The Now: August 3, 2022

I'm working from home this week. But "home" is actually my in laws place in South Carolina. They set me up with a desk in the guest room and I have more space here than I do in my actual home. It's nice. Plus, they have super soft carpet that feels great on my bare feet. 

While I'm working, our kiddo starts her mornings with swim lessons and then gets all day grandparent daycare. I'm fairly certain she will not want to leave.

Also, another slight change to the format of the post this week. I want it to reflect more of how my job is structured.

Here's what I'm working on:
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WORK

• Research Assignment Design: I finished all my coding. (No thanks to a Dedoose breakdown that gave be a heart attack. Always back up your data!) Then I reviewed my colleagues codebooks. Tomorrow, we are meeting to collaboratively design a codebook to complete our research from. I am very excited for this process because we all did the same stuff just differently. I can honestly say that my one colleague's codebook is far superior to mine and will provide a great basis to start. Also, it is fascinating what we each read in the data.
• Presentations and Publications: Brain dumped some ideas for my photography webinar. I also chatted about it with the husband.
• Instruction: We kicked off the new request form! I am thrilled because our old one was clunky and difficult. I shared the form with a faculty member to test and updated all of the links on our website. Hopefully, this new process works better for everyone. I'm also doing some maintenance on our Library 101 tutorial course. I'm checking in with professors and updating announcements in the course management system.
• Reference: We've received several chat questions about "religion in politics." That's a broad topic and difficult to provide effective reference for. It's stuff like this which informed our desire to look at how faculty design their research assignments. Also, I threw together a Roving Reference plan. Since we are in a not great temporary space, we want to go where the students are. Assuming the Director gives the all clear, we will start this sometime in early September as an added service.
  
• Outreach: I drafted a blog post and am working on ways to increase our newsletter subscribers. I want to add at least 25 more this semester. It doesn't sound like much, but that would be over a 25% increase. Also, I drafted and shared a website usability testing plan with the team. We want to see if the new format is working and what we still need to improve. Finally, I made new one sheets that we can use as handouts. I directed one towards students about our new space and the other for student support staff and offices about what the library can do for students and faculty.
  
• Administration: Not much movement here. I'm checking things off the list I made for myself.

PERSONAL

• Estate Planning: Nothing. 
• Email Newsletter: More subscribers are still rolling in and I'm bouncing. I'll be on vacation  next week, so I am going to announce that in the two issues going out this week.
• Home Projects: We left the table still flattening while we're gone for two weeks. Turns out, our in laws have a rubber mallet. If the heavy object flattening doesn't work, we'll try popping it out with the mallet when we get back.
• Hobbies: I set up my bullet journal for August. I forgot to bring my wider nibbed pen with me, so I will need to go back and bold some of my monthly pages.

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