never go home

I am taking full advantage of the of fact that I work in a library.  I am too lazy to actually enter this into GoodReads or type out my reading list so here is a screenshot of my interlibrary loan items:

And here are the items I have checked out from NCSU:

I have actually read a little bit of each of these books except for the books by the two Jonathans: Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem) and Eating Animals (Jonathan Safran Foer).  Those two just came in and I will be picking them up tomorrow.  My goal is to actually finish a couple these books before they are due or recalled!  Maybe I will get a review (or a haiku review) written for one or two.

That last item listed is actually a Flip camera which I am borrowing to get some experience using a Flip and to learn how our tech queue system works from a patron perspective.  My general feeling is we have way too many systems for our patrons and we need better integration.  However, it is one of those things where solving the problem is a lot harder than complaining about it.  The interlibrary loan system, for instance, is a different vendor than our regular card catalog system (aka the “ILS”), a different database type, and has different data formats.  Just getting books from the two systems to appear on the same page (not even in the same format) takes some effort.  I am starting to look at these different pieces since we hope to eventually create mobile instances of all these tools and it is quickly becomes pretty overwhelming…but would be very satisfying to solve!