Week Alone at Work

Starting Friday of last week, I'm the only one working in the library until next Monday. MG is out on vacation/mission trip. Our student worker for the summer is at home for a visit.

The quiet and lack of interuptions is nice. There are a couple of frustrating parts of the week.

The first frustration I expected--that is balancing my projects with daily projects in the library. There are certain things that just don't wait very well--putting the daily newspapers out where people can read them, checking the ILL lending requests (we only have four days to respond), ILL requests from our patrons.

The second frustration was that when I sat down on Monday to do these projects, I discovered problems with all of them that ended up taking me all day to straighten out.
- One of the newspapers had gotten out of sync with what our computer expected, so I had to re-set the computer to get it back on track.
- The ILL lending requests apparently hadn't been touched for weeks, as there were over 100 requests in our local file, but the vast majority of them had already been removed from the central file because we hadn't responded to them. So I had to go through all of the requests on the local file to sort out which ones were already expired and which ones I actually needed to respond to.
- The ILL requests from our patrons arrive in the general library e-mail along with various other e-mails for the library in general. In theory, when one staff person has read and responded appropriately to the e-mail, then that e-mail is to be moved into a subfolder. However, I discovered e-mails in the main folder from back in June and a few ILL requests that were leftover from last week. I wouldn't have thought about the leftover ILL requeststs, as our student worker hadn't worked since Thursday around noon--I would've just assumed that they'd come in after she'd last checked. Except that some of these ILL request e-mails had been opened. So then I had to go search the files to find what had already been requested and what hadn't before I could clear the inbox.

But now that I'm caught up on that, I'm rolling along on other projects. None of the big projects yet I was hoping to do, but several smaller ones that are time-sensitive or I just want to knock out quickly. Hopefully I'll be onto the bigger projects tomorrow!