Back in the office

Back from my semi-vacation to find out we’re getting a student intern after all!  Exciting!  Drafting up a project plan for the 10 weeks the student will be with us and hoping the student won’t be too bored.

Getting things confirmed for the day with the City.  Got a couple more pieces of info for scheduling of the Fall Associates Program.

Meetings about meetings

A lot of loose ends have been wrapped up this week.  We had a good meeting on Wednesday – figured out who’s driving where when and settled on a food provider for most of the meals.  Also have a great outline shaping up for the day with the City.  Sent out emails to all the speakers asking for their PowerPoint files since we’ll need the interpreters to look over them beforehand.

This afternoon a couple of us went over to the Levis Faculty Center to plan out the Opening — we’ll have the group photo outside by the fountain, or on the 2nd floor couches if weather is bad.  Social time will be on the 2nd floor patio, followed by Ceremony with the screen showing a slideshow.  Then downstairs for dinner.  Excellent, excellent.  I think this will work out much better for photos.

Early Birds

The program for the Chinese library directors is about three weeks away and we’re running up on the time when a lot of the details need to be settled and confirmed.  Invitations are getting sent out, speakers are double-checked, making our lists and checking them twice… at least.  Still waiting to hear exactly how many visitors we have in the program… at least ten, but maybe eleven?

The Where and How

Last couple days have been about transportation and location.  The vehicles we wanted to get from the campus pool are already reserved so we have to come up with a different plan that will still be within budget.  Also, the building originally picked out for the Opening Ceremony is too expensive and has a high school dance the same night as our ceremony.  So that’s out.  On to Plan B at many levels.

Let them eat… something

After last week’s focus on scheduling speakers, this week’s focus has started with food.  Yes, food.  A very essential yet easily overlooked detail in event planning.  We’ll have visitors over the holiday weekend of July 4th and figuring out the logistics of feeding them is proving a little bit tricky.

Also followed up on the marketing grant project with a very brief summary of our ad and the results from it.  Basically, I think we learned from the experience that we need to look closer at online marketing over paper marketing.  Video? Social Networking? Gotta think about this more.

Email tag

Lots of lots of emailing today to schedule speakers for the Chinese library directors.  Sometimes I wonder if this kind of scheduling would be more efficient with just a phone call, but there is quite a bit of information to be sent out too.  I think opening the discussion with a phone call and following up with an email would probably be best, but then we’d just play phone tag in the same way we play email tag.  I don’t know — just something to be thinking about.

Schedules

We got our Chinese names in class today!

Work had a focus on scheduling.  Sent out my preliminary schedule for the summer, and also started a document for the Fall Associates Program schedule, which doesn’t have much on it yet.  Put the presentations for the IFLA-OCLC Fellows up at http://www.library.illinois.edu/mortenson/misc/IFLA-OCLC/

Chinese and Chinese

Today was the first day of my Chinese language class and it’s going to be awesome!  It means I’ll be working in the afternoons for the next three weeks.

Today was all about planning for the Chinese librarian visitors.  Emails to a few more speakers and a couple more confirmations have come in.

Nooks and Crannies

Some people really enjoy the research part of a paper, while others live for the writing part.  I am definitely of the former, and my little joys of late have been the interesting discoveries of obscure library journals that weren’t published for very long but had great articles during their short lifespans.  Tonight’s example is Library Consortium Management: an international journal.  LCM only had 8 issues, from 1999 to 2000, but these few small issues are teaching me incredible things about library consortia!  For example, I’m reading an article about the stages of development for library networks – when they go from simply purchasing shared resources to being “incorporated” and the consortia becomes a body of its own outside of the individual libraries.  I automatically think of the Orbis-Cascade Alliance from my previous life.  The member libraries were from universities and colleges across the Pacific Northwest, but the consortia had its own little office and even staff to handle all the administrative aspects of making sure things went smoothly for the libraries.  This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to chart out in my paper.

Word of the day: Cooperations

I seem to have found at least one solution to my search term problem of yesterday — “library cooperations” or at least that was the catch phrase in the 80s.  I’m not sure if it’s really still used in the literature today, but I have the beginnings of a bread crumb trail now.  I discovered a couple shelves full of the stuff in the 021.64 area of the Library Science Library (ha! … sounds like something out of that new show Pushing Daisies, like the Darling Mermaid Darlings).

I’m a little worried that most of the material I’ve found so far is rather dated.  I only have a few things from the 90s and nothing from the Aughts.  Hmmm…