Week 1 - Web Services Coordinator

So this week was fairly chaotic, and it was partially my fault for not being able to say no.

This was my first week working by myself as a Web Services Coordinator for my rural public library (Publib1.0), the gal who had it previously is also in charge of all teen programing and she is a teen librarian at heart. She managed to persuade management to let her give up the 'assigned' 8 hrs she was committed to managing our website so that she could have more time on the Reference Desk (and probably a lot less stress!). I have been working on call as a public service assistant since September with no regular hours and since being an Online Branch Manger/Librarian is one of my 'dream jobs' I was super excited about this turn of events. I still am pretty humbled that I was able to secure such a high level professional job before graduation - albeit extremely part-time. The fact that this is so few hours fits really well with my 'lifestyle' right now as I wanted to concentrate on primarily staying home with my son this summer (after being such a distant mom with grad school and all) as well as the fact that I still have another full-time semester left on my MLIS in September. In other words fellow un/underemployed librarians - no more job hunting for me until January ;-)


The quandary of course is that 8hrs is NOT enough for this job. I'm maintaining standards and growing our Joomla based CMS website, Co-ordinating the efforts of our content -providers (Ref. head, Readers Advisory head, Teen Head, Kids Head, Foundation, etc etc etc). Still working out snags in our system that our developers left us (long story for another day when I have a better understanding of the problems, igh). Simply going from zero Joomla experience to having to teach people how to use it (like already happening) has been an intellectual challenge.

In some ways I'm glad for the challenge, in others I feel emotionally exhausted over the totality of my responsibilities and the straight jacket my employers have put me in. Obviously I'm doing work outside of the office at this time. I probably will be doing that all summer until the rubber hits the road in September.

I can't even ask for more hours right now. We are broke. In November we are going to the voters and begging for money which, if we don't get, there won't be more hours for anyone. In fact, we're going to have to cut back and probably reduce open hours and services. Again, that's another story for another blog post. Budget issues are not my speciality.

So ideally I'd like to Library 2.0 us - Facebook, Twitter, etc. Let's get us out there, let our patrons decide how they want to interact with us. Develop a social network policy, not necessarily to be on the forefront of change (to many shuderers) but to at least use reasonably stable and proven venues.

And then there is the InTRAnet. It is NOTmeeting the needs of our staff. As a Web Services Librarian, in theory, that should be my area of concern as well. Right now its nobodies...

eight hours, eight hours, eight hours.

So my first week wasn't a complete disaster - being Eeyore things could have gone a lot worse. But when the Director 'all of a sudden' needed something added to the Front Page and I spent half and hour trying to photoshop an image for it before giving up in despair because I am not a graphic artist at all before I finally called the Big D into my office and told her that THIS is simply going to have to wait until next week when our graphic artist is in the house because as the Librarian in charge of our webpage I did not want a photo that looked like a talentless hack with no photoshop skills created it (me). I put my foot down on keeping our most visible and landed on page professional looking, and the Big D agreed. I'm not sure if I handled the whole situation the best way possible. Upon reflection I think I should have come to the conclusion that this THING that the Big D wanted would have to wait for early next week and that was that. Things need to be communicated in advance if they require coordination between multiple units within the organization (graphics, publicity, web).

Of course, standing up to people and saying no and not trying to take on the world just because someone asks is a perpetual weakness for me. Maybe management class in the fall will cure of that?