TiddlyWiki

Have been playing with TiddlyWiki for the last hour or so. A very interesting concept – I love the idea of using a virtual notebook! Thanks to Fiona in Sydney for the info. I have created a TiddlyWiki of my own, on my thumbdrive, and will see how it goes.

Work today was uneventful. I work in a university library (which shall remain nameless). Helped an academic with EndNote, over the phone, and was told that I am “fantastic, a true gem!” when I solved his problem. Which is always nice to hear; I only wish I was as good at solving life’s other little problems! A great deal of my time is spent teaching people how to use this bibliographic management software and troubleshooting it. In fact, when I think about it, a lot of my time as a librarian involves helping people with computer-related problems.

Besides EndNote, in a typical day-in-the-life of CW, the sorts of things I do include:

• helping people find stuff online. Almost all the people I come across use Google, but not everything is available via Google, and that’s where I come in. The stuff I do can range from showing people where to start (database, catalogue) to actually finding the information for them.
  
• evaluating and investigating new books, electronic journals and indexing databases. This job isn’t as interesting as it sounds, mainly because we have very little money to buy new stuff, especially the electronic materials, which can be very very very expensive.
  
• attending meetings. Just thinking about all the meetings I attend in a week makes me tired so I am not going to dwell on it! Meetings are the bane of university existence, I think…
• answering email queries. I get lots of these.
• answering phone queries.
• answering questions at our information desk.
  
• working on ‘projects’. Some projects can be tedious. Happily, my current “RSS and blogs for research” one has turned out to be very interesting and energising.
• teaching groups of people how to find the information they need using library and other tools. In librarian-speak we call this information literacy, info lit for short.
• welcoming new students and academics.
• working with colleagues to solve various problems.
• managing staff. I am responsible for a small branch library. Managing people can be time consuming and frustrating, but I do enjoy getting to know my staff members and building my relationships with them.

Have I left anything out?