So, given that I haven’t shown up in these parts for over a year, you might be thinking that I’m only popping in to tell you that I’m shutting down this blog, once and for all. If so, props to you! You are right.

The truth is, I am an intermittent blogger at best and an unreliable one at worst. I’ve had not one but two blogs on the go concurrently for ten years and, well, when you write intermittently and unreliably, two blogs is at least one too many. And maybe even two too many. Having said that, I’ve had some little corner of the internet all for me for too long to toss it all in and give myself over to Twitter and Facebook alone.

My solution? A single online space that combines both my personal and professional interests. I can’t promise that I will show up there daily, but I do plan to write more (and, ok, link to things more), and most of that writing will be published there. Do visit, if you are so inclined, or subscribe to the feed if that’s what people still do these days. And fair warning: it’s not all library/design content over there, but the bulk of it probably will be.

Since this domain will disappear eventually (archives have already been imported into the new blog), I’ve also had to give some thought to what to do about the Blogging Libraries Wiki. That, too, will go away, and I’ve outlined my rationale for that decision over on the wiki, so go have a look if it’s a resource you care about.

Thanks to everyone who has read/subscribed to bwal.net over the past nine years! I do hope you’ll stop by e.tches.ca for a visit.

Also, having just returned from a pretty intense leadership program made me approach the exercise as an opportunity for professional self-reflection. Here are some of those reflections to round out this series of day-in-the-life posts:

• Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s the type of work I do (more likely it’s a bit of both), but I need large blocks of time to get things done. Squeezing in tasks between meetings is almost an exercise in futility.
• When faced with a daunting to-do list, with no specific priorities, where everything is due NOW, I inevitably start with the things I enjoy the most: wireframing and related design work, usability, and code munging.
• I could spend days munging code.
• I need to find a balance between spending my time in amongst the weeds (see last bullet) and staring at the stars (strategic thinking and planning, big picture analysis, scanning the horizon).

• Conference planning meeting. McMaster is hosting WILU 2010 (which is a library-ish conference about information literacy, active learning, &c.) in May of next year. I am on the planning team and we’re furiously making plans for an awesome conference.
• Create practice bibliography and gather reference questions for mentoring meeting.
• Mentoring meeting.
• Customize 2 Drupal Views.

PM

• Meet with a faculty member about hosting Drupal for a collaborative research portal she is building.
• More tinkering with article search UI. Hours of tinkering, in fact.
• Begin blog post reflecting on day-in-the-life meme. Coming soon!

Later PM

• Beer with colleagues. A beloved Friday tradition.

• Endeca Development Team meeting. Discuss testing results and issues that need resolving before going live with upgrade to next version (which I’m calling 1.5, since 2.0 is already under development and will be radically different). Decide to move upgrade to next week.
• Quick coffee with few colleagues.
• Head into meeting room for the Handheld Librarian web conference. Work on webpage updates during opening keynote. And back-channel conversations.

PM

• Faculty association meeting.
• More hhlib. Work on UI changes to article database search while listening to afternoon sessions. Realize it’s near impossible for me to just concentrate on one thing.
• Create a new section and two new pages on our iTunes U instance. Customize, tweak, add content.
• Brainstorm ideas for redesigned library login screen(s). Search the webs for resources on the topic and come up mostly empty. Curious. More people need to be writing about login screen interaction and usability elements, please.

Later PM

• Drink a few beers. Yes, this is a distinctly library-ish activity.

• Review calendar. Rejoice over large block of free time in the middle of the day. Things will get done!
• One-hour download from programmer who is leaving us next week (these folks are lucky to get him). He has done some awesome research and programming work on a recommendation engine over the past few months. Requested a report of his findings — which are, at the same time, a little surprising and not surprising at all. He’s working on an article describing his work, which I will link to when it’s published.
• Return to usability report I started on Monday. Write up summary of issues uncovered during testing.
• Chat with other awesome programmer about Drupal upgrade. Realize we need to take site offline for upgrade. Decide to push date back to sometime after August 7 (when summer session wraps up).

PM

• Brief chat with department head about hosting audio for faculty. Discuss servers and iTunes U.
• Turn to usability report once again. Resolve to get this sucker done today.
• Head to e-classroom for staff training drop-in (as part of our move to blended service on all desks). Work on usability report while waiting for people to show up.
• No one shows up for drop-in. Hang out in (empty!) room, add recommendations to usability report, finalize, format, and send to project team. Ace!
• Review catalogue test results for testing done by colleagues in preparation for upgrade to new version. Summarize test results for catalogue team meeting tomorrow morning.
• Happily check 3 items off to-do list before heading home.

Later PM

• Thumb through last 3 issues of Technology Review (deadtree version). Read a few articles, skim a few more, scan the rest.
• Fire up my LIS course site, read students’ posts, prep for course chat.
• Chat with 3 students in our meebo chat room for an hour. Log off feeling energized (as always) by bright, talented librarians-in-training.

• Meeting #1:  with 2 colleauges (Director, 21st Century Fluencies and Teaching & Learning Librarian) regarding our 21st Century Fluencies program. Worked on the document that describes the program.
• Meeting #2: with various colleagues about some user interface changes to the article database search on our website. Showed them the redesigned UI, got feedback, took copious notes on more changes needed before launch.

PM

• Lunch (not a whole lot different from yesterday)
• Log into meebo for an hour of IM reference. Answer 2 questions, both about course registration. At the same time, watch Howard Rheingold talk about 21st Century literacies (decent).
• Install Flashblock and ClicktoFlash to alleviate annoying resource hogging on the part of Flash. Swear I hear audible sighs of relief from both Firefox and Safari upon installation.
• Call vendor to discuss *cool new stuff* they’re going to do for us. Follow up by scheduling a meeting for him to brief project team on said cool new stuff next week.
• Pull together questions, comments, action-plan for mentoring meeting next.
• Meeting #3: mentoring meeting.
• Spend 30 minutes hiding out in dark, empty meeting room, catching up on email. Remember how much I love working in dark, empty meeting rooms.
• Review to-do list on way out of the library. Lament the general low productivity of this workday. Hope for large blocks of time tomorrow to Get Stuff Done.

Later PM

• Explore the Library Leadership Network (LLN), read a few articles, tag a couple for my LIS class. Berate self for not checking out LLN sooner, given that I am a big fan of Walt Crawford and he’s at the helm at LLN.
• Spend an hour configuring NetNewsWire on my iPhone for offline feed reading on-the-go. Wonder why it’s taken me so long to do so.
• Close computer to (get this) read a book. Heh.

• Back in the library after a week at the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Program (which was fab, by the way). Mostly a whole lot of e-mail, calendar maintenance, accepting meeting requests, &c. to start the day.
• Update the to-do list, sigh, attempt to keep spirits up.
• Log into problem reports database (where staff report issues related to the website, library resources, etc.) and assign myself to outstanding issues. Knock off several web page updates and general CMS maintenance as a result.
• Set up 3 wikis for various faculty and colleagues on the 2.0 Toolbox.
  

PM

• Lunch (homemade tabbouleh, boiled egg, fruit, yogurt. Nothing specifically library-related about lunch, but it was delicious and therefore, noteworthy).
• Work on an article proposal with a colleague. Fingers crossed it gets accepted!
• Set up another wiki for a colleague on the 2.0 Toolbox.
• Tweak some Drupal CSS for our intranet. CSS-tweaking on Drupal is never as quick & easy as it should be, alas.
• Cleanup metadata on 4 video files, upload them to iTunes U.
• Watch a video on the future of libraries (meh) and read an article on mobile usability (good).
• Begin draft of a usability report (based on testing I did a couple of weeks ago) for a new digital collections site/project that is underway.
• Update to-do list.
• Call it. 45-minute drive home.

Later PM

• Don my other library-related hat: LIS instructor.
• Post to course blog, read student posts, check delicious stream, do some marking.
• Update to-do list once again (clearly, I have a problem).
• Fire up the aggregator & read some feeds.
• Turn attention to non-Libraryish matters for the rest of the evening.

I remember reading a few of the posts that came out of the Library Day in the Life meme last year, and thinking “wow, these people have really interesting jobs” as well as “how nice to know exactly where your day went!”. So, when I saw the meme roll around again this week, I figured I should take the time to participate.

So I’ll be posting summaries of my workdays all week. They will be low on intrigue and world domination, but high on the interestingness scale. Or not.

Sorry to be so screenshot-y lately, but I couldn’t pass this one up. The above image is a tag cloud of my del.icio.us bookmarks generated by wordle. You should have heard the loud gasp that issued from my lips upon seeing this image. Why? Because IT IS MY LIFE represented in a tag cloud. Well, my life at the moment, at any rate. Here’s the what’s what on that:

• I’ve read that “to read” (or some variation thereof) is arguably everyone’s most frequently applied tag. As you can see from the image above, it’s definitely mine, and it always has been. This is particularly poignant at this very moment in my life because it feels like I’m not doing much more than wading in a pool of good intentions, gathering data and content that could potentially have some impact on me if only I had time to digest it all. You see, I’m one of those odd types that actually removes the “toread” tag once I’ve read something, so the fact that it is, by far, my most frequently applied tag drives home the point that I’m not reading enough. At the rate I’m going, I might never get through the “toread” backlog and that makes me disproportionately unhappy.
• Of course, one of the main reasons why I’m not getting to all that juicy, bookmarked content is because I’m teaching my LIS course again this term (“lis9763“). It’s the first time I’ve taught it during back-to-back terms and I’m starting to wonder if that was a good idea. In some ways it works well: I got into a groove balancing it all last term, and that’s continued nicely into this term. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work and requires me to drop a few other things from my plate (to wit “toread”; see also: dust bunnies running amok in my house). At any rate, the relative weighting of “lis9763″ in my tag cloud is spot-on.
• And then there’s that little project that is swallowing me whole at work: our website redesign (“redesign“). I’m in the thick of it at the moment, and when you’re in the thick of something so huge, with a deadline that looms (September!), you have to keep reminding yourself how much (a lot) and for how long (years) you’ve wanted to blow up the website and start over.  I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally be doing the work (this is my favourite project ever), but boy howdy, it is all-consuming. Even more so than its relative size indicates in my tag cloud. “toread” will necessarily remain on hold for a few more months.

So, there it is, my life distilled into three tags. I am at once horrified (I’ve GOT to get our more), vindicated (so THAT’s where all my time is going!), and amused (O, tags! you never fail me!) by it.

Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.

Original image here.

This is an image I used in a guest lecture at an LIS class last Fall. The point? Challenge the status quo; switch up your focus and make sure you look at things from a different angle. If you ever find yourself saying the words, “we’ve always done it this way”, that’s your queue to step back, take a deep breath, and change your focus. It’s something I try to impart to my LIS students, but when I was prepping for that guest lecture (which was for Reference class) last Fall, I realized that it’s an approach that really can be applied to any situation — whether it’s an interaction at a reference desk, a website redesign project, an LIS course, whatever.

Thanks for the tag, Michael! And while I’m not much of a meme-tagger myself, this time I’d love to hear from Jason Griffey, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Ryan Deschamps, Chad Boeninger, and Michael Porter. And anyone else who’d like to play, too!