Laundry list systems librarians

On the always excellent Techessence, Dorothea Salo posted Hiring a systems librarian. The blog post warned against libraries who put together a “laundry-list job description” for systems librarians:

Sure, it'd be nice to have someone who can kick-start a printer, put together a desktop machine from scraps, re-architect a website, do Gantt charts for the library's technology projects, write a MARC-DC crosswalk, performance-tune the ILS database, and build a custom IM bot. It won't happen.

Oddly enough, that's a pretty close description of what's on my plate these days.

Certainly my duties include:

• Kick-starting printers. Well, at least in helping staff add a printer to their XP profile.
• Putting together machines from scraps. If one of the staff member's machines dies, I've been known to cobble together a new machine from the remnants of a few old machines if a suitable replacement isn't ready and waiting. It seems like a waste let staff experience downtime.
• Re-architect a website. That's actually been my highest priority for the last few months. Granted, I'm part of a good team, but most of the structural & navigational principles came from my keyboard. As part of the follow-through, I've been asked to provide a visualization of the web site -- hence my previous post that was tangentially asking for good sitemap visualization software. It looks like Graphviz might be my answer, by the way.
• Do GANTT charts for the library's technology projects. No, not yet. Right now the GANTT chart would show one primary resource for every technology project. The problem I'm facing at the moment is prioritizing and tracking them all in an open fashion that can be understood by all stakeholders. I started trying to do this with a wiki, but an install of something like Trac is probably in the works. Anything to help consolidate all of those emails, phone calls, and slips of paper has got to help avoid important items from slipping off the plate -- not to mention making it painfully evident just how many requests for changes are in the queue.
• Write a MARC-DC crosswalk. Well, no, but I certainly have plenty of MARC transformations on my plate. We haven't updated several important union databases with our holdings for a while, and those databases all seem to require different input formats, so this is a high-priority too. Apparently a PAPYRUS-to-MARC conversion is in the future as well. It's a good thing that my File_MARC project is coming along nicely.
• Performance-tune the ILS database. Well, heh, our ILS doesn't allow for much performance-tuning -- but happily that's not a problem at the moment. However, every other customization and administration matter, from user accounts with bounced emails to creating look and feels for the OPAC for each of the dozen partners in our consortium is my bailiwick. I think my major accomplishment so far has been to stabilize the ILS so that we haven't had any crashes for the past three months (knock wood).
• Build a custom IM bot. Well no, this won't be happening anytime soon -- but in a university with so many remote and off-campus students, I believe it would be very useful to provide virtual reference. So this one tugs at my heart strings.

On top of that, I have collection development, reference, and occasional public service duties. Oh yes, and writing circulation policies and procedures for big new projects like our loaner laptop program. Et, bien sur, je doit apprendre français as a condition for obtaining tenure, along with the scholarly publications expected of us academic types.

So it's one big old workload that I face every day, and sometimes it's overwhelming. But it's also quite invigorating--I get direct contact with our patrons and the users of our systems, as a result--and probably quite necessary given the size of our institution. Every librarian has to play multiple roles on our team to offer the level of service that we feel is necessary for a university. And it does give me a darned good basis for understanding the complexity of how all of the different parts of the library work together: a true systems view, where “systems” is about more than just technology.