This is the last post in a weeklong series offering a snapshot of what a day in the life of an academic librarian, specifically an outreach librarian and department head, looks like. Here was Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

8:30a: Arrived at work and immediately had to troubleshoot an HR issue regarding student hiring. Once I handed that off to one of my team members to manage, I checked in with the campus children’s center to make sure story time was going ahead as planned (the air quality was almost poor enough to cancel their walk to the library).

9:00a: Because of meetings later in the day, I took advantage of my free morning to go to the gym.

10:00a: Cleaned up my email. Reviewed notes from the latest Faculty Senate meeting. Ordered gifts for my graduating senior student employees. Added an ND filter to my camera equipment inventory (pictured above).

11:00a: The leadership of the library met with the leadership of ITS. There were a number of issues to discuss, including cybersecurity of library systems, printing modernization, AI workshops, and digital assets management.

12:30p: Drafted the agenda for my department meeting on Monday and shared that with my team. More email (I always make sure my email inbox is cleared before the weekend). Emailed a student who won a raffle item by filling out a library survey. More coffee.

1:30p: My son was performing at his school today, so I hopped over to watch that.

2:30p: Went through my students’ project boards (we use Trello) and cleaned up their unassigned tasks, archived their completed work, and prioritized their projects for next week. I also scheduled their end of year performance review meetings.

3:30p: Committee on Committees meeting. We’ve mostly completed assigning all faculty volunteers to open committee seats, but there were a handful of unresolved issues to discuss.

4:30p: For the rest of the day (until about 6:30), I did my “Weekly Review.” I’ve discussed this before, but essentially it’s the time I set aside to review all my notes from the week, capture any action items, plan my priorities for the week ahead, and make it possible for me to go into the weekend without any hanging fire.

6:30p: Done and done. That’s it! If you were along for this whole ride, thanks for sticking around. Maybe I’ll do this again sometime. 