So what does a day in the life of a collection development librarian look like? It could look like this:
7:40am - Arrive at work, put things away, check bullet journal for today’s tasks. It's a casual dress day, so I am wearing my new shirt from Book Riot and nerdily excited about it.
7:45am - We’re considering our options for digital content, so I read through a current contract, highlighting relevant information and jotting down some talking points and questions to go over with my Director later.
8:05am - Done with contract, skip down to lounge in search of something for breakfast. Check emails, greet colleagues as they come in.
8:15am - Since I am very new to the world of selection and acquisition, my director and I thought it would be a good idea for me to take a cataloging class. Now, I check in to my cataloging class and add to the discussion boards. I work on and submit my assignment for the week.
9:15am - I want to submit my weekly book order today, so I log in and start working on carts. I have been building them all week, but I check on how close I am to my weekly spending goal and add/subtract titles as necessary. I also double-check that I have my grids set on everything (grids tell our processing and cataloging team which area of the collection they’re for and which branch, if we had a branch) and that there are no books put in without a quantity.
10:00am - Short break for a conference call with our main book vendor. We’re outsourcing our processing to them and still in the process of getting it all set up. We chatted about how things are going and switching to electronic invoicing.
10:10am - Back to finishing up these orders. I’ve submitted them and now make sure that I enter the amounts I’ve spent into my budget spreadsheet.
10:30am - Short break to answer a question about changing call numbers and to look into the process of making global changes in our catalog. Then back to updating budget spreadsheets.
10:45am - We get an email about with the program schedule for an upcoming conference and I shoot out a recommendation to my staff on a session that I would like them to go to.
11:00am - Fun with POs! I put in POs for some previous orders and get a few in order to take up to our Business Office for processing.
11:30am - Early lunch today so I can make sure to be back on time for a call this afternoon. I am lucky to live close enough to work that I can go home for lunch.
12:30pm - Back from lunch and I spent some time poking around Edelweiss. This is a great resource for finding pre-publication books and I am not super familiar with it. I'm on the hunt for finding out about diverse books enough ahead of time that I might be able to read them and potentially nominate them for Library Reads.
1:00pm - My cataloger and I have a conference call with someone from our ILS who is training us on using their online selection and acquisitions module. We learn about updating vendors, importing MARC records, and placing orders through their system so that they get into our catalog as "on order".
2:15pm - I continue the discussion with our cataloger about the new module and what our next steps will be. We got a response to our help ticket about making global changes to the catalog, so we try out the instructions and discover that it is something we can do quite easily.
3:15pm - Read and respond to emails about Hoopla's new Book Club site, resources for finding diverse adult books, etc. I clean up my desk since it's possible we may have some visitors to the office tomorrow.
3:50pm - Work on letter of recommendation for one of my colleagues who is applying to library school.
4:30pm - Help our cataloger finish cataloging some video games and game controllers that were brought in by our Public Services Dept. for us to put in the circulating collection.
4:45pm - Run a report to find the new Large Print titles that have been added so I can update our new LP binder… then think better of it and email our most recent large print selector and homebound outreach coordinator to make sure the binder is still useful now that we’ve implemented some other strategies to make patrons aware of new books. She felt like we don’t need it, which saves me quite a bit of work. I write up a little reminder for her about running a list of the new titles in case she needs it and we’ll leave it at that!
5:00pm - Type up this Day in the Life and schedule it to post...
5:20pm - Done! Time to head for home!
