Legal Research

A day in the life of a librarian: new job edition

By Jason

So the day in the life of a librarian meme seems a great way to start blogging from my new position at Yale. I got put onto this by The Technological Tortoise (thanks Sarah).

A reminder to new readers of this blog, I just started a new job as the Librarian for Emerging Technologies at the Yale Law School Library. And below follows a run down of my day today. I don’t know whether or not it will be typical (I’m working on my second week), but I think it’s a good indicator of things I’ll be doing here, and a nod to some of the amazing people I have an opportunity to work with.

8:30am: arrive, check email, check RSS Reader

My RSS Reader (Google Reader) may be the most crucial tool in my arsenal. I often get asked how I stay on top of the latest technologies and happenings in the library world. It’s all due to the Reader. I subscribe to 257 feeds, including ego feeds, search result feeds, and blogs (library, web, design, and technology related blogs).

I can scan through the RSS feeds in about 15 inutes to 30 minutes depending on how many interesting things are in the reader. I will also star items to read later, and bookmark things using Diigo. I use the aideRSS Firefox extension to help filter my feeds and sort through them more quickly.

9:45am: attend the Advanced Legal Research class

Being in this academic environment is very new to me and even though some of it is review (review is always good),  I’ve already learned quite a bit about the students, librarians, academia, Yale. Today’s class was led by Yale Law Librarian S. Blair Kauffman. He brought a lot of enthusiasm and energy to the class, and gave a great introduction to some basic research topics.

I also applaud the students for taking additional research classes. Some of the attorneys I worked with would have been well served with a good legal research class, and I have a feeling these students will have a bit of a leg up wherever they go from here.

11:10am: attend Researching American legal history class

This is an area of research where I may be a little weak and is important to learn about. It’s led by John Nann and Morris Cohen. I already learned a lot and it’s just the first class. There was also a librarian/historian from the university’s main library, and a 3L interested in the treatment of certain subjects throughout American legal history attending. This provided good insight into how interesting and challenging some of the reference here will be.

2:00pm meet with Fred Shapiro

Fred is the Associate Librarian or Collections and Access. Part of my orientation has included learning about the responsibilities of other librarians and how things work in the library. We discussed the process for ordering and canceling materials, how materials are selected, and how the various librarians work together towards collection development in the library.

3:00pm: set up web server

Worked on a virtual windows server trying to set up a web server to host some web projects I will be working on. I have been trying to set up XAMPP , I’ve used it before with some success. It makes it easier to set up Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PERL.

I’ve been having some real problems with it though. I’ve installed and uninstalled it trying to get it to work. Today, I decided to try installing the individual items without using the XAMPP package. Apache, MySQL, and PHP were installed successfully. But when I tried installing PHPMyAdmin I ran into some major errors.

5:00pm: Success! I figured out how to install and enable various PHP extensions to make PHPMyAdmin work. Normally I would want to continue working on this, I like to stay on a roll. But it’s already about time to leave. If I leave now, I can go home with a smile on my face. Whereas if I encounter more errors I might go home miserable and frustrated.

So that’s my day, the long and short of it. Like I said, while not typical I think there’s a good indication of what this job will be. I look forward to documenting my work here in the future.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on January 29, 2009 (boomark / email).