More of everything

Yesterday started off with a meeting that continued from last week. Most of it was spent planning for the summer session. Aside from the fact that no classes are being held on the main campus, the librarians are trying to deal with the new fiscal year starting in the middle of the semester. They do not know what the budget for next is yet and can only make plans that include outside sources (like adjunct librarians) for June. For July, they can only plan to cover everything themselves. To make sure this can be done, they are making the entire semester lightly covered, but as much as they can get away with without losing coverage. They also talked about having to finish making any purchases by the end of next week before the spending freeze starts. This freeze, while normal, is occurring earlier than normal. They also discussed the cost and functions of databases and the credit for one database.

I spent a little time looking through Booklist and Choice for new books to purchase. Booklist occasionally has some good reference materials, but it mostly has leisure reading. Choice has a lot more reference materials, but a lot of that is for upper-level undergraduate or above. Making them not ideal for a community college.

The rest of the day was on the reference desk and QuestionPoint. The desk itself was quite, so I was also working updating the Libguide pages (almost done with that). QuestionPoint was a little busier, but I am a little hesitant to take some questions now after getting a few really bad ones. I took one that looked like a student messing around, only to have them ask a real question. They did however take a long time to make any responses, making me quite a few minutes late getting down to the reference desk.

Today, I finished up one page in the Libguides. Then worked on using Camtasia to make the instructional videos. I feel like I am getting better with making them, almost ready to produce and share one for use. I did discover that using the Narration tool to record the audio track after recording the video (instead of trying to do both at the same time) was a lot easier. Also that the Narration tool set could create the Closed Captioning using a Speech to Text Tool. The problem is that Camtasia only uses the Microsoft tool in the Works program and only certain versions can work on certain operating systems. The Library uses XP with Works 2007 and that is one of the combinations that Camtasia does not work with. Well, I can still put in the captions the old way. Import the doc file or type them in manually.

Then I was a part of a meeting with three Librarians about the Website. They looked over the Word doc that I created that mapped out and evaluated certain aspects of the current Website. They were a bit surprised by the size of the site and the fact that there were pages still up that were no longer being used.

The rest of the day was back on reference. Serious questions from the physical patrons and mostly people goofing off on QuestionPoint. I still have a few little details to learn about the Library, but I really do like working the reference desk.