LibDay8 | jkbeitz

The Library Day in the Life Project is on Round 8! And here I am.

We’re supposed to start our LibDay blog posts with a reminder of who we are and for whom we work, so: I am a reference and instruction librarian at the Warren E. Burger Library at William Mitchell College of Law.

I actually started my Monday on Sunday night, with a final look at my RSS reader to schedule things of interest for my work alter ego to tweet. That’s also how my Monday morning – and pretty much every morning, actually – started.

I love Hootsuite because it allows me to go through my reader when it has accumulated a lot of posts, and I can schedule a whole slew of interesting things to tweet throughout the day. I feel like my tweets have more of a tendency to get lost in the Twitterverse if I make a bunch of tweets at once (or maybe I think they’re more likely to be ignored?). I consider it a pretty good day when I can have a tweet go out about every half hour during the work day.

This was my favorite tweet of the day:

https://twitter.com/#!/BurgerLibrary/status/164081268651335680

It is not law-related. So sue me.

I then had an email exchange with a student whom I had helped last week. He was doing research on government entities and how the First Amendment might affect their presence on social media sites (i.e., to what extent can government entities control what citizens post on government Facebook sites?). Anyway, we found some law review articles last week, and I told him to come back and brief me on what he found, because the topic interested me. He sent me a pretty detailed email about the state of the limited public forum and how he thinks social media fits in within that concept. In turn, I found a few more resources he might want to check out, and I emailed those back to him. It was quite gratifying. I usually tell students to feel free to contact me with the results of their research when the topic personally interests me, but they hardly ever do. Which is fine, but it was still a nice surprise to hear from him.

I’m co-teaching a class this term – Internet Legal Research – so most of my work this term is related to that. Even though it’s only a one-credit, pass/fail class, we revamp it so much each time that we teach it that it ends up being more work than you’d think.

One of the new things we’ve added this time is online discussion forums related to the reading. I attended a teaching seminar a few months ago, and one of the things I distinctly remember from it is the idea that we shouldn’t waste time in class with what the students already understand or can learn outside of class. Therefore, if the students “get” the reading, don’t take up class time discussing it! So, we’ve developed (what we hope are) thought-provoking questions related to the readings, and the students talk about the ideas in the discussion forums. This also helps with students who may feel more comfortable discussing things in writing, where they have more time to reflect than they do in class. We haven’t quite worked out how we interact with the students on the forums. Not everything needs to be addressed, and I don’t want to stifle discussion, but I would like it to be more of an interactive back-and-forth than it really is right now.

Last week was one of “my” weeks to teach, so this week I’m the one who primarily grades the homework and makes sure everybody has responded to the Discussion Board. So a big chunk of my day was spent looking at the homework, which was due today at noon. I may talk more about this tomorrow.

I also did a little work on the newsletter for one of the professional librarian organizations of which I am a member. I’m the technical editor (or something like that), which means the substantive editors gather all the stuff, give it to me, and I fit it all in, using a publishing software. I did the bulk of it last week, but I don’t have all the articles yet, and had to make some changes from the draft that I have. There will be more of this this week, too.

Then I went home, but my day won’t officially be over until I go back to my RSS reader and schedule more tweets for tomorrow. The symmetry of book-ending my days like this is nice, don’t you think?

So! What did you all do today?