A Day in the Life of a Digital Librarian
My real job title is Director of Academic Support and Learning Resources but like many in the library world, I wear several hats. My main function is to manage the digital library for American Public University System (APUS). APUS is an umbrella for three schools - American Military University, American Public University, and American Community College. About 80% of our students are affiliated with the military, either in active duty or transitioning to the civilian world. The founder created AMU first which has niche degree programs in homeland security, naval warfare, and strategic intelligence, for example. Then it was decided to broaden the scope of the university to appeal to the population not associated with the military. That's when APU and ACC were created. The University also offers more traditional degrees like business administration, humanities, and political science. APUS is a small 100% distance education university. We have offices in Virginia and West Virginia. I work out of our headquarters in Charles Town, WV.
A typical day starts at 7:30 AM with a quick email scan. One of my primary responsibilities right now is acting as the IT Champion for the Academics department. This means that I serve as a liaison between the Dean, the Department Chairs, Registrar, and support staff and the IT department. I troubleshoot any issues with the electronic classroom, electronic campus, or library and report these to the IT department using our work order tracking system. Most of the time, my troubleshooting process reveals operator error or there is a simple solution. If the IT department does need to fix a defect or create a new feature, I describe the issue in detail, provide documents with visual screen shots, and apply priorities to each work order request. My next step is to brief the University department heads with any new issue that arose since the previous day's meeting.
This daily briefing occurs at 8:30 AM where we video conference between the Virginia and West Virginia offices. I initially began attending these meeting out of curiosity as they were open to anyone at the University. I wanted to be informed as a new employee. The agenda is to discuss the previous day's registration totals and then go around the room where each person has the opportunity to report any IT issues or brief the group on the status of current or upcoming projects. I quickly realized that to be in the loop, it was best to attend this meeting each day. So now that I'm a regular I am able to bring attention to and usually get a much quicker response to any technical problems affecting the library and the Academics department. This daily meeting is one of the best ways our University communicates between departments.
The next chunk of my day toggles between troubleshooting system issues, communicating with the librarian, and administrative tasks for the library. I spend about two to three hours a day working with staff to determine the extent and impact of any IT problems. We will soon hire our own IT staff member for the Academics department, but until that happens, I'm the "go to" person. Sometimes, all that is needed is new perspective and the fix is obvious. Other times, it's much more involved where I need to perform extensive research into a problem to figure out exactly where the point of failure is and what a suitable fix will be. One other area of the IT Champion role is to work with the staff to define requirements for our reporting system. These reporting capabilities are an important part of day-to-day operations so that Department Chairs can use registration numbers to plan upcoming course sessions or that support staff can run monthly metrics of how many professors are using the classroom tools, for example. We have a lot of data in our system and we need to have effective reports built to retrieve that data, make sense of it, and make decisions.
Moving into the library world, I am responsible for tracking all of the library's metrics. This involves usage reports for each database, the OPAC, our learning tools like Turnitin and Smarthinking and general library traffic. Each day, I check the statistics for the previous day. We use an online web traffic system that tracks visits to the Online Research Center (ORC), how much time was spent, the user navigation path, exit pages and a whole host of other data. Each month I look at the previous month's results and report it to my supervisor. Over time, I can see trends and identify areas of improvement. For example, examining navigation paths can help us to redesign the ORC interface better to meet the needs of students and faculty.
A part time librarian is on my staff who works from home and is a 25 year veteran in the field, having worked for the NSA for many years. She monitors the content of the ORC to ensure that website links are accurate and that our area of Sites-By-Subject is organized appropriately. In this capacity she keeps the subject area links in line with any program changes and submits new resource links each month. She also manages our ILL process. We receive about 30-50 ILL requests a month in contrast to only about 4-5 request for books from our own catalog. Our catalog consists of about 2,000 volumes of a very specialized collection. Since all of our students are at a distance they usually want information that is available online. Also, if a student is on a military base in Afghanistan, he may not receive the books we ship him in time as it may take 6-8 weeks. By then his class is over. One of the most often asked questions I receive is if students actually return books. Yes, for the most part they do.
One of my biggest challenges is marketing the digital library to students and faculty. Keeping everyone informed of available and new resources and encouraging usage is difficult at a distance. We are experimenting with ideas for live chats and interactive tutorials. One method that does not work so well is communicating through faculty and student newsletters. We find that while well intentioned, most do use this type of communication as their primary information source. We are working to improve the use of the ORC within our required courses. Once the syllabi are revised and proper faculty training ensues, it will be interesting to see how well this strategy works. The overall goals are twofold: Preparing students for success in an online university and providing support throughout their experience. In addition, I work with the Director of Faculty Development to create new and innovative ways of training faculty in library resources and keeping them involved throughout their faculty experience. When faculty members are well informed about resources, they pass the word along to students.
When I interviewed for this position, the Provost scratched some boxes on a piece of paper and attempted to explain what was expected. I had no idea what I was walking into, but I knew that it was going to be interesting and dynamic. In this position, I am able to utilize my IT and customer service skills in addition to my love for the library. It seems like it's the perfect blend for me.
In addition to working, I am in an online graduate MLS program at Florida State. It's an excellent program and I am in my second semester. I loved the reference services class and I'm currently enrolled in two classes with one focused on Web development. This semester I have an internship at the local library here in Charles Town where I am helping out with a cataloging project. I am a member of ALA, WVLA, ACM and a few other organizations. Within ALA, I focus mostly on ACRL, DLS, NMRT events. I am on numerous listservs and serve on the NMRT Student Reception Committee. After I finish my degree, I hope to continue working for an academic library. I like the research that is involved in higher education and I love the interaction with faculty and students.