Hey everyone! I hope you had a lovely winter holiday and are ready for the start of the new semester! While I don't have any work resolutions per se, I thought I'd share my planned projects and goals for this year for my sundry areas of responsibility. Feel free to chime in too with your goals!
Access Services: In addition to all the typical "head of circ" tasks such as billing and inventory, My goal is to get ready for the Sirsi migration (go-live is in 2 1/2 months!!! it seemed like we just signed the contract!), specifically to redesign our workflows as appropriate, and to brainstorm a list of reports I'll want to create/run once we get the test load later this month and I can really play with the thing.
Distance learning: The constant thorn in my side known as our horrible VPN setup process has FINALLY been fixed! Huzzah to the IT department! (we don't thank those guys often enough...) With that annoyance off the plate, I hope to focus on building a really good distance learning website, complete with tutorials and helpful links geared to our remote learners, and maybe, just maybe, I can get IT to let us have a blog... :-)
Cataloging: In addition to helping our main cataloger keep up with the floods created by our new status as a government depository, I'm going to work with her to put together a new improved workflow that will take into account the changes Unicorn will bring, and which will also let us offload some more steps to student workers.
Reserve room: The reserve room program in unicorn versus our current ILS is so different that we've been advised to just delete our reserve records in the go-live and start fresh in march. It will be nice to have that area tidied up once and for all, but I expect we'll be spending most of the summer putting humpty dumpty back together again. Again though, this is an area where we'll be able to have our part-timers handle most of the grunt work. (Thank heaven for my wonderful student workers!!!)
Archives: I'm embarrassed to say that this area inevitably winds up at the bottom of the barrel because of it's low priority. I'm going to continue setting out displays every semester, as it has led to an increased interest in our special collections. One of the most popular areas of the archives is our semi-complete collection of school yearbooks, which stretch through our time as a Military academy, junior college (under two different names), and university (also under 2 different names). I have a stack of about 20 yearbooks, most with differing titles and from differing predecessor institutions, which I would like to get cataloged--and obviously, copy cataloging ain't an option here. I had planned to tackle those this week, but between an unexpected extra day off for Gerald Ford (all state offices were closed) and the aforementioned cataloging backlog, it's looking like it won't happen until may intersession (spring break is go-live on unicorn!).
Purchasing: I've made some changes to my workflow that will save me some time...I hope. the closest thing I have to a goal here is to keep looking for more efficient ways to handle this time suck.
Marketing: After the well-received cell phone poster I created a few months back (Still gotta get that up on flickr...), I got tasked to create a similar poster for our new resource sharing program we've started with the local public library. I also have to get information together for our spring semester book reviews and other events, and get that to the school's PR lady to put together the press releases.
Instruction: Spring semester nears, and my goal is to provide instruction services for every one of our orientation classes at our two remote campuses. I pulled this off last semester, so we'll see if I can get a streak going!
Professional development: And I've saved the best for last--my goals for this year is to get with a old grad school friend to start work on a research project we've been contemplating for over a year, and to update this blog every tuesday and thursday. I can't keep up with some of you guys who post dozens of articles a week, but I definitely want to make this blog something that is worth reading, and a part of the larger biblioblogging conversation. I also REALLY hope that I can figure a way to get to Internet Librarian again...we'll see what happens!
I hope you have a happy and productive 2007, and I want to thank all of you who read me regularly. It's an honor to be part of your reading list, and I hope that I provide good information on Distance Ed Librarianship, time management, and on all the other vagaries of our crazy profession.
Next Tuesday: My thoughts on the Sirsi/Dynix acquisition by Vista...
