A Campbell's Can and a String

I can't decide if the better analogy is a soup can and a string or the "telephone gossip game" for the level of communication that is going on these days. The Bokomaten is shipping tonight, says Distec in Sweden, No, says our IT security person who has just spoken with the Distec contact in Italy where the machines are being built and shipped, It's not shipping this week. It's going to go through customs in New York, says the customs official who was tracking a smaller parcel (our RFID reader) that shipped earlier. It's going through Washington Dulles and then customs in San Francisco, says Distec. I'm thinking things have to go through customs at port of entry, but whatever, as long as it's coming. Our admin services asst. director says They're cutting the hole in the building tomorrow (Thursday, today) so it can be installed because it's the most convenient day for the contractor. No, it's being installed next Thursday, according to admin services staff.

We're not getting the boxes that the books have to go in until the machines arrive. (Everything is being shipped together.) We did receive the RFID tags on Monday so we'll be tagging the books as soon as staff can fit this into to their already overloaded schedules. (We're short one of our 10 staff members due to catastrophic sick leave. She's fine BTW, and will be back Monday.)

So the books still have to be downloaded into the machine somehow via a SIP2 connection with SIRSI that we've paid for with our migration to SIRSI.NET that we started in January, especially to be able to make this thing work most efficiently. (We had been in a compromising position of piggybacking on the local college's server since 2001.) But we've never used SIP2 and Distec hasn't used SIP2 in the States yet though they have the 2nd party agreement in place. (That was an interesting exercise in communicating all on it's own, sort of like the one just described but with Sweden and SIRSI and us in the middle.)

Anyway, we're down to the wire now. GoLibrary bokomaten is due to arrive sometime between now and next week (hopefully) and budget is due tomorrow (BOS presentation next week.) 3rd quarter LSTA grant report for the machine is due end of the month. Oh yeah, and I should also mention our HR department has finally worked us into their schedule of doing job analyses for the entire staff.

If anyone reads this other than another librarian, they are probably thinking, She must be nuts... but someone in the biz is more likely to think, So what else is new...a day in the life. And they will realize simultaneously that I'm likely just hitting the high points of next week's schedule. On one hand it makes me think we're ALL crazy, and on the other hand it makes me feel all warm and gooey inside to know that our professional tag line could easily read "Multi-taskers Are Us."