This post is written for Round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries. For more about my job duties, please see my entry for Monday.
6:40am Woke up early enough to take a pleasant 30 min walk before it gets oppressive hot outside. Recently bought an ipod Nano which has a built-in pedometer. Now quite obsessed about reaching the daily steps goal of 10,000 steps.
What a brilliant idea to add a pedometer to the ipod!
7:30am Email, Facebook, Twitter, and football news. Good news to Liverpool as it looks like Torres will stay. Bad news to Liverpool as it looks like Mascherano wants to leave.
9:00am Read a HBR blog post titled, “Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You“, which discusses why customers would rather use self-service kiosks at airports, or ATMs at banks than to interact with airline service agents or bank tellers. “Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live”. This obviously relates to one of academic libraries’ big issues – what to do with the reference/circulation/information desk(s)? I heard that a library (now I can’t remember which one) is already experimenting with replacing all those desks with self-service kiosks, and computers, and telephones (direct lines to reference librarians). This Library Journal article discusses the state of self-service in 2010.
A self issue machine which uses RFID technology to let users check out, return and renew material.
10:30am Summer is quite a bit slower than the regular academic year, so it’s a good time to catch up on my own research. Worked on my diversity research proposal a bit.
11:45am LUNCH!
1:30pm Read my library’s LibQUAL+® survey results from 2007. All 100 pages of it. That’s a long survey!
3:30pm Research reading for my screenwriting paper. A day just for my own personal work.
