Organization Monkey

i’ve been experimenting with a free online organizational tool called evernote. i’m using it to plan all the details of our trip up the coast of california so that we can have paper-free travels. when you sign up for the service you’ll be given an email address so that you can email stuff to evernote; i used it to forward email confirmations i’d received from hotels so that i had all the confirmations/phone numbers/hotel addresses in one place. i created a spreadsheet of dates and the places we’d be visiting every day; i pasted that into a note in evernote and titled it, ‘trip schedule’. i found a map of napa wineries (a pdf) and dragged it from my desktop into the program.  i used google maps to plan our route and grabbed screen shots of the maps and pasted them into a note in evernote, along with the driving directions.

i’m pleased with how easy the program is to use.  i downloaded the program onto my mac at home, made changes to some notes through the web version, and will plan to access evernote while on the road through my iphone.  lovely!

saw this on my commute to work today, chalked onto the sidewalk.  seems like good advice!

Technical services departments are usually housed in the ugliest part of any library.  Technical services do the behind-the-scenes work of the library and don’t deal with the patrons, so are usually tucked away in the unattractive part of the library where patrons are unlikely to go.  This means they’re put in the basement, or in an area without windows, or near the loading dock.  This is depressing for someone as visual as myself.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the new library being built at Loyola Marymount University has plans to house the technical services department on the second floor.  My office will even have a floor-to-ceiling window.  Joy!  It looks like the designers of the new building have taken into account the creature comforts of the people inhabiting the library.  Check it out for yourself at Coming Soon: The William H. Hannon Library.

a library student intern from ucla recently asked me if i had any words of advice for someone young in the profession. i told her that the wisest thing i could advise her to do was to be considerate to every librarian she meets, because she’ll be seeing them for the rest of her professional life. this came true for me at the american library association (ala) conference this year, where i bumped into old colleagues from florida, when i was just a paraprofessional thinking about librarianship. i loved the people there and it was a joy to reconnect with them, but how unexpected it seemed! as big as ala is, to casually run into people i knew was a surprise. it got me thinking though, about how small the world of librarianship really is, especially when you decide which area of librarianship you focus on.

as a young librarian i think it would serve our intern well to network the heck out of any opportunity she has and to stay informally connected to the people she hits it off with.

have you found this to be true also, or would you have offered different words of advice for someone young in the field?