Busy, Busy, Busy

I know I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again - it's been busy around here. Between work and schoolwork, I feel like I'm moving until I drop and then up and moving again. I'm taking a few days this week to recharge - I'm visiting my aunt and uncle in Cleveland before I head to Pittsburgh for class this weekend.
Earlier this month for one of my reference class assignments I had the opportunity to look up terms in two medical dictionaries and compare the dictionaries. (Medical questions always remind me of my cousin the doctor.) That assignment caused me to decide to replace the medical dictionary in my library - we currently have Black's but will be changing to Stedman's. I had the toughest time finding "esophagus" in Black's - actually had to look at the anatomy diagrams in the center to find that it was spelled oesophagus. This was after I had already noticed that Black's used British spellings - guess I didn't realize just how far-reaching this would be. At any rate, I decided if I couldn't find things in that dictionary, my patrons probably couldn't either. We'll be replacing that one!
I'm enjoying how much my assignments this semester have some bearing on my job. It's an interesting symbiosis to be working in a job and studying for it at the same time. Some things are easier because I have some knowledge of them - like some of the reference questions, when I know what resource to look for. Others seem to be harder because I'm trying not to do things the way I always have. My first line of defense for reference questions for the past few years has been Google. Now with this class I'm trying to go other places first. For the last assignment, I actually spent several hours in our main library's reference department trying not to use the computers at all. I roamed the reference stacks using my acquired knowledge of Dewey to figure out where resources would be. It was fun!
I'm finding that this class is affecting how I approach looking for the answer to a question, even at work. I used this different approach the last two times I worked an Ask Here PA shift. It helped me answer some of the questions more quickly. I find in general library life that I'm answering fewer reference questions as a manager than I did as a youth services person. My office is farther away from the desk...

Keeping up with information

Being in an information profession, I feel obliged to keep up with what is going on in information technology, books, librarianship, and many more topics... It can get to be overwhelming at times. After opening Google Reader only once over the weekend, I opened it tonight to find 621 unread items. Three of those were personal (facebook notifications) and 2 were comics that I read through Google Reader (I read the other comics when I opened Reader last night...) So the vast majority of the 621 items have something to do with technology, librarianship, books, young adults, or other aspects of my job.
One trick I've started to use is to subscribe to a blog for a week or two to see if the posts are useful. I've unsubscribed from a few because they were less useful than I wanted them to be. I think it will be easier to keep up with these things after I'm finished with school - that gives me a lot of information to absorb as well.
I recently saw an article by Sarah Houghton-Jan from Ariadne magazine on "Being Wired or Being Tired" - it had some great tips on handling information overload.