Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 5

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. 


Today I was back in the office even with more snow flurries falling outside.  This morning I spent a little time thinking about what materials would be needed for the library table at the Intern Fair.  Each year NPR hosts an Intern Fair where possible future NPR interns come and learn about the opportunities available. Being a former intern myself, I was looking forward to talking to students.  NPR's Library has a good track record with hiring former interns when positions open up and I've found that internships & fellowships are a great way to get a sense of what a specific job/environment entails.

Also this morning I spent some time catching up on ALA & SLA emails/duties.  I took the ALA Membership Meeting Survey and also posted some NMRT announcements on the various social media networks that NMRT has a presence on. I also turned down an appointment as chair of the SLA Technical Standards Committee.  It was hard to say no, but I have a wedding to plan and a huge project at work to implement. 

In the afternoon I did a shift at the Library table and met some interesting students.  Unfortunately, none of them were library students but it was nice to share a bit about what the Library does here at NPR.

The rest of the day was spent cataloging.  I leave you with a few more interesting stories from the day:

• Chris Ziegler explains to Ira Flatow what '4G' actually means
• Brad Meltzer talks with Steve Inskeep about his latest book Inner Circle
• Jay Bakker talks with Guy Raz about growing up with his parents Jim & Tammy Faye

It has been fun blogging this week my daily activities. Even though round 6 continues through Sunday this will be my last blog post as I have the weekend off =)

Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 4

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. 


Today started with a flurry of activity (no pun intended) due to last night's snow storm.  I woke up to find my cable was out which added a small wrinkle to my plan to work from home today.  I decided to wait it out and tried to figure out how to make my blackberry a modem for my laptop.  Luckily the cable was restored just as I was starting to figure out the modem directions I had found.

First up today was compiling more HERMES statistics and sending off an email to my colleague Kee would will compile the rest of the week's statistics over the weekend and send to News Management.

Next up was reviewing the comments made by the developers on the items that are in this release for Artemis.  It's exciting and nerve-wracking to see things coming together. As I've said in previous posts, NPR has many metadata fields and it's hard to capture them in a clean and simple interface.

I jumped onto a webinar hosted by Createsphere this afternoon regarding how to find key assets in your digital asset management system.  While Createsphere's content is geared more for IT and content managers, I have found we can easily apply the content to Library ILS systems as well.  Unfortunately the webinar wasn't that interesting and I decided to jump off and catch up with the archived audio later this week.

Just recently we've decided to hold status meetings twice a week for the Artemis project.  I had a quick 15 minute call with the team and did some follow-ups from the meeting.

The last part of my day was working on my cataloging backlog.  I wasn't able to get as much done because I'm on a laptop at home, but I did find a few stories that were interesting:

• freelancer Ryan Morden explains how one town in New York is trying to determine the environmental impact of an old abandoned General Motors plant
• Foreign Desk reporter Juan Forero explores the Amazon forest with an archeologist
• producer Selena Simmons-Duffin looks back at Wikipedia as it celebrates its 10th anniversary
• Carrie Kahn captures the rubble busters in Haiti 

Best part of the day was working alongside of my fiance.  It was nice to have little conversations here and there in person and not over email.

Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 3

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. 

As the latest snow storm made its way into the DC metro area, I spent the morning attending two regularly scheduled meetings. First was our weekly cataloging meeting.  Every week the library staff meets to talk about issues we might have found while cataloging or to discuss what subject terms or keywords to use for the latest breaking news event.  Most of our discussion this morning was about preferred name spellings for various persons in the news.  The second meeting was a bi-weekly data migration meeting.  The library staff is working on various data migration projects as part of the migration to a new database (Artemis).  These bi-weekly meetings are our way to check-in and discuss any new errors or conditions we've found while cleaning up the record sets we are assigned.

After those meetings I tested a new version of software that is being rolled out to the News staff.  I had reported a bug to the IT development team yesterday and they felt that this new version could fix the issue I reported.  They were correct.  I also spent some time pulling together weekly statistics for the HERMES database which myself and my colleague Kee sent to News Management to report on compliance of metadata standards.

In the afternoon, my goal was to work on the cataloging backlog I have waiting for me.  I was able to get through a show before we were given an early dismissal (due to the snow).  I ended up volunteering to cover the Reference Desk for the rest of the afternoon.  Luckily it was quiet for the rest of the afternoon and I was able to get more cataloging done before heading out into the storm myself.

Here are links to some of the interesting stories I cataloged this afternoon:

• NPR's Guy Raz talks with IBM researcher David Ferrucci about computer WATSON playing on Jeopardy!
• Citizen Scientist makes a 3-D printer 
• NPR's Guy Raz talks with Julian Fellowes about bringing "Downton Abbey" to PBS

Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 2

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. 

Today's activities was mostly meetings with a few data related tasks in between.


I started the day with helping a colleague complete a report request for our Development office.  I reviewed the stories aired on Tell Me More during the month of December and identified which were education related stories.

Next I fixed some older catalog records that had misspellings pointed out by one of our editors.

A few years ago I spent some time working in the Information Technology department on a company-wide software development project.  I became the product owner for a person name authority database (called Hermes) for the newsroom here at NPR.  Part of being a product owner entails training folks on the tool.  I spent 20 minutes or so today answering questions from a producer and intern on the Arts Desk regarding Hermes.

Every Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, my colleague Hannah and I meet with our contractors at Siteworx to get a status update on the implementation of the new archive database Artemis (can you see a theme with the database names?).  Today's status meeting was a little different because we were demoing to our executive sponsors the work we had done on the project over the past two weeks.  This meeting was the first time they got to see NPR data & fields within the product we are using (Collective Access).

After lunch I spent some time merging some records that weren't migrated correctly when our current archive database was implemented.  I was able to finish the listing of records (over 300) this afternoon which was exciting.  I also met with another one of my colleagues - Lauren - to review the additional records that she and I have been reviewing as part of the this data migration effort as well.  NPR's archive has over 40 years of records and the fields available and cataloging syntax has changed over those 40 years.  Therefore there are quite a few data migration related projects to get through before the next migration to the new system. In fact I found a few more queries that need to be run and the results reviewed as I went through the remaining records this afternoon.

Also this afternoon, I sat in on a demonstration from one of our digital engineers on how the audio that is broadcast is captured and split up into individual stories to be posted on NPR's website.  With the new archive database we are planning to offer preview & download audio functionality as the NPR staff are going through search results.  Part of this functionality includes actually creating digital files of our collection as well as establishing "born-digital" workflows for the archive.  This meeting this afternoon was just one step in a many-step process to understanding what actions are happening today in order to adjust them for the future workflow.

Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 1

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities.

I am a Broadcast Librarian at NPR headquarters located in Washington, DC. My main duties are to provide audio reference to NPR staff (i.e. looking for clips of movies, speeches) and cataloging the NPR produced content for reuse.  I've been at NPR for 5 years.

Mondays for me usually are spent on the Reference Desk.  Each of us take a turn covering the Reference Desk each week.  Part of the Reference Desk responsibilities includes processing CDs of the shows broadcast the day before into the collection.  Here at NPR the library is 24/7 so we use some low-tech methods for circulation white cards which we type & stamp. Also part of that processing includes printing the rundowns of a show which includes a brief description and order of the stories with a show. On Mondays, I process CDs from Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well as catalog copies of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows for NPR's Spoken Word collection.

Due to tomorrow night's State of the Union address, we had to adjust the audio we are going to capture for All Things Considered and make a new catalog record for the actual State of the Union and Republican response. I took care of those adjustments and notified our engineering center about the changes.

Some of the reference requests I received today included:

• NPR audio coverage of the Challenger disaster back in January 1986 for stories to use on the 25th anniversary later this week
• George W Bush speaking at West Point in 2002 which I found in our WAND collection - CDs of audio broadcast by the Washington Area News Distribution channel
• Newsreel sound of marines storming the beaches in WWII to be used in a story on tomorrow's All Things Considered
• Healthcare coverage from Nixon era days which required ordering reel-to-reel tapes from our off-site storage site at the University of Maryland
• Trying to determine if we ever did a story on a gay history museum in San Francisco

In between requests, I caught up on some notifications from the system that tracks development work for NPR's new archive system (Artemis), fixed some duplicate records in the news production person authority database (HERMES) and fixed old catalog records that weren't migrated correctly the last migration.

Best quote of the day
Patron: Can you just help confirm because you have a masters degree in searching?