Library Day in the Life is a blog event in which library workers share the details of their work each day for a week. Read other Library Day in the Life meLISsa blog posts or, for more information about the project, visit the Library Day in the Life wiki.

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It’s closing time for Library Day in the Life. Are you wondering what happened to Wednesday? Thinking I threw away Thursday and forgot Friday?  Well, I did.  Kind of.

I was sick Wednesday, out of town Thursday, and didn’t lift so much as a bookmark for two days. On Friday, though, I worked my usual hours in shelf processing at the university library. It was a pretty typical day, and I prepared books, CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and education kits for circulation.

My work in cataloging and metadata services is actually winding down. I started working as a graduate assistant in the department last year. During the Fall Term, I did some title authority work and added items to, and updated holdings information for, existing bibliographic records. I also started inventorying bound periodicals, and that’s what I spent most of my time on during the Spring Term. In addition to providing me with valuable library skills, the experience I gained in GA position was beneficial to my coursework. Knowing how resources were organized helped me better search for and access them. I later needed to catalog items when interning as the librarian for a local children’s center, a task that would have been difficult if I hadn’t been exposed to the “back end” of the university libraries’ catalog. My GA appointment ended in May, though, and I have since been working in student assistant position that ends with the Summer Term.

I’ve mentioned the course in academic libraries I’m taking this summer, the final project for which is due tomorrow. I spent much of the day Friday working on that project, a research proposal to examine the accessibility of three library database platforms when accessed by screen reader users. The topic ended up being more timely than I expected; during last month’s 2009 American Library Association Annual Conference, the ALA Council voted on a resolution on the purchasing of accessible electronic resources. The resolution passed, and you can read it online if you’re so inclined. Library workers may also find ASCLA’s Think Accessible Before You Buy toolkit and the Accessibility to Library Databases and Other Online Library Resources for People with Disabilities section of the ASCLA wiki to be of interest.

I submitted my proposal tonight, finishing another semester.   So ends my blogging for Library Day in the Life and another day in the life for this LIS student and library worker.

LINKS IN THIS POST

• ASCLA: Think Accessible Before You Buy
• ASCLA Wiki
• Library Day in the Life wiki
• meLISsa BLOG posts tagged with librarydayinthelife

Related posts

• Library Day in the Life: Tuesday (0)
• Library Day in the Life: Monday (0)
• Library Day in the Life: In the Interest of Full Disclosure (0)

Tags: librarydayinthelife

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm and is filed under LIS, Professional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.