It is time for another round of Library Day in the Life. So, here is more about my day today –
I arrived at work at about 8:45AM.
I got right to work on building a new computer. Late on Friday afternoon, one of our reference librarians called to report that her computer kept shutting down. It had been doing this for a while, but was really getting bad. She said it had shut down several times on Friday. She was on the list for a new computer – and I actually had new computers in my office. I told her that I thought it would be best to simply get her a new computer on Monday. She had to work on Saturday, but would be out of the library until Tuesday at 2PM. This would give me plenty of time to get her computer ready for her without too much interruption.
So, I began to configure a new computer for her first thing this morning. It took about 45 minutes to image the computer and about another hour to install all of the library specific software that she uses (our ILS client, cataloging software, ILL software, etc). Once the software was installed, I began copying all of her files to the new computer. This process took a massively long time because the computer kept losing its network connectivity (this machine was seriously messed up). Lastly, I configured her profile specific settings. The computer is all set and ready to be deployed tomorrow morning.
Throughout the day, I had other projects, meetings, etc. that needed my attention at various points during the day.
I spent quite a bit of time documenting the process of setting up the new computer and configuring its settings. I have a new employee starting on February 1st, and I need to get training documents ready for this person.
At 1PM, I had an hour and a half meeting across campus with the vendor from whom we buy our servers. While I am primarily part of the library organization (in the academic division), I am also part of the IT department (in the finance division) – part of the IT’s systems department. This meeting was one for this IT group. The vendor was laying out their server roadmap and discussing their new line of servers. It was extremely informative. I generally consult with this group before buying hardware, but feel like I learned quite a bit about server architecture.
When I returned from the meeting, there were several voice mails waiting for me. The first one was from my boss. He was missing his archived folders in his email client. I had not transferred these files when I built his new computer for him last week. I had to get his old tower, hook it up and find the files. I copied the files to his new computer and then connected to his computer to add the archive data files to Outlook. One problem solved!
Next, one of the reference librarians had reported that a computer in the reference area was not functioning properly. I connected to the computer and poked around. Everything seemed to work fine. I rebooted the computer. We have software on the computer that resets the computer image upon reboot. I emailed the reference librarian to get additional information. He hadn’t specified what exactly was wrong with the computer. He got back to me quickly to report that the screen would go dark and then it would not wake up. This is a reoccurring issue. The flat panel monitors on these computers are over 8 years old, and they are starting to die. I requested a new one from IT. Normally, I would have walked over to the IT offices to pick up the new monitor, but the weather was nasty. It was pouring out and the wind was vicious. I will try and get the monitor tomorrow.
The last voice mail was from someone in the Admissions office who was trying to access pictures on the web site associated with our digital asset management system. The web site seemed to be working fine, but the images would not display (there was instead a red x). This is another reoccuring issue – although it hadn’t happened since mid-November. I was somewhat disheartened that this happened again. I may have to reopen the original call to the vendor. I used remote desktop connection to connect to the server. I copied the log files and then tried to restart the services that control the web publishing service. They, however, were frozen. I had to reboot the server. Once the server came back up, the images displayed correctly. I then did a write up on the problem to add to IT’s call tracking system. All of the licenses for it were in use, so I will remember to add it to the system tomorrow.
I left work at about 4:10PM.
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