I get on a plane at 8:30AM tomorrow and I haven't even touched my packing. I should probably get on that...

Here's what I am working on:

1. AGLS Conference Presentation: I'm jointly presenting a session on the scholarship of teaching and learning as it relates to general education. We did a brief run through of our session today and talked about where we would let the audience participate. I just need to finalize my bit of notes and make sure I've got everything printed out. Then I need to get ready to head to Austin.
2. Embedded Librarian: We're doing more embedded librarian work this semester. I'm in nine classes and we're starting to get into the meat of the semester. I'm conducting several reviews each week to stay on top of the classes to recommend material related to what the students are working on. I'm also meeting with professors to discuss the live library instruction I can offer. This is more instruction work than we've done for a few years, but it feels great to reach more students.
3. Database Trials: Our library is demoing three different vendor databases and tools right now. I've been sending a lot of messaging trying to get faculty to try them out and send us feedback. I've got one more week to get them to let me know what they think. Of the three, there is one that I think we should definitely make a permanent part of our collection... I just need to get the faculty backup to help make our case for funding.
   

Short one this week as our kiddo oh-so-lovingly passed along some common daycare crud to me... just one week before I have to travel for a conference.

Between sniffles, here's what I'm working on.

1. Faculty Promotion Portfolio - This is over (for now) but I spent 20 solid hours writing and gathering evidence for my faculty promotion portfolio. As I mentioned on Friday, it was a HUGE frustration but rewarding in the end.
2. Slide Decks - Never again will I host two webinar series in a semester. One series is about navigating the information landscape directed towards students. The other is our teaching research series for faculty. This is one of the outcomes of our research assignment design project. Faculty are already teaching research and we want to help them do it effectively while relieving some of their teaching burden. Between those sessions and my four conference presentations, I'm living in PowerPoint. I am getting really sick of stock photos.
3. Financial Advisor Prep - We're going to meet with a financial advisor this week. It's our first time so we're doing a lot of prep work. That includes gathering documents and statements, filling out some questionnaires, and trying to figure out what, exactly, we want our money to do. 

This is the busiest week of my work life. Part of this is my own making. I said yes to a few things I probably should have said no to. The rest of September is busy but not like this week. I will be very glad to get to COB on Friday. Then, I am going to treat myself with a bottle of beer from my favorite brewery.

Here are just the top three things I'm focusing on:

1. Promotion Portfolio: Instead of going on a long rant, let me just say that the process of applying for promotion at our University is not designed for library faculty, requires a ton of unnecessary busy work, and uses antiquated means of submission. (Flash drives?!?!) As much as I'm frustrated at the tedious nature of this, I am also proud of everything I accomplished in the past few years. I've got 17 pages of narrative listing all of my outreach, reference, instruction, and research/presentation work. And I've only been focusing on the major items! I don't have time to include everything. So... hate the process, love the outcome.
2. Presentations/Webinars: In the month of September I have given or will give seven conference presentations or teaching webinars. All of them need decks and notes. A few require training sessions on the production platforms. My dreams now look like PowerPoint.
3. Content Prompt: My new newsletter launched on September 1 and I think it's off to a great start. While much of the content I can batch make, I do need to conduct daily reviews for some of the trending material. It only takes 30 minutes or so each night and I've been having fun with it.

Wednesday is usually a day I'm in the office. But, since I threw my back out on Sunday, I decided to work from home. It's just easier to stretch at home than in my cubicle. No one wants to be lying down on office carpet. 

Here's what I've been working on:

1. Faculty Promotion Package: Turns out I qualify for a rank promotion this year and I completely forgot about it. The deadline is next week. (Ah!) So, I'm diving into a lot of paperwork and will be doing even more narrative writing and collating/linking of materials. But, let me tell you, this process seems extra tedious and pointless when the vast majority of my material already exists in our annual review platform. It's like when we ask job applicants to submit a resume and then require them to fill out an online form with the exact same information.
2. Research Assignment Design: We are making good progress on our first article. We're writing things on our own and then meeting to do joint edits. It's working. We also realize that we will need to do a STRONG edit to reduce the length and reorganize sections. But, it's shaping up nicely and we hope to be able to submit it to a journal by the end of the fall semester.
3. Content Prompt Newsletter: The first two issues go out Friday! I wanted to share both a daily post and a monthly post to give a real taste of what to expect. I've drafted both already but will give some final review tweaks tomorrow. Behind the scenes, I've been setting up calendar reminders and amassing my resources to make daily curation easier. I also conducted my initial round of promotion to gain subscribers.

Welcome to Wednesday during the first week of classes. I have answered an untold number of questions about where to get textbooks, how to access course materials, and where the bathroom is located. Typical first week stuff. It's all easy, but the flow is constant. I think I walked nearly a mile during my shift yesterday simply showing people to classrooms and troubleshooting printing issues.

Here's what else I've got going on:

1. Welcome Marketing: This is my game time for student outreach. I've been writing and sending emails; posting to the blog; updating social media; and, generally, insinuating the library into anything I can access. Students have energy and excitement at the start of the semester and I want to harness that.
2. Research Assignment Design Article: For the past few weeks, we've been brain dumping into our article draft document. The pages were a riot of colors, bullets, and comments. Today, we started going through the chaos as a team. Now that we've resolved many issues, it's actually starting to look like an article. We still need to do the back half, but we've made a lot more progress than I thought.
3. Embedded Librarian: We've always offered embedded librarians at our library but, this semester, we made it opt-out for the writing courses in our general education program. In this program we librarians create a discussion board in our course management system. On that board we share material related to the course work. Students can ask us questions or, generally, just get to know that the library exists as a support service for them. This week, I focused on introducing myself and making notes for future content. At the moment, I've got nine classes to stay on top of. Usually I can reuse existing library material, but I'm preparing for the courses where I might need to make a new video or two.

We've begun the final countdown for the new semester. Every year, it feels like it sneaks up on me. Every year, I feel like I've gotten nothing done on my summer to do list. It's the same this year. My summer projects list is basically untouched. I got a lot of stuff done, just not as much as I wanted. Oh well. Guess I'll never learn.

Here's what I've been working on:

1. New Website Navigation Bar - We did some usability testing last fall and several of the tests indicated that our navigation bar could be improved. I've been bashing my head on the keyboard trying to get the coding for a dropdown on hover nav bar to work. I think I've wrangled my problem, but I still need to code the bar, test it out, and make it live. My hope is to get it done before fall classes start in a few weeks.
2. Slide Decks - Between the last summer webinar and a few requests for video recordings for classes, I'm up to my ears in making slide decks. Most of them I have to make from scratch, but I've lucked out and been able to reuse some content for the library instruction classes. I know I want to make more engaging videos, but these will do for now. I'm pretty excited for our webinar on Friday. It's a fun one about finding what to read next. You can register here.
3. Kiddo's Birthday - We are throwing our kiddo's first friend birthday party this weekend. There is so much food to buy and order and so many logistics to nail down. We're nearing the end. Now we just need to keep our fingers crossed that the weather holds and the splash pad pumps are working.

Except for the noises from the building work happening below me, it's quiet in the office today. From what I can tell, I am in the only one in this part of the building. I always feel extra productive when no one else is here.

This is what I've been working on:

1. Research Assignment Design: We've entered the period of our work where we write up our findings. We each individually brain dumped into an outline document. Now, we are meeting as a group to flesh out our ideas and add comments where we need specific material. Our first article is finally starting to take shape. I'm also continuing to read material for our lit review section. 
2. Website Updates: I have been bashing my head in trying to get coding to work for a new navigation bar on our website. Our usability tests showed that people would prefer a nav bar that drops down on hover to show the contents of pages. I can get some things to work but, when I test it on the live website, it doesn't work. I'm going to give it a few more hours of work but this may just be something I have to toss my hands up about and walk away from. I know that if I get it working, it will be easy to update and edit, but the getting it working is proving nearly impossible.
3. August Days Alone Prep: In August, I will be able to enjoy 10 days at home by myself. I'm plotting out my laundry, cleaning, to do tasks, watch list, and menu. I know that I am probably over scheduling myself, but I am very excited for the amount of free time I am going to be able to devote to things I want to get done.

I almost opted to skip this week's update because I am not in the office. But, we're always working on something - even if it's not a professional project. 

Here's what I've been working on:

1. Super Cleaning: The husband is out of town for work and my kiddo is in daycare for most of the week. I opted to take the week off to tackle some home projects. The major home project was giving our home the deepest clean it has ever received. I'm talking taking things out of cabinets to dust the interiors, vacuuming under furniture, and washing walls sort of deep clean. Over the course of three days, I spent approximately 15 hours cleaning. I was a one woman scrubbing machine and my wrists are sore enough to prove it.
2. Weeding: Twice a year, I try to go through all our belongings to find things to donate or throw away. I gave our entire place a good assessment and collected three bags of donations and one bag of trash. All the donations are going to sit in a closet for two months to see if we miss them. If we don't, they are going out the door with our condo building's next donation pick-up.
3. Kiddo Birthday Planning: The kiddo's birthday is next month. We are going to host her first ever friends party at a local park with a splash pad. The Husband reserved the site a few weeks ago. This week, I'm finishing up our menu planning and shopping list. Kiddo and I are going to CostCo together on Friday to grab many things. We have a longer guest list than anticipated and need way more pouches, snacks, and beverages than our local grocery store can provide.

I just finished submitting written answers for a profile related to library customer service. I never know how longwinded I should be. It ended up being almost five pages of text. Probably too much, but that is what editing is for.

Here's what else I'm working on:

1. Research Assignment Design: After a brief break, we held a meeting today to discuss next steps. We've decided we're in a good enough position to outline an initial paper. From there, we can identify gaps in our analysis. I also have been doing some reading for our lit review. I'm glad we're outlining. It will help me narrow down which items are worth reading this time around.
2. Webinar Plans: I developed slides and a talking point for our webinar on power searching on Friday. I also started a brain dump for our August webinar. AND I produced a skeleton plan for our fall faculty webinars we're cohosting with another unit. Now I just need to skeleton plan our fall student webinars.
3. Content Prompt: I'm full speed ahead on my next newsletter. It's in a good enough spot that I can actually link to the main page. Still have some backend development to do. I also want to make templates to make my life easier. I think I can wrangle this in time for my planned launch date of September 1. (I also rejiggered my newsletter page to host both of my publications.

I'm staring at the summer to do list over my desk and realizing just how much I am not going to get done. Part of that is because other things keep cropping up. (We're about to be down one librarian.) The other is that nothing has a hard deadline. Everything on this list is something I've assigned myself. It's difficult to find motivation when no one else is waiting on me.

Here's what I am working on:

1. Outreach Content Calendar: In an effort to be more prepared and on message, I'm creating an outreach calendar/tracker for the entire upcoming academic year. It will have dates, audience, formats, and contents listed when I'm done. I just added in a slew of stuff for blog posts. A lot of the content is still TBD, but at least I've got an excellent start. It will be easier to fill in the TBDs as we get closer to the start of the semester.
2. To Do and Master Lists: One of the things I put on my personal list for the summer was to streamline all my to do lists into one spot. I decided to make Trello work only. That meant I had to transfer all of my personal stuff to another platform. I opted to go with Evernote. It took some planning to figure out how to do it, but now I've got things working as I like. Also, related to this, I am making master lists for things like cleaning, laundry, etc. to help me work going forward. I want to get all of these lists done soon so that I can use them during my time off from work in July and August
3. New Newsletter?: I was working on another presentation when the idea for a new newsletter popped into my head. Not content for my current newsletter... and entirely new newsletter. I spieled to my husband about it and he thinks it's a feasible thing. I squatted on the name over on Substack just in case. Now I'm working on strategic planning, templates, to dos, and all that "get off the ground" stuff. I want to ensure I can do this in a sustainable manner before I release it widely. I think​ I've got a good plan nailed down but I want to noodle it around a bit more.