On to-do lists and organisation

Said I was going to post every day this month. Uhm, that's been going well, hasn't it?

I've been thinking lately about prioritising work. Most libraries are short-staffed, so we're all doing more than, in an ideal world, we should. But how do we get the most of out of our days while at the same time delivering a good service to our patrons?

My (seemingly endless) daily to-do list goes something like this:

- Prepare work for student assistants - ensure they have enough to get on with for at least an hour or two without bothering me.
- Check to-do list for really urgent stuff that can't wait and deal with those.
- Check email for ditto.
- Quality check stuff that students and staff members have done the day before.
- Create derivatives of stuff they've done and package and send to requester.
- Upload yesterday's theses to digital repository and email requester with link.
- Prepare new projects for students and staff by deciding on file names, creating digital folders, deciding on metadata fields and metadata to be used.

Other stuff I do includes being on the marketing team and the work that that entails, dealing with issues to do with the digital repository, like display problems or downtime, maintaining twitter accounts for various depts.

Ok, there's more, but I've lost the will to list it all.

To keep on top of things, I maintain a to-do list on an Excel spreadsheet that I open at the start of the day and keep checking throughout the day. I also change the status of particular emails that I can't deal with right away to "follow-up" and check those regularly.

How do you arrange your working days so that you don't get behind on important stuff?

Library signs

We've been putting up a lot of signs in our library lately. Signage isn't a simple thing: you have to get your message across, make it succinct enough so that students actually read it, and interesting enough for the sign to catch their attention. You also don't want to put them off with too many prohibitions.

Which is why I love this sign from Oak Park Public Library.

Time to start blogging again

When I saw this post by Kathryn at Librarians Matter, it inspired me to start blogging again. The challenge is to blog every day of June. Lots of work, but also a good way to revive this blog.

For my first post, I'll point you to my institution's digital repository. We've been working very very very (did I mention very?) hard at uploading content to it since last year. We now have over 2000 objects from our visual archives and Special Collections division and over 1000 theses, dating back to 2008. At the moment, the layout is a bit messy, but the platform hasn't been officially launched yet and I'm in the process of sorting it out with the helpful chaps at Ex Libris.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Twitter 101 for librarians

I gave a presentation this week to library staff about Twitter, explaining what it is, who uses it and why they use it, and how to get started.

I believe Twitter can be a powerful Library marketing tool. It's just one of the many ways we can push information out to our students.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Twitter for Librarians

View more presentations from neen01.

To Kindle or Not?

I've been wondering whether or not to invest in one of these. According to this academic, it's not a great idea...

CIL2010

I WISH I'd been able to go to this conference. I've been following the tweets (#cil2010) and blog posts by participants. The content looks really good.

I'm intrigued by this blog post by Sarah Houghton-Jan, about a panel discussion in which presenters had to list 3 innovative and 3 dead technologies. Flash drives, cell phones that are only phones and Adobe formats are dead, apparently, as are proprietary catalogue systems (yip, I coulda told you that).

Read the post - it's an eye-opener.

Maybe I could get to this conference next year...

Looky!

I've been published! I'd link to the paper, but it's not online. Sigh. I wrote this as part of the Research Libraries Consortium Library Academy last year:

Blogging in South African Libraries: a preliminary survey. Innovation: journal of appropriate librarianship and information work in Southern Africa, no. 39, December 2009. pp 34-42.