Sat down at my laptop about 7:45 AM. It was month end, so I had administrative tasks to tackle.

My day went something like this:

• Checked email for anything that needed immediate action.
• Reviewed my upcoming day and the rest of the week.
• Reviewed AIIP-L posts.
• Walked office assistant for about 40 minutes – it was cooler this morning, so the walk was a lot more pleasant and we did a bit of training while we were out.
• Back to email and FaceBook after the walk.
• Phoned AMA about registering for the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication – the registration page appears to be a non-secure page and the person I talked to wasn’t sure about the workings of the process, so I faxed in my registration.
• Did some reading arising from email and Twitter off and on during the day. Some samples:

10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted

Why we learn more from our successes than our failures: MIT study sheds light on the brain’s ability to change in response to learning

TweetDeck and Hootsuite – Better Together (From April – and it appears some of the features on the blogger’s wishlist have been instituted in the new version of HootSuite.)

A silly pat on the head helps seniors remember daily med, study suggests (My mom, at 90, forgets to take her medications sometimes, despite having a bubble pack from the pharmacy – I wonder if this could work for her?)

Farewell to e-mail: E-mail’s shortcomings are hard to ignore as new collaboration tools take off (I’ve used Google Docs on occasion, but some folks I’m working with still cling to emailing back and forth)

Building a Collaborative Environment on the Medical Education Blog

• Lunch break about 1:15-1:45. Left-over pasta salad and veggies. Switched from morning coffee to afternoon tea.
• Did research on ways to extend range of our wireless router (Signal is stable in the living room, but less so in the back of the condo. Some days I get dropped from the network 5-6 times in the back. Due to cable connection, need to keep router where it is, so a bridge might be just the ticket.)
• Did invoicing for projects that wrapped up in July and emailed them to clients.
  Discovered voice command to search computer for files using Dragon Naturally Speaking! (No more scrolling through to open a file. There’s so much more to learn about this hand-saving software.)
• Calculated GST (federal Goods and Services Tax) for second quarter remittance due today.
• Twitter: off and on during the day, Tweeted, retweeted, replied.
• Corresponded with a client to firm up an initial project meeting in early September (One member of the research team is away for the summer).
• Went to bank to pay GST (Normally, I do my banking on dog walks – office assistant’s day is made if she gets to say hi to lots of people – but today it was too hot to walk her that far.)
• Went to buy a bridge for the router, then got conflicting opinions, so came back to the office with a new router instead. (I’ll see how it goes – Staples has a great return policy if the problem continues with the new router.)
• Discovered that the audio on my headset isn’t working with the USB connection. Tried all USB ports on the laptop with same result. Audo works through analog connection, but USB is better for voice recognition funtion.  Went to London Drugs to exchange them for another pair (since I’d had them only 2 weeks. LD also has a good returns policy.)

That’s it – 5 days in the work life of a librarian working outside the traditional world of a library with walls. There are a few things left undone, which will get done on the weekend – but since they aren’t of an urgent nature, they’ll get done when they get done.

I’m off to enjoy the BC Day long weekend. A few of the Vancouver events going on over the weekend, in roughly chronological order:

1. World Police and Fire Games: Started Friday night with the Opening Ceremonies and a parade. 10,000 participants from around the world. Events taking place throughout the Lower Mainland and up the coast. (I’m taking a vacation day on Thursday to attend the Police Service Dog events open to the public: Agility, Obedience, Protection and Search. Events on Friday are closed to the public: Explosives Detection and Narcotics Detection.)
2. Critical Mass: Cyclists take over the streets in protest. Took place Friday evening, with lots of negative press beforehand; about 3,000 cyclists attended. Photos available at the Vancouver Sun gallery.
3. BC Cultural Crawl: Month-long celebration of the Arts in BC starts on Saturday, with several Vancouver galleries/museums participating.
4. Dyke March: Took place Saturday at noon on Vancouver’s Eastside.
   Celebration of Light: Fireworks competition. Finale takes place Saturday evening in English Bay. Videos of the previous 3 nights this year – the entire almost half hour each – can be found at Global TV’s website.
5. Pride Parade: Takes place Sunday in the West End during the Pride Festival this weekend.
6. Powell Street Festival: Takes place Saturday and Sunday, celebrating Japanese Canadian arts, culture and heritage.

I hope to spend some time over the weekend reading some of the other Library Day in the Life posts.

• Checked email for anything that needed immediate action.
• Reviewed my upcoming day and the rest of the week.
• Reviewed AIIP-L posts.
• Had a quick phone meeting with a client.
• Paid a few bills online.
• Checked Twitter and retweeted a tweet about Canadian Copyright Consultations happening now across the country.
• Did final preparation for this afternoon’s Reference Manager training session for a research group at University of British Columbia.
• Emailed myself a customized import filter for Reference Manager for session this afternoon in case my flashdrive fails me.
• Had a quick lunch before leaving the office for the rest of the day. Breakfast was later than usual today, so wasn’t really an ideal time for lunch, but had to squeeze it in somewhere.
• Drove to UBC for Reference Manager training. Thought about taking the office assistant, but decided she’d get bored in a long “down stay” while I taught. (There are several dogs who go to work in this particular UBC building and I occasionally take one of mine along for short stints, since my client loves animals.)
• Had a good training session. Smart group of researchers with interesting questions and good sense of humour.
• Met with head of research group about old project files and library materials. Then spent almost 3 hours just catching up on news. This is a client I’ve worked with since 1992 and we always have a good long “gab fest” when we get together.

Left campus at almost 7 PM. Home, dinner, quick email/Twitter/AIIP-L check, bed! Another day comes to an end. Listening to the third night of Celebration of Light fireworks competition – we live very close to English Bay where they’re held. Another night I might be out on the street watching, but with this heat and such a long day, I decided not to.

I’m a consulting librarian/information specialist, so my library is a virtual one. It’s been some years since I worked in a physical library, and in those days it was several small libraries that I managed as a consultant – one in a non-profit (community mental health services) and one in an academic research centre (health technology assessment/health services and policy). Now, I spend my work day in one of three main areas:

• Research or other work for clients
• Administrative work (the business of being a consultant)
• Professional development (reading, sometimes writing, taking courses, attending conferences and webinars)

My day started with a walk with one of my office assistants – Freckle, one of my dogs – before the heat of the day settled in. I then returned to my office, powered up my laptop, and with coffee in hand, settled in to the work of the day about 9:30 – a late start since I worked over the weekend and decided I could start later today. Roughly, my day looked like this:

• Checked email for anything that needed immediate action.
• Reviewed my upcoming week so I make sure I’m on top of things.
• Spent time on Twitter, reading and posting a few items.
• Fielded a phone call from a client – our 10 am meeting rescheduled for later in the day.
• Quickly scanned through AIIP-L posts – I’m the chair of the Association of Independent Information Professionals discussion group committee and one of my tasks is to monitor this private list.
• Checked out the Fraser Valley Regional Library’s “Stop BC Library Cuts” website and signed the online petition. Background: our provincial government here in British Columbia has announced that it will be clawing back already committed funding in a number of areas, including to public libraries. The website lists programs that would be affected by this looming cut in operating grants. It also provides suggestions for tactics and a toolkit for library workers.
• Wrote a short blog post about the claw backs and installed the petition button graphic on my blog. I’m puzzled that the new tags I used don’t who up in my tags list.
• Brief lunch break at 1:00 (about 20 minutes).
• Started up the portable air conditioner after lunch – it’s meltingly hot, very unusual for Vancouver, and with no end in sight.
• Had the rescheduled phone meeting with a client, discussed research results.
• Spent time working on a redesign of my blog – new plugins, new look coming soon, I hope.
• Answered an email from a university student I’m mentoring on preparing manuscripts for submission (she’s doing the near-to-final changes to a paper we’re coauthoring with her supervisor).
• Added a new member to AIIP-L – another of my tasks as committee chair (some of this process is automated, but I still check our directory to see if the requestor is a member of AIIP and then send a welcome message).
• Filed some business-related financial papers.
• Backed up my website and blog.
• Upgraded Wordpress for my blog from version 2.8 to 2.8.2, hoping it would solve the missing tags problem (nope, it didn’t).
• Spent more time trying to figure out what’s going on with my blog tags (looked at other tag cloud options).
• Spent time in and out of email and Twitter most of the day.

Stopped the main work of my day about 5:30 and walked the same office assistant again before dinner. Work often spills into the evening, and I suspect I’ll continue looking at tag cloud widgets later on. (If anyone can suggest a good tag cloud widget, I’d love to hear about it.)