• Admin Metrics 8:00-9:00 Taking a first look at result of metrics. Looking… Ok. As there have never been metrics established prior, there will be some experimentation involved to refine them, as well as this being the first week that we’ve actually kept ‘em and metrics tell more over the long term than they do in the short term. We’ll get there. I’ve got an awesome team now, figuring out where we’re getting randomized and tightening up will just make us even better.
• Admin Meetings 9:00-9:15 Planning for team mtg.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 9:15-10:00 Outsourcing process doc. How we’re going to decide what to send out & technical details of how we’ll pull it.
• Admin Meetings 10:00-10:30 Cat. team mtg. Pretty laid back today.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 10:30-12:00 Outsourcing process doc. Yep, back to this…
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:00 Emails to answer a test question about what we would expect a “contains” search to include (string match of the terms entered? keyword “AND”?). What we would expect (AND/NEAR) was not the case (exact string match to be included in rest of the search). Which is fine. I’m glad I know that’s the case now!
• Outsourcing Vendor Management/Review 13:00-13:30 Outsource pilot lead had questions. I had answers.
• Admin Metrics 13:30-14:00 Looking at updates to the incident metrics. They look good. Better, anyway… we’ll get there, we’ll get there…
• Admin Overhead 14:00-14:30 Spilling water on my computer & keyboard because that’s just how I roll. *sigh* Cleaned up, no damage done. Back to more interesting things.
• Admin Overhead 14:30-15:30 Sales/sales support client call post-mortem initial write up, set mtg for Monday review/feedback from team.
• Admin Overhead 15:30-16:00 Planning Monday. (Why, Brain? What are we going to do Monday night? Monday night, Pinky, we’re going to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!)

Came home. The little girls showed up fifteen minutes after me & we had a lazy daisy evening. Although M2 decided to clean her room. I think she did a better job than I do. When she sets her mind to it, she is really an amazing little cleaner upper. I wish she’d take initiative to do it more often, it’s truly amazing.

• Admin Billing 8:00-9:00 Straightening out billing stuff with a MARC record supplier.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 9:00-10:00 Mtg. to help a sales guy figure out how to approach a current client.
• Admin Billing 10:00-10:30 Send on the billing stuff for signatures.
• Admin Overhead 10:30-12:00 Restarting computer due to updates, getting stuff ready for bugzilla bash.
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:30 Bugzilla bug bash! w00t! Taking a look at bugs & figuring out how to put together something our awesome director can go into a meeting with to help us get some leverage for stuff that would improve the cataloging workflow.
• MeSH Meetings 13:30-14:00 Sorting out a MeSh mess, sorted & resolved. Yay! My recommendation to resolve the issue is what the dev was thinking too & we’re golden!
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:00 Looking at top dbs that could be outsourced & what sorts of ‘packages’ we could set up for varying markets (mostly med as int’l has yet to be determined). What can we put together (for example, normalizing the top 25 med. databases to 100% — so MARC records and authority records for all holdings within a particular provider package).
• Admin Overhead 16:00-16:30 Prepping for tomorrow.

I feel like there were some wasted cycles in there. Not because I wasn’t trying, but I wasn’t getting as much accomplished as I wanted to. But I feel like we made a dent in some other stuff. Then I came home, fed the cats, & met my parents & girls at the lake. I had the best intentions to go swimming today, but by the time I got there, all I wanted to do was nap. So I sat in the lawn chair & kinda snoozed without really ever sleeping while crazy beach mayhem ensued around me. Then we had a lovely dinner, ending with sweet tasty watermelon. And then we came home. It’s too hot here.

So I forgot to add yesterday that I’m also the executive producer of a couple other sites & one of them got hit hard with spammers, so I spent about 1.5 hours cleaning that up too…

But today… Took the little girls to Auntie’s & made it to work in an hour. Woo!

• Admin Overhead 9:45-10:30 Email, setting up conference rooms for mtgs.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 10:30-12:30 THE mtg & half hour to follow up on action items. I hear it all went very well. It’s hard to tell over a bad phone connection & not being in the room, but the folks that were there said it went well. Yay!
• Incidents Incident Resolution 12:30-15:30 Normalization issue for a client libraray. Not finished with all the journals that need to be rematched to their target MARC records yet, but… soon.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 15:30-17:00 Trying to pull together the process, priorities, and workflow for what material goes for outsource assistance.
• MeSH Filing or commenting on bugs 17:00 18:30 MeSH taxonomy bug. Easy fix, just need to use the unique MeSH id to identify paths rather than internal tools path id & we’re golden (hopefully those aren’t famous last words! Last time I said that it was requesting recursive queries in a directed acyclic graph database… And that actually is not, by definition, an easy fix. In fact, I believe it’s impossible. These minor details…)
• Admin Overhead 18:30 19:00 Planning tomorrow…

There was also some time spent after that sending loltaxonomy images due to a polyhierarchy issue that reared its ugly head during the MeSH thing, but that was just muckin’ around having fun. :) Then I logged off & came home. And now here I am, dreading to go inside my 95F house. It’s so much more pleasant out here on the deck, although the only light is from the laptop screen & it’s starting to burn into my retinas. Good times, people, good times…

Round 1 July 2008
Round 2 January 2009
July 27th 2009 begins the Second Annual

Eh, so I’m starting a day late. I’m the cataloging team manager for Serials Solutions. I’ve been in this position about 5.5 weeks & I’m still learning the ropes and wrapping my head around things. I think I’m getting there, but I also have a ways to go before I’ve mastered the finer details. I got my MLIS in 2005 & I’ve been working in various library environments for the last 12 or so years.

MONDAY

It’s an early morning for me. It’s warm in the house already. I get in the car & make it to work in about 35 minutes — it’s a *good* morning. Except I overslept because it was so hot, and so I walk in the door right when I wanted to get there. Woo!

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 8:00-9:45 Trying to get my ducks in a row so I’m prepared for an upcoming client meeting.
• Admin Billing 9:45-10:45 Reviewing and sorting out billing issues and changes to MARC records provider contracts.
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:45-11:30 Back to trying to organize those ducks for the client meeting.

• Normalization Normalizing 11:30-12:00 NORM! 29 records reviewed, two normalized. Sadly, I think I messed up both records. On the upside, one of my excellent team members caught it & promises to continue to help me out until I have it all down.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 12:00-13:30 Outsourcing strategy overview. Completed with minor exceptions (Normalization plan, largely…). The volume of materials we have has increased exponentially & to continue providing the services at a reasonable cost in a reasonably efficient manner, we need some extra hands!
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 13:30-14:00 I know, I’m preparing a lot — there are a lot of details and I want to get them right. This is tying up loose ends before meeting with one of my awesome team members who will promptly provide me with a hydra of questions… :) Also a moment of recursive brain explode-y as we contemplate how things might go with this library. They’re kind of a unique case. Everyone’s library is unique, but this one is even uniquer than most…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 14:00-16:00 And here’s the hydra. For every question I get answered, five more questions pop up in the first question’s place.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 16:00-16:15 Reviewing MARC records received from one of our international libraries that I had to do a lot of clean up on last week. Yay for learning regex! Regex is *neat*.

Leave work — the blast of hot air from the elevator warns me that it’s ridonculously hot outside. Drive in hot weather for an hour to fetch The Girls from Auntie’s. Drive another half hour to get home, pick up everyone’s swim suits, a book, and some other stuff. Drive another half hour to meet my parents & husband at the local beach for dinner. Eventually come home to a freaking hot house (91F when we got home at 9ish).

TUESDAY

Late morning for me — that means I take the girls to Aunties. Made it to work in a little over an hour round trip from my house to Auntie’s to work — not too bad, considering I usually chat with Auntie a little.

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:00-11:00 New client agenda for the meeting I prepared for yesterday. Filling in what I can as pre-prep mtg prep.
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 11:00-12:45 Composing email response for a library who might help us with foreign language cataloging to help fill in some of our gap records. During this time, my lovely bosslady brought in the book The Time Trap for my team and me. Looking forward to seeing what kinds of things I pick up from this book…
• Admin Billing 12:45-13:00 Responding to library MARC record resource that updated their contract based on info from our lawyer. This doesn’t appear to be a super-easy renewal. We’ll see where things go from here…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 13:00-14:00 Prep mtg for tomorrow’s client mtg with my team. Because they are totally awesome, they feel confident that we’re prepared for this meeting. I still feel very new & am nervous about it, but I’m glad they’ll be there because they know their stuff. They’re really amazing & I’m lucky to have another good team. Hoorah! I’d like to bring them with me to InfoCamp & do something, but I don’t have any idea what that something might be.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:30 *cries when mrk -> mrc borks the int’l records* Send stuff off to library that might help us with it. Really, this is a cross between the outsourcing stuff I’ve been working on and the records acquisition stuff. Ball’s in their court!
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 16:30-17:00 Setting up bugzilla bash & NOMS. We need to organize the outstanding bugs that are getting in the way of our productivity for the director. She wants to get some of that fixed for us which would be really great. A lot of the fixes are “well, I guess we do have a work around…” but none of them are efficient & some of them are only barely functional. But other stuff has a higher priority and yada yada… so to have someone with a little more leverage say, “yep — time to add some extra resources and Get That Fixed” will be a good thing.
• Admin Overhead 17:00-18:00 Organizing & planning for tomorrow. I know it sounds weird, but by taking about a half hour to wrap up & another half hour to plan the next day at the end of a day, it makes it much easier for me to come in and get right to work the next day. I don’t have to try to remember where I left off, what needs to be done, what my priorities are, because it’s all set up for me by my very own best administrative assistant — me, the night before. :) As I get more settled, this routine may go by the wayside a little, but at this point I’m tracking so much stuff, I think this might be How It Is for me from here on out. And in the name of productivity, I’m totally cool with that.

In the meantime, I’ve walked across the street to get a pint of blueberries & the heat outside is ugly. At the end of day I head out into the heat. Just straight home this time. Sit on the back deck & eat some fruit & chicken. It’s actually pleasant out there. I surfed for a bit as the computer was out there, then we came in to watch Deadliest Catch & Chopped because clearly we’re crazy. It’s come down several degrees in here since we came in. It’s only 90F. It was 94F when I got home. Uck. We shall see what tomorrow brings!