Inside my work brain

In case you were wondering what goes on in there.

On the front burners, requiring constant stirring:

• Replacing our most aged Bookmobile with a new unit (12-18 months delivery time) and hopefully also ordering a new customer van via 2014 budget
• Other Bookmobile Service Review-related stuff
• Some new options for library customers with disabilities
• Team-building
• 2014 project planning
• Staffing: recruitment, training, retention!

On the back burners, simmering away happily:

• Bookmobile outreach: LEGO at Bayshore (photos!), the pop-up at City Hall which reached over 200 people this summer, our "Win a Ride on the Bookmobile" prize to celebrate Summer Reading Club and our 60th birthday year: we picked young Rebecca up from school with the bus, drove her around the Experimental Farm, and took her for ice cream... A good time was had by all! 
• A developing/deepening partnership with Frontier College in coordinating homework clubs and conversation groups at the library
• Working with the City, who recently launched the amazing City of Ottawa Immigration Portal
• Launching, along with other City depts and teams, a new online volunteer database later this month (which meant I spent my summer re-writing all our related policies and procedures. A great job done but time-consuming and nit-picky).

Swimming around somewhere in the oven:

• Library of the Future Project: Imagine Campaign (see preliminary report here). My lovely Newcomer Services team helped OPL colleagues collect focus group feedback for the campaign from newcomers and groups serving newcomers this fall.
• Attending special events for outreach, such as our recent booth at the CNIB Technology and Services Exhibit.
• Thinking about things in new ways: we recently hosted Volunteer Fairs at OPL branches: the inspiration for these events came out of the recent IMAGINE campaign at OPL. We're also adding some readers' advisory to our brochure for Newcomer Services.

+ 7 million other things I just forgot about right now. Let's file those under "getting scraped off the bottom of the oven with oven cleaner and rubber gloves." Sigh.

See, kids? This is why I haven't blogged a lot about work. For one thing, you probably find this really boring! For another, so much is ..... un-publishable!

I'm still having an amazing time in the new role: it's fulfilling, demanding, exhausting, and endlessly rewarding. It puts me to bed by 10pm and saps my weekend energy, but that could just be a "Year 1" phenomenon.

Right?

'Cause it's not like I'm getting any younger!