Oh dear, my cubicle is a mess
Today on 25th of July i participated in Library day in the life -campaign. This was already the 7th time for the campaign, and the idea that all sorts of library workers tell about their everyday job for a day (some are reporting all week). The background of the campaign is explained better elsewhere. Today afternoon when i started writing this there were 144 registered reporters and many, many more by the evening. Even more unregistered people were active, especially on tag #libday7 on Twitter.
Ok let’s get to the (everyday) business, this is what i do on this random day in the office:
Just before 9 when i arrived at the library office it seemed that the holiday-season was coming to an end as it seemed more lively than the previous few weeks at the Turku city library’s main building. This day i intended to read some ExLibris Primo documentation and see if i could come up with a way to generate lists of new titles from it via it’s servlet programming interface (API). We are piloting Primo in National Digital Library of Finland -project.
The morning didn’t go too well in that regard, that i was interrupted a few times (quite useful interruptions though, i’m not saying that). First we discussed with my boss how i could get my hands on the access logs of the online catalogue (OPAC) of our Vaski -libraryconsortia for doing some analysis of them. After that we agreed, that i am allowed to travel to and attend Online Information 2011 -conference (where i will be presenting), if i take unpaid leave for it.
11:20 a late morning coffee at the excellent Café Art around the corner.
After coffee i actually managed to spend about 30 minutes looking for and asking for the Primo documentation before the next interruption. This time i had to figure out my own extra salary (päivärahat
) for the duration of the IFLA 2011 -conference, where i will be presenting my pet-project Cycling for libraries. I spent a little more than half an hour on this task of calculating my salary.
After that i downloaded primo4j, eyeballed it’s documentation and tried out an example program that came with it.
14 o’clock pasta at Café Sirius.
After food i opened the Primo CSS-stylesheet, which i haven’t really touched during all summer. I have the CSS under version control system (i’m using Bazaar aka bzr), and i reoriented myself to how i had arranged the files there. I also thought about how to organize CSS and other customizable components of the Primo user interface in a version control system (and issue management system), if we wanted to collaborate with other pilot-organizations of the National Digital Library. I wrote a proposal to our NDL-mailing list about finally getting together and starting a collaboration with some such tool.
At about 15:30 i found and installed a version of Firebug that is compatible with my version of Firefox, Firefox 6.0. I started to fiddle with the CSS, and tune it to look like what our ad agency KMG is building our Vaski-consortia’s new website to look like. So i was tuning the colours and layout of our navigation menu etc. It’s quite meditative, really.
I left the office a little after 18, i had tickets to an art performance (which was great, i may add).
Riippumaton asiantuntija 