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.

Here’s a recap of my day:

• 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 after wetting her down with the hose – should probably say we plodded very slowly around a few blocks, seeking shade, since it’s still incredibly hot here. (This Vancouverite wants her rain back!)
• Back to email after the walk, in the relative cool of the office. Thought about starting up the portable air conditioner a bit earlier today.

Semi-retired office assistant Ceilidh is enjoying our favourite appliance in the heat

• Attended a webinar on secure large file transfer.
• Did some reading arising from email and Twitter off and on during the day. Some samples:

It’s A Search Party! Twitter Revamps Home Page. (Change aimed at highlighting Twitter as a research tool and at new users to experience Twitter’s immediacy.)

Using pen and paper workarounds could boost EMR efficiency. (Comment on Twitter “integrating tech w/ what ppl do” from @pat_devine. I like the use of visual aids to help identify people with high blood pressure when they arrive in the ER)

Is Vancouver About to Become the Greenest City in the World? (From the AlterNet.org website. From the standpoint of a Vancouverite, this article paints the good and the bad and is pretty well balanced.)

Mentor Yourself article on Inside Higher Ed.(Some good advice here.)

8 reasons I love Zotero on fellow librarian Tara Robertson’s blog

• Corresponded by email with co-investigators about setting up initial project meeting via Webex (we’re scattered around BC).
• Discovered what “muted” means in gmail and how to unmute. (I obviously need to be more careful with hot keys: m=mute, so I must have mistyped j (=next) when I was working my way through messages. If a message is muted, it means that the thread of responses bypasses the inbox, so important email could be missed!).
• Explored some websites and did some more reading while I have the luxury of quieter time:

Canada Values Health: Dialog on Health Care.

Encyclopedia of Life (From homepage: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” – Edward O. Wilson. Visitors to site are invited to contribute photos by adding to the Flickr photo pool, EOL Flickr group. Already over 30,000 images. Makes me want to start the onerous task of scanning all my travel/wildlife photos! A quick search indicates I might actually have some to offer up.)

Looked over the conference website for the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication here in Vancouver in September. (Looks very interesting – I’m going to register tomorrow, after I contact them about what seems to be an unsecure registration page.)

• Lunch break 1:00-1:30 PM – my version of a vegetarian hotdog (peanut butter and banana in a flour tortilla – no hotdog buns in the house right now).
• Uploaded today’s photo at momentile.
• Corresponded with article co-author about structured abstracts per journal submission guidelines and found/sent a couple of examples from PubMed. This particular journal substitutes “Background” for “Objective” as discussed in the 2003 article by Bayley and Eldrege on the Medical Library Association Research Section’s website.
• Had a long chat by phone with my mom – she’s 90 and lives in Alberta. She’s excited about the new baby (her grandnephew) in the family and is planning a trip to Ontario to see him in the fall. I may tag along. (Count this as “coffee break” time.)
• Posted a question to AIIP-L about Firefox and secure websites. (Decided to register for the above conference afterall, but there’s no indication on the registration page that it’s a secure site other than saying it is – no https in te address bar, and no little lock icon in the lower tray.)

What started out to look like a quiet day rather quickly became a rather hectic one instead. That’s one of the things I enjoy about consulting – you never know quite what’s coming down the road. I’m hoping to spend some time on the weekend reading through other librarians’ descriptions of their Library Day in the Life, as I haven’t really had a chance to do that yet.

Decided to quit early today – 4:15 PM – and move on to some personal projects, like working with my photos. Tomorrow promises to be a day of administrative tasks given that it’s month end.