Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

Our university just announced that they're closing all buildings (except for residence) tonight at 8:00 PM and locking the doors to all staff, "so if you have anything in your office that you need come and get it now".

Would have been nice to maybe spread that out over a couple of days to avoid lots and lots of people in one place methinks? I have a few plants I need to go and rescue, as I normally commute by foot. So I'll see how that goes...

Uh-oh. Colleague then exported the Google Doc to Microsoft Word, deleted the Google Doc (wiping out all of the comments, in which several significant decisions were documented), and copied/pasted from Word into an email (which screwed up the formatting).

Back to unbest practices.

The changes have all been accepted! Colleague admits he's still getting the hang of this "collegial editing" thing. Excellent!

Colleague shared a document in Google Docs and asked for edits from our team. It was pretty rough text, so I added about 20 suggested edits. He sent me a reply by email, saying "Thanks, good edits" but left them all as suggestions in the document itself.

I've recommended he actually accept the changes so that other members of the team can read the modified text and make their own suggestions...

I managed to overcome a clever barrier to submitting expenses at MPOW: they removed the entry for the reimbursements form from the menu.

Luckily, emails for previous reimbursements still link to the page. Took me about 15 minutes of navigating fruitlessly before I tried the "check old email" route.

I'm sure they didn't remove the menu entry deliberately, but this is likely going to cause problems for lots of people.

Cool cool, our president is taking students they can borrow a Chromebook from our library while our acting UL had said they're reserved for staff to enable them to work from home.

Hey @adr Congress finally said they're going online: http://www.congress2020.ca/novel-coronavirus-covid-19-and-congress-2020

I sent a nice "Hey it looks like when you updated our page without telling me, I lost the ability to update it. Could you revert the permissions change and coordinate with me in future if you're going to make a change?"

I've been updating the page _for years_ now so it's a bit annoying. But I understand, people are trying to do the right thing.

Ah what a great time to lose access to updating our library & archives home page.

Well we almost have an FAQ together detailing what services our library is going to offer while it's closed.

Wouldn't have been so fucking painful if library admin had called a meeting so we could discuss this in advance, say last week right after all classes were moved to online?

Yay, our admin team announced that they're closing the library as of the end of today.

Now if they had engaged in a dialogue with us back on Wednesday when we started advocating for the closure of the library, rather than fighting or ignoring us, then we would have been able to focus on planning for the closure. Instead, we now have a few hours to figure everything out.

I get it's a crisis, but include your team in discussions and decisions and you'll get better results.

I replied no, but that I work with & care for them, and am obliged to advocate for them.

Next response: please follow up with the Chair of your department on this non-urgent matter.

The Chair was CCed on the conversation.

So, replying all, I asked the Chair to ask the acting UL the same question.

The fact that the acting UL wouldn't give a simple yes or no, and went with a snarky response instead, doesn't sound good for our P/T employees or student workers.

New pay continuance guidelines: "P/T & student employees will be paid for their regularly scheduled work for March 14 - April 3, even if they can't work". Sounds great!

But library hours were reduced on March 13th, closing on weekends and evenings. Which are most of the hours that our P/T and students work.

When I asked our acting UL whether these staff would be paid for the evening and weekend hours, I was asked whether I supervised any. 1/2

Okay now I'm pissed.

I confirmed today that our teaching faculty are not expected to offer face to face office hours during our "all classes online" period, but librarians (who are also faculty, in the same collective agreement) are expected to offer face to face reference.

WTF?

And people wonder why our union files so many grievances against our administration.

I just asked Ex Libris why they're still documenting the expensive and clumsy manual process of shipping around signed CSRs when they could just be using Certbot / Let's Encrypt for free:

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/campusM/Knowledge_Articles/Working_with_custom_domain_names_on_hosted_ExLibris_environments

UL: "I've been negotiating with a vendor to migrate to a new library system."

Me (systems librarian, repeatedly): "Can you include the systems librarian in your discussions?"

UL: "..."

Department strikes a committee to evaluate the costs & benefits of migrating to new system.

One working day later, library manager tells staff that the license for the new system is a fait accompli.

UL: "Well we've agreed to a price but still need to sign the agreements"

Library department: "Motion to adopt circulation policies that allow unlimited renewals with no overdue fines until an item is recalled."

University Librarian: "That's nice, now immediately implement this update to circ policies to increase the maximum overdue fines."

Department: "But... collegial governance!?!"

UL: "That's an order"

Another example to add to our already open grievance over the lack of collegial governance in this place.

Learned how to use youtube-dl today.

For work: profs subcontracted a local company to create some instructional videos; company posted them to YouTube and might not have the originals anymore. Profs own copyright and want copies of the videos in our institutional repository, away from an ad-plagued platform.

So if worst comes to worst, I'm ready...

Trying to figure out the most environmentally friendly options for some renovations. The most friendly option is to not renovate.

But then the staples continue to stick out of the vinyl flooring, as they have for 14 years...