Day in the life post 1

Photo by Simon Pow

I have been quiet on my blogs lately. I think I just needed a bit of a break- not to mention that school and my practicum are taking more time than I thought they would. I am back now to participate in the “A Day in the Life of a Library” meme, started by Bobbi L. Newman at Librarian by Day. You can see a list of other “Day in the Life” posts on the wiki.  (or sign up to participate yourself!)

Today was a little unusual, because I took a vacation day to go to my practicum at the Nebraska Library Commission. For those that don’t know, a practicum is a school requirement where I get to pay tuition to work for 90 hours. Exciting, huh? Usually, a practicum is used to get a sampling of what it might be like to work various jobs in a library. In my case, I was approached to help build a new website for the Nebraska Library Commission to supplement their existing site, and it was a too good an experience to pass up. I’m running a little bit behind on hours for the practicum (it’s over August 1st) which is why I am taking vacation days to finish it up.

It was actually really, really wonderful to be able to devote a full 8 hours to a project like this. My usual day (as you’ll see later this week) is a little bit of everything, with a LOT of interruptions. While it makes the day go quick, it can also make it hard to get things done. Today, on the other hand, I had the luxury of working almost non stop on one project. So today’s post will be somewhat short. Except I already rambled quite a bit already. oops.

I got to the Commission a little before 8. My first order of business was to talk to Michael Sauers. I had a favor to ask him having to do with the Other Job, and I wanted to touch base about the presentation we’ll be giving together this fall.

After that, I picked up where I left off last night on my website design. I have finished working out most of the design part, and am down to the nitty gritty of the CSS- not exactly my favorite thing to do. This is where having a lot of time to work on something comes in handy, because I can’t squash all those CSS cross browser bugs very quickly. Around 9:30 I checked the email account for the Other Job, responded to a couple of things, checked my personal email, checked Twitter, and started work on the CSS again.

I made a lot of progress today, which felt great. My next step in my practicum is to show my design proposals to the web committee, and hope they like them. I also have been working on a few suggestions for them. I am trying to leave them with well commented code and some Photoshop files they can use to make their own custom attractive graphics.

So that’s it for today. There will probably be some more variety in tomorrow’s post, but this being summer I can’t guarantee anything. :)