than I do. It's refreshing and requires me to think differently (which is a good thing).

Next I work on ebook sets. I'm tracking in Evernote what stage each collection is in; which have open tickets; which need tickets opened for bulk loading process by our technology/systems folks.

During my ebook sets work, I'm interrupted by a rush ebook cataloging request (2 individual titles), required updates to several serial records as a result of the ebook cataloging request, and multiple questions from my staff about a current transfer and barcoding project. I log into the secondary ebooks general email account to see the rush request emails and reply/forward to the appropriate individuals.

10:00am and 10:30am - Bi-weekly check-in meetings with 2 of my 4 staff. Next week I'll have my meeting with my remaining two staff. This is something new I'm trying. Management I've learned over the past 2 years is an ever evolving process. I try different things, some work, some don't. I'm constantly having to learn and improve as a manager. These bi-weekly meetings are to try to improve/increase communication with my staff by having regular face-to-face conversations. Hopefully it will help address problems before they become crises. It also presents more opportunities to get solutions for things directly from them. I don't have to solve the problems, I just have to support the solution and the process.

Back to ebook sets work.

Interrupted again by the arrival of the two grant staff that will be guests in our Unit's space. We happened to have two empty cubicles with the departure of my intern the end of June. So until December, the grant staff will be using the intern cubicle and the student cubicle in my Unit's space. I introduce myself and make sure they know where the essentials (bathroom, water cooler, refrigerator) are and find out when they will be around the next few weeks. My staff had requested an informal meet and greet since we're sharing space. While the grant staff are not part of my unit or even under the umbrella of my department or in the tech services division (they're part of a completely different department and division in the library), we do want to ensure that things aren't awkward and that the space sharing goes smoothly. So I reserve a room for a mid-morning meet and greet with everyone early next week after our guest have settled in a bit.

12:30 - Brownbag lunch discussion for librarians. This is also something new. An informal discussion on a different topic suggested by ourselves each week. Essentially informal professional development. Unfortunately, I arrived late due to the moving in of our guests.

After the brownbag, stopped to chat with a few colleagues to answer questions and get an answer to a question about what these rush ebooks actually are in the bibliographic cataloging world. Turns out the 2 new ebooks we received a rush cataloging request for this morning are actually separately published "enhanced" versions of a serial issue. So they need original cataloging and I can't piggyback on the existing serial record. Good times.

Return to my desk and deal with more email. Questions, cataloging issues, and committee work. I didn't get a chance to eat before the brownbag, and I forgot to take my lunch with me, so I end up eating lunch at my desk around 2:20pm. Oof.

I end up working on the ebook original records while eating lunch. One of the benefits of working with mainly online materials is I don't have to worry about spilling food or beverages on them. Also, multitasking at it's finest!

I complete one ebook record and my lunch, and am promptly interrupted by my staff with a few questions about item record strangeness. The also let me know they need more work and more dusting/cleaning supplies. I call and leave a message for a colleague that we need more volumes for our barcoding project (we're trying to systematically barcode all the bound serial volumes in the stacks...this is a long-term project). I then email our business office staff person to order more dusting cloths. Many of the volumes we are barcoding haven't been moved, or even touched, for years so they have a nice coating of dust on them. By now it's 3:30pm.

I check my email, and find a message from our systems/technology staff asking me about the profile for a bulk load. I have no idea what this profile means. What's worse, I have no idea where to look to find the bulk import rule profiles for our system. Time to make a phone call. Apparently they are in the system admin client, which I don't have access to. Fortunately one of my colleagues who's office is conveniently next door does have access and was able to print out the specs for each possible rule profile. Emailed the systems person back and I think we've figured it out. We'll see when the load log arrives.

I think I'm going to talk to my boss about putting in a request for access to the System Admin profile at least on a "read only" status when I meet with her this week. It would simplify things.

I realize I'm not going to finish the ebook cataloging today, so I save the records make a note to finish them both first thing in the morning tomorrow. I also didn't get to any CONSER work today and my shelf/stack to be completed is starting to lean dangerously. I'm going to have to schedule time in my calendar for that, aren't I? [Rhetorical question...the correct answer is "of course if I want it to actually happen.] Sigh.

Final email check. Clean out email listservs, skipping AUTOCAT (I'll deal with that one later...I don't have the patience or time right now). Check Twitter and blog feeds. Schedule this post.

4:35pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Pray rain holds off until I get home. Really looking forward to my "Tranquil Vinyasa" yoga class tonight. It's the perfect way to start the week and end the day on Mondays.

In which the universe does me a solid

2010-09-16T18:22:00.004-04:00

Last weekend I had the stomach flu. Like curluponthebathroomfloorIwantmymommy stomach flu. It was ugly.

I think the universe decided to try for balance, and do something nice to counter the OMGIwanttodie stomach flu. It did me a solid.

A few weeks ago on a lark I threw my email into an online contest to win concert tickets. I do this periodically, if it's a band I'd actually like to see. I'm certainly not entering every contest. I honestly have to want to see the band or I don't bother.

The band in this case? Cake. It was CAKE. A band I've been listening to since late high school/early college but have never had the chance to see. And they don't come to the East Coast that often.

So I entered. Just once. You could enter every day, but I only entered once.

And then I forgot about it.

On Monday, the first day I was able to eat solid food, I get a phone call. It's the radio station running the contest. I won. I thought it was a joke. Asked what the punchline was. The nice woman on the other end of the phone just laughed and told me it wasn't a joke. Really, I was one of the winners.

Wait, what? Pause...I let it sink in for a moment.

OMFG I WON. I won two tickets to the show. In box seats. bouncebouncebouncebounce

And then she says: "And you won a meet and greet with the band after the show."

I froze. Mouth open. Holy effin' shite I GET TO MEET CAKE!!!

She gives me the details about where to pick up the tickets. The concert is Wednesday. Holy crap. I manage to pull myself together and figure out who to take with me.

So the show was last night. And it was full of so much awesome win. I have no pictures, as the band has a strict no-photography no-recording policy. The event staff were enforcing it, too (saw them throw a couple of people out).

Cake did three sets. Two main plus an encore. A nice mix of early stuff, their big hits, and a few songs off the album coming out in January 2011. Truly an excellent mix. They even played one of my all time favorites: "How Do You Afford Your Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle?" (from Motorcade of Generosity (1994)). They have no set list, choosing instead to play whatever they feel like that evening. They were clearly having as much fun as the rest of us were watching them and dancing at our seats. John kept the crowd engaged, really interacting with everyone between songs. There were moments of complete random hilarity.

Did you know they give away a real live tree (a sapling in a bucket) to an audience member at every show (info here)? And they make the person swear to plant the tree and take care of it. They have to submit pictures to their website as proof. They want progress pictures too, even if the tree dies. You can see pics of people with their trees here in the gallery. A dude named Ian won the tree at this show. A Fuji apple tree, specifically.

All around a good time.

And the people watching? Priceless. What a crowd.

The meet and greet after the show was predictably weird and awkward yet very cool. The guys actually talked to us contest winners. Mingled and chatted. They're nice very down to earth real people, which was a very pleasant thing to have confirmed.

It was an excellent evening. There really isn't another word that's better. Just excellent. Yeah, awesome works too.

But don't think you're off the hook yet, universe. This was a nice little interlude, but not change. I still need things to change. So, thanks, I had fun, but let's work on the bigger long-term picture, m'kay?

Neglect

2010-09-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

Dear blog,

I know I've been neglecting you. I just haven't got much to say.

Actually, that's not true. I have much to say, just none of it I can say here. Let's run down some topics, shall we?

*Work (i.e. day to day): I can't talk about what's really going on. I WON'T talk about it. I refuse to think about it outside of when I'm actually at work these days.

*Career: going swimmingly. Really. I've been achieving a lot of goals recently that I had set as "sometime in the future" goals. As in, I never expected to achieve them already. I'm young, and I know it. The struggle now is accepting the positive reinforcement and accolades from colleagues and believing I can actually succeed now that I am where I am career wise (i.e. silencing the "don't f*ck it up" voice in my head).

*Dating: MEH. Just a big ol' MEH. Online dating sucks. It really does. It's going nowhere. It's to the point that lately I can't even muster the energy or interest to log in and check my account. I contact people, they don't respond. Meanwhile, those that do contact me obviously haven't even read my profile.

*Philly: I've been here for 4 years now. FOUR YEARS. I've come to the conclusion that I don't love Philly, and never will. Some (most?) days I don't even like Philly. I just don't feel at home here. I feel like I'm a half step off from the rest of the city. Like I'm out of sync.

*General: Lately I feel like I'm just passing the time, keeping myself busy. Cooking. Doing counted cross stitch. Reading. Hanging out on the balcony with my cat. Listening to the radio. Just functioning on a day to day basis. Trying to keep myself from dwelling on the negative ('cause there's a lot of it). Trying to accept that this is how things are for me right now and hope that things will change for the better sometime soon. Trying to believe that something has to give. The universe has got to throw me a bone soon. Some days are definitely better than others. But I keep putting one foot in front of the other, and taking one day at time.

So that's that. Not much I can or want to talk about. So, blog, my apologies for the neglect, but for now, that's just the way it's gonna be.

Love,
Me

Library Day in the Life - Round 5, Day 5

2010-07-30T17:38:00.002-04:00

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds in Janurary 2010 and in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday5.

There is no post for Day 4, Thursday, July 29, 2010. I was at home battling a migraine, which required aspirin, water, a dark room, a cold pack for my head, and lots of quiet.

Friday, July 30, 2010

6:25am: Roll out of bed. Shower, dress, breakfast, coffee. Pour remaining coffee into travel mug. No packed lunch today. It's "food truck Friday"! All summer a small group comprised of myself and a few of my colleagues have been sampling the various food truck options in and around campus. The food truck culture here is incredible. So many delicious options.

7:35am: Walk to work.

8:05am: Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Check in with early-arriving staff. Catch up on news feeds, and library-related Twitter lists while finishing coffee. Start this post. Review my calendar. Review the scribbled to-do list I made at the end of the day Wednesday. Send more emails.

8:40am: Sent off final report for ALA committee and upload it into the committee's ALA Connect workspace. Upload other various documents and reports from my time on the committee (and as Chair) to the committee's Connect space. I have now completed all my duties for that committee. I was on it for seven (yes, 7!) years. That's a long time. But it's also time to move onto other committee work elsewhere.

8:50am: Set up new subscriptions for MARC records for an electronic book collection set. This set has lots of subsets, so I double check I'm ordering records for the right ones. I print out the confirmation screen and put it in the inbox for our electronic acquisitions person so she can watch for the invoice and process the payment.

9:00am: Review and update the spreadsheet for all our electronic collection sets. Start reviewing 3 sets of MARC records processed by my colleague in preparation for loading them into our catalog.

9:30am: Check in via IM with my boss. She sends me a document to review later this morning. Must finish reviewing the MARC records first.

10:20am: Finish looking at third MARC records file. All seems to be well. Checked report of URLs, and all is well there. Yay! We can cross this set off our list. Send email to colleague that the records can be loaded and update the tracking spreadsheet accordingly. Review email and start reviewing document from my boss.

10:30am: Remember that I told a colleague at another institution I'd email her a list of, um, challenges I encounter when working with MARC records from vendors for our electronic collection sets. Quickly make list of issues and send email. Records from vendors tend to have a lot of variation and present some interesting challenges. I always try to encourage the use of the PCC MARC Record Guide for Vendors. It's a good resource for any vendor looking to create MARC records for their customers.

Run errand upstairs to color photocopier to make copies of unit statistics sheet for new cataloging.

Remember I have to send weekly time sheet for unit to HR. Double check sign in sheet and my calendar to make sure everything is correct, and send it off.

11:25am: Back to reviewing document from my boss. I *will* finish this before lunch. Make a few comments and send the document back to her.

11:45am: LUNCH. Food truck Friday didn't go as planned. We tried two different trucks. The first one wasn't there, and the second one was closing up shop early. So we ended up at a nice sushi place instead. Mmmm. Sushi. Such a perfect light summer lunch. Filling yet not heavy.

1:15pm: Make final revisions to a recommendation for a colleague and post it to online form. This involves a small battle with the online form, which gives me an error message whenever I try to upload a file. Finally I just copy and paste into the text box and submit it. I'm hopeful for my colleague.

2:00pm: More email review. Clean out the listserv folders. Wonder again at the pertinacity of a particular listserv thread. And now there's two of them. They're multiplying. Damn Friday threads.

2:15pm: Type up notes from Wednesday afternoon's meeting and distribute them accordingly.

3:05pm: IM with colleague regarding other large collection sets of MARC records. I'm trying to do more with MarcEdit to distribute the work on these sets a bit more. Having to write a PERL script for each one, especially sets that are single-time loads, is a bit much. I attended the MarcEdit workshop pre-conference at ALA and learned a LOT from Terry Reese. Now I'm trying to replicate the things he showed us MarcEdit can do. It's a much more powerful tool than I realized. So much potential. I now have several very large (100,000+ MARC records) sized sets to play with and test the limits of MarcEdit. Hopefully I won't break anything (my desktop included).

3:30pm: Post updated version of spreadsheet tracking our electronic collection sets to the library webpage server via FTP. Nearly forgot my password. Yikes.

3:45pm: Copy monthly statistics from report posted online. Only the current month of daily statistics is kept, so I have to copy the daily stats on the last working day of each month. If I didn't have a handy dandy tickler in my calendar I don't know I'd remember to do this otherwise.

4:15pm: Week wrap up. Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check feeds and blogs. Schedule this post.

4:30pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Yay weekend!