Return to Work

The return to work has been rather jarring. I'm thankful I had a full-day on Monday to recover from the trip before going in for the day today!

Yesterday (Monday), my dad made a few calls in the morning and we found a place in Leesburg where we were comfortable getting our photos developed. We had a total of 18 rolls between the three of us to develop. We got all of the pictures put onto CD, so we have the digital as well as the prints.

Mother and I went out to pick up the photos in the afternoon. When we got back with the photos, we started going through them and sorting out who took which roll. It was disappointing to discover that one of the rolls had been double-exposed (it had first been to camp with my brother).

After a tasty (and much-appreciated) steak supper prepared by my neighbor, my parents and I returned home to work further on the photos. While the two of them consulted their journals and merged their pictures into chronological order in a photo album, I copied all of the photos on CD onto my harddrive. From there, I sorted the photos into chronological order (one subfolder for each day) and burnt a CD of the sorted photos to go home with my parents.

While Mother and I were out picking up photos, we did stop by the library. I didn't intend to stay long and managed to only be there for 1.5-2 hours. The first thing I learned was that due to major network changes that had begun on Thursday, the two major pieces of library software were down (Voyager and Clio), other pieces were having issues (Connexion), and a good number of shared files on the network were inaccessible. While I was there, the problems with Voyager and Clio were fixed on one computer, but even by the time I left this evening, the solution had not been applied to any of the other library staff machines.

Today, I spent a good bit of the day reading e-mails that I had received while I was gone. I responded to a few of them. I felt like I also spent a good deal of time following up on projects that were started or should've been started while I was gone. It was obvious that a lot did happen while I was gone. The 288 boxes of law books were moved to storage (except for 3-4 that were missed). The 8 boxes of fictional books were claimed by student life to be made available to students. A good number of boxes of books had been cataloged and added to the shelves. The newspapers and periodicals were moved to take advantage of the space that was freed up with the removal of the law books from the shelves. The Library User Guide was copied, stapled, folded, and turned in for the new student registration packets.

There were a couple of things that I had hoped would get accomplished, but didn't. While I was annoyed that neither got accomplished, when it comes right down to it, neither was very time-sensitive and can still easily be done before the semester starts.

What was also just as annoying was the fact that I didn't feel like any progress was made on any of the library's tech problems. However, I know they are busier than any one else. Many (if not all) of them have been putting in 100-120 hour weeks for the past two weeks and expect to do it again this week. At the moment, they are working to ensure that all 100 new students will have computers that work on the network by tomorrow evening. Many of the computers they were just given yesterday.

I did stop and talk to tech on my way out this evening. They are going to make a couple of projects priority, so that at least most of the resources will be working for the library orientation tomorrow afternoon. A couple of the changes will be quick-and-dirty work arounds, but it will be enough for library staff to make progress on projects and students to know what to expect from the library. There will be more to be done to follow-up, but with these done, we may be able to survive through the first day or two of school without any critical problems.