We Two Librarians

A Facebook quandary for libraries

2010-04-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

Our library's Facebook page was for a long time a quiet place, with occasional announcements and around 100 fans. We decided that this was a missed opportunity, and so we planned a Facebook publicity campaign for this month. Ten days into the campaign, we've already gone from around 125 fans to over 1,000! This is fantastic for us. We've never had such an easy way to listen to, and be listened to, by so many of our patrons.

We want our Facebook page to be all about participation. This means involvement from students, staff and faculty, but also from librarians and library staff. We see the page as a form of two-way communication with our patrons, not just another conveyor belt of copied-and-pasted institutional announcements. And in some ways, the page has moved in that direction already, as both staff and patrons have begun posting comments.

So what's the quandary?

The problem is with the way Facebook handles page administration. I created the page, so I'm automatically an administrator of it. I'm allowed to designate other administrators, and I've added several colleagues in that role. But now that we're administrators, we've actually lost the ability to participate on the page as individuals! If we want to post to the wall, or comment on someone else's post, our only option is to post as the library, not as ourselves.

Thus, anyone involved enough to be a page administrator can not post to the page under their own name, with their own picture next to their post. You can see how this would be a problem. What if I want to give an individual response with an actual human face on it? What if I want library patrons to get to know who I am by virtue of my participation? No dice.

On Facebook support discussion boards, there is a thread about this, stretching back to March, 2009. So far, over 500 people have posted there, virtually begging Facebook to take notice of this problem and to do something about it. The best resolution I've seen suggestged is to give page administrators the option of posting as the institution, or as themselves. So far, though, not a peep from Facebook in response to this flood of complaints and requests.

I'm sure that Facebook maintains pages with an eye toward major commercial ventures -- big companies like fast food chains and clothing retailers, potential sources of big revenue to Facebook through their ads. These companies aren't likely to want their employees to speak for them as individuals, so they probably don't object to the current arrangement. But our library is a different sort of creature, one that Facebook has thus far not acknowledged. I hope this will change, but the silence from Facebook on this issue doesn't bode well!

Gettin' Jingy With It

2009-11-13T20:20:00.001-08:00

So -- what can rouse me from lo these many months of blog silence? Jing -- that's what! I am having fun with it. I've known about Jing for quite a while now. Last summer, I installed it, played around with it, and then got distracted and turned my focus to other things. Recently, though, I have taken the plunge in earnest.

Jing is a free download. It's a program that allows you to select a portion of your screen -- say, the browser window -- and record it live, synchronized with whatever you're saying into your computer's microphone. Then with a click of a button, it uploads your little makeshift video to screencast.com and puts a link to your video on your clipboard so you can paste it somewhere -- like to that patron you're busy chatting with! Anyone who clicks that link will view your video.

Just tonight, someone popped in to the library's chat and wanted to know how to find the full text of a particular journal article. I did a quick check and discovered that, yes, we owned that article in full text! So, mad scientist-like, I scrambled to whip up a frothy video tutorial concoction. I launched Jing and recorded a mini-tutorial, stepping through searching for the full-text of that journal article. Voila, there it was! Fewer than 4 minutes later, I pasted the link to the video into our chat, and wound up with one happy customer who followed the steps, got the article, and in the process learned how to search for full text in the future, too.

This is awesome!

Things to remember when using Jing or other on-the-fly video generating apps:

It's not good for everything. Think of situations like mine where there is a series of well-defined steps that you're trying to get across. You wouldn't want to do this to record a bunch of attempts to try different keywords in different databases, for example.
Don't worry about polish. Just click through the steps. Don't rush, but don't go agonizingly slow, either: the video can always be paused, after all!
If you make a typo, don't start over, just backspace! At the reference desk, you can't turn back time because you made a typo... right? (If you actually can turn back time, drop me an e-mail, please. I want to know your secret.)
Go through the steps. Mention any salient points, but don't expound or theorize or embellish or be redundant or flowery. You know, like that last sentence. The video should be relatively short. And more than likely, there's someone waiting for you to finish it!
If you're doing this from your own personal computer, you might want to make sure you're not capturing a browser session with a bunch of tabs open to things that are NSFW. I'm just sayin'.
When you first install Jing, do a test run or two. Record something, play it back. How is the audio? Is your mic picking up your voice? Are keyboard and mouse clicks popping too loudly? Think about adjusting your setup to compensate before doing a "real" video.
Have fun! Don't stress. Just tell the person in chat that you're putting together instructions for them and you'll be right back. Record, save, send the link on over. Don't overthink it. It's just a tool, after all... helping you be that awesome reference librarian that you are.

What's that? You're reading this, and you're not a reference librarian? That's okay! How can you apply a tool like this to what you do for work or play?

2009-05-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

My message to Apple... e-mailed to them today.

------

I am writing as a longtime Apple customer, in both my personal and professional life. I greatly admire the iPhone, and the elegance, ease of use, and stability ensured by the careful screening process in the App Store.

However, I am disturbed by Apple's move from screening apps for quality, stability and technical compliance, into screening for content. Removing the shaken baby application was bound to be noncontroversial, but censorship of content is a slippery slope. The recent decision not to approve Eucalyptus, which displays public domain electronic books from the Gutenberg Project, is appalling to me and to many of my friends and colleagues.

Apparently, the decision to reject this app was made because such works as the Kama Sutra are available via the Gutenberg Project, and as such can be displayed using Eucalyptus. But rejecting this app because it can display such content is equivalent to removing Safari from the iPhone because it can be used to display sexually explicit material from the web. Both Safari and Eucalyptus are simply tools that display content that is freely available online: they do not *contain* said content. Even if Apple intends to reject apps that themselves contain, for example, pornography, here Apple steps into the realm of rejecting the medium rather than the message.

This foray into censorship, and this confusion between content and medium, is dangerous territory for Apple. To this longtime customer, it evidences Apple's move from being a technological innovator into being a corporate parental figure, attempting to impose a moral vision onto consumers -- an effort that, when tied to Internet content, is bound to be capricious, inconsistent, and unsuccessful.

I urge you to revisit the App Store approval policy.

2009-03-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Our library building has served us well. It's got a wonderful skylight that looks down upon a calming fountain; it has comfortable, solidly built furniture. But it's showing its age. Students can't find plugins for their laptops. That wonderful skylight leaks whenever it rains. We have almost no space in which to host guest speakers, library instruction sessions, and exhibits from our special collections. So, in a few months, we're moving into a new building. Really, though, this is less a move than a reinvention. We're taking advantage of this opportunity to examine everything we do and to consider how to do it better.

I've been particularly involved in planning for our new information commons. There are lots of definitions of that term floating around, but I guess you could say that an information commons is a combination of a library reference area, information desk, tech support center, and computer lab. It's a one-stop shop for services, resources and technology. So many details to think about! What services will we offer? What technology will be featured? Who will staff it, and what kind of training will they need?

My colleagues and I have been reminded that, if we don't get this new library right from the start, we'll have a hard time recovering our reputation. There's some truth to that, but at the same time we're also all aware that there will be glitches -- I mean, learning experiences -- and changes that we'll have to make over the first year or two. It's easy when in the midst of a huge project like this to get hung up on every single detail, but it's not very productive to let them overwhelm us.

I tend to forget that at times. I scribble down idea after idea, culminating in a massive to-do list, with the feeling that all these great things have to happen when we open our doors, or they won't happen at all. Then I'm overwhelmed, because of course, there's no time to see all these things through.

Note to self: step back and remember the big picture. We're a group of inspired librarians and library professionals, all working together to give our campus community something they'll use and even enjoy. We've got tons of great ideas, and even if they don't all happen -- even if some don't work out as planned -- many of them will be appreciated as improvements upon what we're doing now.

With that big picture in mind, it will be possible to take a deep breath and dive back into the planning process with a better attitude. I'll come back and read this when I get to work tomorrow, and maybe I'll be able to take my own advice!

Well, OK, there's one nagging worry that just won't go away. We're going to have a cafe just steps away from my office. This presents an immense problem, one which is never addressed in the library literature.

How, as a sophisticated information professional, does one just say no to baked goods?

2009-02-27T16:26:00.001-08:00

Blog-again, off-again. That's how it seems to go for We Two. (I don't think I'll capitalize that again -- it suggests delusions of grandeur, doesn't it?)

To make and then abuse an analogy: writer's block isn't a brick wall, but a series of small hurdles. I (the runner) know that I can leap over each of them... but for each and every hurdle, the first step is a doozy. Lately I've been hung up on those first steps. I recently squandered an opportunity to write some short fiction, and obviously I've not been keeping up the blog. Writer's block is painful enough when you want to be creative or share your thoughts freestyle. But what about that other kind of writer's block -- the kind that stops you from publishing research?

Perhaps it's better called researcher's block, because there's so much more involved than just sitting down and putting fingers to keyboard. There's that small matter of coming up with a topic and getting over the self-defeating mantra of "but it's been done before." Then, there's the formation of a reasonable research question. Am I asking an answerable question, or shooting for the moon? Will the answer be valuable to anyone, or is it just an exercise in naval-gazing? Next, there's methodology to consider and literature to consult. Oh, yes, and then doing the research and writing it up. This all adds up to "Ack!" (Insert Cathy-like beads of sweat here.)

Library literature tends to get a bad rap: librarians complain that there is a lot of low-quality research and pointless pontification, but a dearth of well-designed studies. Even putting aside the fact that many people mistake qualitative research a lack of rigor, the critics do have a point. So how do I get from an idea to something that actually turns into a valuable contribution to the profession?

Two years ago, I felt like I was well on my way. To complete my MLIS degree, I wrote a thesis applying conversation analysis (a research method used by sociologists and others) to library reference desk interaction. It was something new and different, and I saw some promise in turning the work into something publishable. But then I got swept up in the day-to-day of being a librarian, in the "must-dos" of my job, and the idea got pushed off to the side. I also realized that collecting data would probably meet a lot of resistance: recording reference interviews on videotape raises some obvious concerns. Since publishing is not a requirement of my particular position, I just let it slide.

And now, even though I feel ready to take a fresh look at research and writing, I'm stopping at every hurdle: Everything I do has been done. My ideas will be scoffed at. Oh, yeah -- and I just don't have time.

Some librarians publish copiously and regularly, and a good number of them have fascinating things to say. There are a lot of gems out there in the literature. Intellectually, I know that I am capable of creating one of those gems. I just need to go from knowing it to believing it. I won't claim to have a diamond in the rough, but I'd like at least to produce an interesting semi-precious stone.

And when I finally do get to writing up my work, I promise to lay off the analogies.

2008-12-27T12:24:00.000-08:00

Work/life balance. I love my job, I really do. But love it or not, I can't live and breathe it. Though we each have our thresholds, it's the rare well-adjusted person who doesn't need something else -- whatever that may be.

For me, it has to be something creative. My first major in college was theater, and I also took a stab at applying for MFA programs in creative writing (which led to a fiasco that I'll save for another time). If I don't have some form of acting or writing going on in my life, I end up moody and generally discombobulated.

I get in some writing when I can, and I've enrolled in a fiction writing workshop that starts in March. Maybe I'll make some progress on my library novel, tentatively titled Reference. (Don't laugh. Oh, who am I kidding? Laugh!)

The acting bug is biting, though, and I have yet to figure this one out. In a city teeming with (mostly out-of-work) actors, how do I casually pursue a role in a community production, the way I used to in Bloomington or Ann Arbor? And most of all, with a job that has me rotating through evening and weekend shifts, how do I make myself available for a demanding rehearsal schedule?

I don't have the answer, but then again, I haven't tried yet. I want to soon.

What's your secret to maintaining that work/life balance? What do you need in your life to stay on an even keel?

All work and no play makes Ken a dull boy. (Typing that into a blog instead of on a typewriter somehow causes it to lose its Shining-style creepiness!)

2008-12-22T14:43:00.001-08:00

My first library job interview...

Bloomington, Indiana has begun to settle into winter. A light rain overnight has, this frozen morning, turned the streets and sidewalks slick. Everything is crisp, and the air has the specific sharpness of an early winter frost. Bare branches are coated with glinting ice.

I've settled into my own cold spell, of sorts. My career as a graduate student seems to be collapsing around me. I've lost traction in the Sociology program somewhere along the way to my Master's degree, and I'm vacillating between blaming external circumstances and berating myself for lost opportunity. Either way, I'm done, and I need a job.

The other day, a listing had caught my eye as I'd scanned the Bloomington Herald-Times: a clerk position at a nearby public library. I'd decided to apply -- and today is interview day.

I get out of my car and perform a mental inventory. Resume? Check. Notepad? Check. Pen, and a backup pen just in case? Check. Falling on my rear end on the icy sidewalk?

Check.

I sit, momentarily stunned, as a few passersby struggle with whether or not they should look at me. So much for the charm of an early winter's day in Indiana. I gather my notepad and my wits, stuff my slightly sodden resume back in its folder. My hands are shaking a bit, but I manage to negotiate my body back into a standing position. Now comes the fun part: the obligatory check for leaves and twigs on my dress pants.

I pat myself down, out there on the sidewalk, hoping that no one is looking out the library window.

The interview goes all right, if you don't count the fact that one of the interviewers expresses surprise that I, a male, have applied for the job. See, it's all OK: their typing test has clocked me at 95 WPM. That earns me a wide-eyed response, and I know -- I've got this job in the bag.

Yeahhhh... that's right. Just call me Ken, library clerk extraordinaire and fastest typist in the midwest. I wonder if they'll promote me to librarian in a year or two? Or do you need some kind of degree for that?

I strut toward the library exit. My strut turns into a lurch as I open the door, the chill air hits my face, and I remember to mind the icy sidewalk. I daintily pick my way back to the car.

Oh, crap. Has that leaf been on my elbow this whole time?

Four days later: the library has sent me a polite "we're sorry" letter in the mail. I'm stunned. What was wrong with me? What could I have done wrong? Aside from being male, apparently, and bringing a touch of nature indoors.

Ah, well. Life goes on. I tuck the experience neatly away and end up working as a Senior Secretary at Indiana University. I like the job. What had I been thinking, wanting to work at a library, anyway? Silly notion.

Thirteen years later, I would begin my career as a librarian.

2008-12-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

My dad is a pretty quiet person. He's the wallflower to my mother's social butterfly. He leaves family gatherings early and doesn't socialize too much, but if you are a wallflower too you'll find he has a sarcastic sense of humor. He's rugged in that blue collar way. He has smoked since he was 14, he drinks too much beer, and he has worked out in the sun for most of his life. He spends a lot of time out in The Barn -- an old structure set opposite my parent's house on their one-acre property. He does his own variety of folk art out there, creating wind chimes from discarded silverware, dreamcatchers from copper wire and dried chili peppers, and walking sticks from old reclaimed wood. His two old dogs, one deaf, one who can't climb stairs, are his companions. The two eat the same grade beef as he barbecues for himself in the backyard. He's the kind of dad who I suspect told every one of his three children that they were his favorite.

When I was younger, I remember going to the library with my dad and seeing him collect a huge stack of Louis L'amour paperbacks. It seemed impossible that he could read that many books in the one or two weeks before we'd be back, but I believe he's read every book published by L'amour if not once, then twice or even three times. He once took me on a tour of the empty room in the attic of his grandfather's house where he spent a lot of time as a boy, reading books that were still there on the shelf, now covered with dust. Old Zane Grey books and Hardy Boys novels. My dad is also a speed-reader. He told me he regretted learning how to read so quickly. Maybe he'd run out of books when he decided to read through our old encyclopedia set A-Z. Yes! My father actually read an entire encyclopedia set, well out of date even before he started to read it.

Later I came to understand that my dad, like so many people, reads so voluminously because it is his escape. My father is a Vietnam veteran and he lives with memories too horrible for me to imagine. It's only sometimes, at twilight, around the dying embers in the backyard barbecue pit, that he might talk about the damages of a war from before I was born. These are the scars that necessitate a life away from urban settings and crowds. The busyness of his hands and mind forestalls thoughts about best friends who were lost and a survivor's guilt. I'm reminded of what Nancy Pearl has said about the importance of reading in her own life: "It's not too much of an exaggeration -- if it's one at all -- to say that reading saved my life."

As librarian who aims to please, finding good books for my dad has always been my greatest challenge. I'm always in search of that One Perfect Book. Recently I realized that though I can't always find something amazing, he reads whatever I give him. He usually doesn't comment on the content of the book, he just reads. Though I might be able to find better material for him if he gave me more feedback, I've come to understand that the greatest part of my gift isn't the content, but the possibility that in some tiny way a book can provide an escape and a better life in the imagination.

2008-12-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

I did not grow up wanting to be a librarian. As a little kid, I told my family that I wanted to be a part-time chemist and a part-time telephone operator. (Why a telephone operator? Check out my piece in Alert Nerd's second issue of Grok and you'll find out.) I was a voracious reader, having taught myself to read out of old phonics workbooks before we got around to it in school. I loved organizing things (except my messy bedroom), finding information, classifying knowledge just for fun -- yeah, I was wicked fun, I tell ya -- and I loved going to the library, but being a librarian? Never occurred to me, not then, not in high school or college -- not until I was well into my thirties.

But I do remember going to my local libraries: the Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys branches of the Los Angeles Public Library. I had a natural affinity for the card catalog: as with learning how to read, I don't remember the struggle, just the pleasure of "getting it." I can hear the sound of the wooden drawer opening, smell the glue-y scent of the cards as I flip, flip, flip them to get to my desired subject.

I had a few favorite books in the children's section, but pretty early on I started browsing the adult stacks, defying the helpful librarian or two who gently suggested that there was age-appropriate material just across the room.

What did I want to know about back then? I wanted to know how the post office worked. All that behind-the-scenes sorting and processing fascinated me. And sure enough, under Dewey Decimal number 383, there was a book all about it. Pictures of mail sorting equipment, shots of letters shooting through cancellation machines and scooting past the eyes of USPS employees who routed them according to zip code. (Once automation took away the need to eyeball each zip code, I wonder if those employees went on to become fish counters?)

Checking out a book in the 1970s: there was a hole-punched card in a pocket inside the book. The clerk removed the card, and placed my library card next to it on a platform underneath a boxy machine. Thunk. A record was made, a picture of my card next to the book's card. The book was mine until the due date.

By the time I hit the sixth grade, I was a big-time library user. I wrote a paper on the Olympic Games, complete with extensive bibliography. Sounds great, except that I think my paper consisted of sections of all those books copied near-verbatim and linked together with some nice transitional phrases. My sixth grade self may not have known much about plagiarism, but I knew I could find tons of information there on those shelves... just open that card catalog to Olympics, and let the games begin!

I kept using the library as I grew up. (In junior high, getting dropped off at the library was primarily a good excuse to talk to my friend on the pay phone outside while my parents thought I was doing homework.) In my first year of college, I liked to cozy up in the library's upholstered chairs, reading philosophy books I'd never have the patience to tackle now.

But in all those hours spent in libraries, it never occurred to me that I would end up working in one.

Now that I'm a librarian, I use the old catalog cards -- as scratch paper. Computers excel as search tools, but they sure don't provide that satisfying tactile experience. I sit behind the reference desk and watch students come in and out, check out books and return them, search databases, and just sit in one of our comfy chairs and read. I wonder what library memories they carry, and what memories they're making today. I hope they're good ones. I'll do what I can to make sure that they are.

2008-11-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

What is a technology librarian?

This question has loomed over me, and occasionally bitten me, since I took on my current job. My job title is Reference Technology Coordinator -- but what does that mean? I'm constantly reformulating my response to that question.

Before I was a librarian, I worked in I.T. for ten years, as a troubleshooter, trainer/instructor, and manager. I have a pretty good intuition for working with technology, and I enjoy it, but I wanted to stretch my brain back toward academia, and library school looked like the way to go. (Kelly went first, and inspired me to go next!) Coming out of library school, I saw a posting for my current position, and it looked like my dream job, blending my I.T. background with my new career as a librarian.

As Reference Technology Coordinator, I pictured myself maintaining the public computers, and occasionally troubleshooting a database or investigating new software for the library. All this would only be a small portion of my job, though, the majority of which would consist of normal "reference librarian stuff," including shifts at the reference desk, library instruction and collection development.

It sounded good in theory, except that in practice, a huge gray area between I.T. and librarianship opened up, nibbling at those well-defined boundaries of my job description. The root of the problem is this: when a huge proportion of a library's collection becomes electronic, and as technology becomes more and more central to what reference librarians deal with every day, what does that mean for someone whose job it is to oversee that technology?

It didn't take long to find out that some things just weren't going to work. I wasn't going to be the go-to expert on using all two hundred-and-something of the library's databases, and I wasn't going to do the stuff that the campus I.T. Department did. I found myself at the receiving end of some well-intentioned attempts to get me involved in all sorts of things just because they involved a computer or the web, and I pushed back. It was too much, too broad, and besides -- I needed time to do reference and instruction!

I was starting to feel my way through when the social web came up and knocked me upside my head. This was a great opportunity and I almost let it slip by. I had already been using Facebook, MySpace, and I'd been chatting online for twenty-odd years (I wrote an early thesis on online social interaction in 1991), but I hadn't brought those things into my job yet. It became apparent that it was going to happen with or without me, and I felt drawn toward exploring and implementing all that cool stuff. Not alone, of course -- but, as part of a team. We at the library have put ourselves out there to chat, friend, and otherwise 2.0ify our services. It's fun, and I think that aspects of it are really successful, but formal evaluation of these efforts will tell us more, down the road.

As I wrapped my brain around all that stuff, our plans to open a new library building began to ramp up. The new library includes an information commons, and all the planning that entails: new computers with more applications installed; multimedia capabilities on the public computers; revamped classroom technology. So exciting -- but so much to cover!

So, I find myself asking again -- what is a Reference Technology Coordinator? Am I troubleshooting those database issues? Am I the go-to guy when the printer stops printing? Am I focused on new technology planning, exploring and selectively piloting new ways to enhance the services that we provide? And if I do all that -- am I still able to take on a full plate of reference, instruction and collection development responsibilities?

I'm finding that "Reference Technology Coordinator" means different things to different people, and that I need to create a definition that works for my employer, and for me. Otherwise, as technology is already so pervasive, it could mean being all things to all people.

And that makes my brain hurt.

2008-11-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

Blog reborn?
Well, it looks that way.
When Kelly and I set out with We Two Librarians, we did so anonymously, so that we could talk about all sorts of scandalous things. The problem is that anonymity is really frustrating. If I can't tell my friends and colleagues about my blog, if I am just shouting anonymously into the ether, then I'm just stumbling along, hoping that someone wants to read an anonymous brain dump. Sure, there are some good anonymous blogs out there, but for me, it gets old, shouting from behind the curtain.
Kelly and I ran out of steam, trying to blog anonymously.
So, forget all that. We're posting as ourselves now.
So...
Hi there!
More to come.

2008-08-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe because I was stressed out and thinking too much about my October vacation, I started thinking about all the unusual things I never thought I would do in the line of duty back when I was in library school. Here is a list of ten strange things that will never appear on my resume but probably should!

1. Refill toilet paper rolls. I hate doing it at home; doing it in the public library restroom is also a bummer. As a corollary, I’ve inspected many a bathroom stall after a library visitor has deemed it unfit for use. I’ll spare you the deets.

2. Defuse a dry ice bomb faster than MacGyver. Yes, someone left a dry ice bomb in a soda bottle by the water fountain. I found it and defused it before it exploded.

3. Tell a former library employee he had to leave the staff room. He tried to bully me into allowing him to work on his resume back there. How could that be appropriate?

4. Employ ice to remove gum from carpeting. One of my least favorite tasks and one of the only reasons I was sad to see our old carpet go. New carpet *must* be protected!

5. Call for police helicopter backup when one library user threw a computer mouse at another user. Okay, I didn’t call for the helicopter backup, but that is what they sent. Guess they were in the neighborhood. How they expected to help from up there, I don’t know.

6. Perform dazzling feats of flyer design using free Microsoft clip art. We have a ton of programs at this branch. I’d rather design my own flyers on short notice and bypass the long waitlist for library PR. Thank goodness they let us do that!

7. Evacuate the entire library staff and public in a single bound. Bomb threats happen a lot around our branch due to our proximity to the court buildings. We joke that you’re not an employee here until you live through a “suspicious package investigation.”

8. Coordinate teen volunteers for whom this could be a fun first “job-related” experience or a court-ordered punishment. I love my volunteers. They make it easier for us to do a variety of enriching programs for kids and teens. It’s just hard to make it a quality experience for them when I have so little time to give each of them.

9. Innovate on a budget of zero. Programs with Office Depot supplies, a redesign of the library’s teen space using Craig’s List, or trolling the neighborhood’s restaurants for gift certificates and coupons. Sometimes it can be fun to see how to you can get something from nothing.

10. Clean out a biohazard of a fridge. This is not specific to the library world, but I have to say that my branch has THE filthiest fridge known to mankind. I’m convinced that there are things in there that are older than some of our staff members.

2008-08-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

You turn around, and they change things up on ya!

This happened at the reference desk the other day:

Patron: Where'd the lending library go?
Me: Excuse me?
Patron: You used to have a lending library, a cart with books to take and read on the honor system. Did you move it?
Me: I've been here for two years, and I don't think we've had anything like that in my time here. When did you last use it?
Patron: 1987.
Me: (...)
Patron: Guess all the books got read!

Isn't it nice that technology has improved since 1987? Now, books don't get used up after they get read!

2008-07-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

Exhausting.

That one word sums up how I felt when I finally collapsed in my bed after a grueling, but fulfilling American Library Association conference in Anaheim. I managed to walk away with a lot of new ideas, connections, a large handful of really exciting YA galleys, and three blisters! Yay!

Heading into the conference, I was actually dreading the experience. I strained a muscle in my back and last week I had difficulty walking. Every time I stepped on my right foot, I experienced a shot of sheer agony in the left side of the bottom of my back. Fun! Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I put off going to the doctor until the conference was bearing down on me, hoping that the back would get better on its own.

Finally on Friday, the day We2 was scheduled to get to Anaheim, I broke down and went to my emergency room after two phone calls to the Kaiser appointment line failed to get me in to see any doctor before 7:45pm. A few X-rays and a jar of pee later, they gave me a morphine shot laced with an anti-nausea med.

Sleepy, but ready to go, we got in the car in the late afternoon. I only had to make Him pull over on the freeway once so I could throw up. ALA HERE I COME!

Luckily though the medication somehow worked a miracle. The morphine finally got the muscles back there to settle down and I spent the rest of my Friday lightly snoozing in our cool hotel room.

I'm still absorbing the conference itself. I have a ton of ideas percolating and it's going to be hard for me to think about focusing on just one. I've noticed lately I have had a tendency to flit around to lots of projects, I end up doing lots of things half as well as I envision. I think that's less a statement about me than it is a statement about how life is when you work somewhere that could use at least a 50% increase in staff.

I am so glad to have had the opportunity to meet and hang out with so many librarians that are beyond dedicated to their work. It's so refreshing to be surrounded by people that refuse to settle for less and continue to advocate for the rights of teens in public and school libraries. It inspires me to go back and do better at my local branch and also makes me think more about how I can better contribute to my profession.

Hopefully I'll have more of this processed by the end of the week and I can start meeting with some higher ups to talk about new ideas...

2008-06-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

What Librarians Talk About at the Annual Conference

Something like 28,000 librarians are about to flock to Anaheim, California, for the annual American Library Association conference. There will be hundreds of meetings, discussion groups, lectures, and readings to choose from, in addition to aisle upon aisle of vendor booths that could take a whole day to peruse.

Here is a list of discussion group topics. I hope this will give you some insight into how the library profession views itself in 2008:

The Millennial Generation: How to Make Them Not Think We're Old Farts
What Libraries Can Learn from Retailers: Let's Hire Greeters Away from Wal*Mart
Information is All Online, So Let's Abandon the Reference Desk and Party in the Staff Room
Wak-A-Pedia: Academic Librarians, Take Out Your Hatred of Wikipedia with Foam Mallets and Sharp Words
Library 2.1: Trying Desperately to Stay Ahead of Web 2.0
Face It, Their Tax/Tuition Dollars Do Pay Your Salary: How to Do Whatever They Want, Even When it's Impossible
How to Get Annoyingly Loud People to Be Quiet Without Ruining Your Cool Librarian Rep
Because We Can: Let's Get our Library on Facebook and Decide What to Do With It Later
Second Life: Gaming, Avatars, and Whoops, You Missed Your Desk Shift Again
Swag: How to Sell Your Free Vendor Loot on eBay

There are just a few of the many topics to be discussed this year. It's going to be hard to choose!

Actually, maybe I'll avoid the whole mess and just crash all of the vendor breakfasts, library school alumni reunions, and awards banquets. Great networking, free hors d'oeuvres.

It's hard work, but somebody's got to do it.

2008-06-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

Things have been crazy in my version of library land, preventing me from posting.

You'd think I'd have something to show for it, but unfortunately paperwork doesn't really work that way. Truth is I've just been busy keeping our library branch together in the absence of our branch manager who managed to accrue a whole month of vacation. And, yes, I'm jealous.

But I thought I would tell you about this interesting gentleman I met yesterday. After requesting a few books from our library, he so politely informed me that he is, yes dear readers, a Time Traveler. He's a class 47 time traveler. If you're not familiar, as I was not, a class 47 jumper is apparently one that cannot control their time traveling. Instead, The Government controls his jumps through time. To understand more about his plight, he recommends that I watch Jumper, Donnie Darko and, maybe, I could also read The Philosophy of Time Travel?

I told him I would think about it, but let him know we didn't have that book in the library system.

He told me he knew other people wouldn't believe his story, but he was so grateful that I believed him. I mean, nobody would have believed him 50 years ago if he came in and told me about cell phones. (True, I might not have believed him.)

He KNEW I believed him. In fact, he and I would be responsible for saving the world in the future.

Hmmm. . . ok. That's about all I could say to him about that statement. Too bad I wasn't more probative, asking at the least "when will this happen?" Of course this didn't occur to me until later. But you can't really blame me. He was, after all, my first time traveler.

2008-06-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

Fear and Loathing of Wikipedia

Every so often, somebody brings it up on a library listserv.

Someone pops her virtual head in the door, and quite innocently asks: "What do we tell college students about Wikipedia?"

Poor, unsuspecting creature. Before she knows what's happened, a thundering stampede of librarians descends upon her, whipped into a frothy frenzy by professors waving their syllabi in the air. They shout, "Wikipedia is ruining academia!" "Don't trust Wikipedia!" "Thou shalt not cite Wikipedia!" (A sizable minority of professors are also carrying signs: "No online sources! No Internet research allowed!")

The problem is, these folks are missing the point, and while they moan, groan and ban the use of Wikipedia and "the web," a growing, quieter crowd of educators are doing something much more constructive and thoughtful: they are teaching their students about Wikipedia and about evaluating sources in general, whether these sources be in print, on the Web, or standing on a soapbox in Peoples' Park. These librarians and professors are making use of these sources, warts and all, to teach students how to evaluate information.

I'd be the last person to claim that everything found in Wikipedia can be trusted. Mistakes get made, intentional distortions are sometimes left unnoticed, biases creep in, and vandals throw in the names of their friends. I am awestruck at how well Wikipedia editors (aka, any and all of us) keep things pretty clean and accurate. The journal Nature concluded in 2005 that Wikipedia and Britannica have comparable rates of accuracy! (That conclusion is the source of much controversy.) Regardless -- academia isn't ready to accept sources that can't be traced to specific individuals or groups who have clear qualifications to be writing what they're writing. That means reliable sources are usually thought of as limited to peer-reviewed material that goes through the major publishers and content providers. How convenient for those who charge megabucks for access to this material!

But, guess what. Students will use Wikipedia anyway; they will use continue to visit web sites that come up in Google searches. When they graduate college, they won't have easy access to all that costly material anymore, anyway. We need to give these young adults the analytical tools to look at a statement, an article, a web page, and ask themselves certain things about it:

Who wrote it? Is it attributed to anyone at all?
Does this person or group have an agenda?
Is this person or group credible? Is it a professor, a researcher, or just some dude?
Is it out of date? How long ago was it last updated?

It amazes me that so many students get to college and have no idea that these questions are important. Maybe their high school teachers are part of the thundering herd yelling "Ban Wikipedia, down with Internet sources." More likely, these teachers are smart, skilled people who are being forced to teach to standardized tests, and who don't have the chance to cover such information seeking skills.

It's time to set some clear priorities in academia, and especially as academic librarians. The dividing line between subscription-based academic literature and electronic resources at large is disappearing fast. (It's all accessible through a web browser, isn't it?) That line in the sand is being washed away by the rising tide of online information. Let's teach students how to swim with that tide, not how to run from it.

2008-05-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

Librarians: savvy social networkers, or blog spies?

The term "Web 2.0" is probably on its way out. But whatever you call it, I'm into it. I'm fascinated with the question of how technology shapes human interaction, and how technology is shaped by human interaction. In fact, it's been on my mind since I wrote a paper about Internet chat rooms 18 years ago.

This helps me as a librarian, because I like exploring the use of social networking and other social technologies on the web. So I get excited about getting our reference service onto IM, putting links to our services on MySpace, Facebook, etc. I'm always a little dismayed when I find that some of my contemporaries haven't even bothered looking at this stuff. It's part of the near future of reference service. If you're a reference librarian and you're not at least putting your pinkie toe in the water, the wave will come up and smack you upside the head anyway!

So -- I'm all for the use of this technology when it comes to reaching students who might otherwise not connect much with the library. And it's fun just to plunge in with pilot projects and experiments. But at some point, there have to be rationales, results, assessments. To be honest, I hate that stuff. Analysis, especially quantitative stuff, makes me shudder. I'd rather jump in and play and give a top-of-my-head explanation of how well it works. I know, I know. Not good enough, but that's my tendency.

Still, even I won't jump into certain things, just because I can.

Take Second Life, for instance. It's very cool and it represents something that will be very, very big, and maybe even ubiquitous. But it's not there, yet, and I'm not going to spend my time setting up shop there. I'm glad that others are taking the time to do so, but for me it's enough to understand how it works for now, and to be ready for it when the technology matures and gains users.

And then there are the ideas that are just, you know, completely insane. For example, I just read an article in an academic journal, written by someone whose job is a whole lot like mine. If I followed his advice, I would seek out blogs written by students at my university. Then I would apply keyword filters to them, monitoring them for such words as "research paper," "library" and "assignment." If I see that the student is working on a research paper, I would then take the proactive step of contacting that student to offer assistance.

I'm sorry, did I say proactive? I meant creepy... and intrusive!

Maybe we need to wait for Web 3.0 for that.

2008-05-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

Answering fun questions is one of the better parts of my job. Apart from the satisfaction I get from actually helping someone, it keeps things from getting rote.

We have a younger patron who always manages to keep me pretty entertained. He's here at least 3-4 times a week with his mom. Usually he ends up parked on our kid's computers while she answers emails. After a while he gets bored and sometimes comes up to talk to us at the reference desk, asking for books on a variety of five-year-old boy topics.

This time it was mosquitoes. I found one or two in the bug section right away. I say my usual "anything else you want?" Ever the jokester, he figured it was time for "stump the librarian" or maybe it was supposed to be "embarrass the librarian."

"Yeah! Books about PoooOOooOOP!" Giggling ensues and I'll admit that it's not all him. So I continue with my usual reference interview thinking that it would greatly amuse him to know that I take his poop inquiry so seriously.

"What would you want a book about poop have in it?"

"Um. ALL kinds of poop! Like diarrhea!!" More fits of giggles.

"Okay. I can think of a few books that might work, but I have to look in the computer to be sure." I type in the titles I can think of and write a few call numbers down.

I pick a great book called Grossology by Sylvia Branzei and it opens straight to a cross-section of a human intestine with little brown lumps inside that look like potatoes. I point to the picture.

"Do you know what this is?"

"Uh… no… uh.. what is that?"

"POOP!"

Both of us giggle.

So yeah, I got paid for hooking up a five-year-old with some pictures of poop. How awesome is that?

2008-05-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Where do all the golf pencils go?

Every couple of days I have to put out a new batch of golf pencils. People use these, along with little 3x5 scraps of paper, to write down notes, website addresses, call numbers for books, whatever. Obviously I know where the paper goes -- into the trash or recycle bin. But what do people do with the golf pencils?

Sometimes we find golf pencils crammed into odd places, but even that can't account for the huge number of golf pencils that go missing.

Now I'm imagining that the pencils are being collected SOMEwhere by SOMEone to be used for some weird project. Can you imagine a log cabin built out of golf pencils stolen from the local library?

2008-05-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

MySpace is on my mind today -- MySpace as a library space, that is.

I know, I know. Facebook is taking over the world.

Still, we just unveiled our library MySpace page at the end of March. A colleague created the page. He put a library search box on the page, to save users a few clicks. (Many libraries do this now... catalog search boxes are usually easy to drop into any ol' web page.) Now I've been given admin access to the page and I'm thinking about what else we can do with it.

There's the question of blog entries and bulletins. I was wary of posting announcements that don't resonate with students. They have to want to read them, or they will stop paying attention. ("Brand new!! LexisNexis has a new interface, wowwie!" Yeah, great.) So I drafted a batch of bulletins and planned to release one every few weeks. They're about things that actually might be perceived as immediately useful and/or fun -- and library-related, of course. They point to things like streaming music (via library music databases and public web sites), Citationmachine.net, and RSS feeds and what they're good for. The bulletins are written in a breezy, casual style... but not trying *too* hard. (Trying too hard: "HeYyyy check citationmachine.net if u r writing a paper. l33t!")

Our strategy for getting students to friend us? Send friend requests. To all current students. This was a horrible process: there were a hell of a lot of current students on there, and we had to invite them one by one. Some people didn't enter their school info correctly, so it was hard to tell who actually was a current student. Some bizarre false matches came up due to what must be bugs in MySpace searching. And people who keep their profiles private -- well, there was no way to tell if they were actually current students.

I imagined we'd get maybe 25 friends, a couple of nasty "leave me alone" messages, and that would be it.

We're up to 650 friends. Some students have sent friend requests TO us. We're getting some comments and suggestions. It's real, two-way communication with an audience that is notoriously hard to reach!

Word got out in the library, and the buzz was good, and I thought: neato!

And then we had a staff retreat. We broke off into groups and brainstormed projects and initiatives. And a bullet point on every single one?

• Promote via MySpace

Ut-oh.

So now I'm wondering. How much is too much, when you have a built-in audience of 650 students who potentially will see your bulletins? How do I say "no" to various colleagues because they want to announce things that are good but -- well -- aren't cool? How do I stop this from being a victim of its own success, without becoming the library's MySpace bouncer? ("Hey, you can't come in here! Go announce yourself on the library website!")

And, oh yeah -- now they want me to get on Facebook, stat.

Gulp.

(Note to Ms. Librarian: it looks like you're keeping us in suspense about what happened with that nasty library patron. Come on, now, dish it -- we want to know what happened!)

2008-05-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

When you work in a public library, it can make you feel pretty smart. You get to help people with stuff you know how to do and they don't.

Then something comes and knocks you on your ass.

If you want to get that feeling right now, hop over to the TED Website. Annual TED conferences bring together top thinkers from a variety of fields, primary among them Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Every single talk I've taken the time to watch has blown my mind.

One of the most inconceivable talks is from Ray Kurzweil. Most librarians will recognize this name because he invented the technology that converts text to speech for the blind. Yes, this means he was the inventor of OCR. But that's not what makes him amazing.

What makes him amazing are his convincing arguments that lead to startling predictions about the future of technologies. Using graphs to show how historical, current, and future exponential technological change works, he states that by the end of the 2020s humans will transcend the limits of our biology. When we reach the limit of biology, new advances in medicine will be achieved with the use of machines. It will be like the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, only the submarine will be a nanoprobe with only artificial intelligence at the helm.

It all sounds so Philip K. Dick, right?

2008-05-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

In many ways being a librarian is like retail work. You do want to deliver the best possible customer service that you can. But being that we're educators and we're not profit-based, things are a little different here when there are problems with library users. The master's degree programs at most accredited schools are based on theoretical aspects of librarianship, yet encountering difficult library users is one of the most challenging tasks we are expected to perform on an ongoing basis.

In particular today's patron left me at a loss.

The first time I encountered him was a few months ago. He was here was in the afternoon when we're typically at capacity on all computers while we also have students in to work on homework. I was solo at the reference desk trying to help multiple people at the same time. No, not ideal, but unfortunately not atypical.

On this occassion, the gentleman needed to use the Internet but didn't know how. I gave him some detailed instructions, demonstrating how the address bar in IE works. I showed him how to delete the library's address and type in a new one. I told him to press the Enter key so that the computer would know that he was done typing his address. I showed him this demonstration no less than four times without losing my patience. Each time when I left it was on the site he had requested. Each time he seemed to indicate that he understood what I had done.

So you can understand my surprise when he complained to our clerk about me asking for the senior librarian. Though I won't go into details, he was also rather abusive, insulting me with derogatory terms unrelated to my professional skills. Needless to say, my boss couldn't satisfy this guy either. He then said he wouldn't be back. By now I was hoping he meant it.

But today he came back. Unfortunately I was the only librarian at the branch this morning -- so there was no escape. He acted like nothing had happened before.

How would you handle this situation? Post to let me know what you think and then later I'll update with what actually happened.

2008-05-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

Don't fall into the generation gap.

I'm in my late 30s. I remember a time before the Web. I'm not a kid, a tween, a teen or a young adult.

But I don't let that stop me.

I hear it all the time in my profession, especially in journals and at conferences. "Teens today don't have any sense of privacy." "The new generation has a different way of thinking." "Kids are digital natives; if you don't text with your thumbs, then you'll always be a digital immigrant and you'll never quite get it."

I just seethe when I hear this stuff.

I don't think that we, as library professionals, gain anything by viewing young adults as a giant generational mass, an exotic species with which we can't really communicate, one which we'll never truly understand. No. That outlook does them, and us, a disservice.

Take Johnny here. Johnny is a texting whiz. He can send 'em with his eyes closed, and he Twitters like there's no tomorrow. And then there' s Susie. She can whip Flickr into a froth and add lots of cool graphics to her MySpace page. Johnny and Susie seem to be making their entire lives visible to everyone. We grown-ups shake our heads in awe and concern. How can we ever reach them? We can't, because we believe that they won't listen to us. We don't think we speak their language. So we study them instead, agonizing over just how to make them hear what we have to say.

And then there's young Alec. His family lives in a rented room. They don't have a computer at home, but he uses the computers at the public library. He's never really done too much beyond randomly surfing around the web.

Now Johnny, Susie and Alec are seniors in high school, or maybe they're entering college. And they need to find some balanced sources of information on a controversial issue. Let's see Johnny find a web page about abortion, evaluate its reliability and tell us why it can or cannot be trusted. Let's see Susie explain the ins and outs of Wikipedia. That is information literacy. We know Alec doesn't have it, but hey -- and Johnny and Susie, the Digital Natives, probably don't have it either.

We librarians can help with that. And if we help them, in a personable, engaging way, then we have a pretty good chance of succeeding. It doesn't matter whether we're putting instructional videos on YouTube, creating library Facebook pages, or standing in front of a classroom with nothing but a chalkboard at our disposal. It's all good. If we stop agonizing about the generation gap, we can all focus on the task at hand: transferring our knowledge to those mysterious young folks, who in fact come from all sorts of backgrounds and have a wide variety of proficiencies. They'll learn something from us -- and we'll learn something from them!

2008-05-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

So that would make me "she."

I am a public librarian in a large metropolitan library system. I think most people believe that I get paid to do a lot of reading. HAH! I wish I had time to read. Instead I spend my day helping people get information they need so they can get a job, fix their car, learn Microsoft Excel, cook vegetarian food, learn about Aztecs, or even start their own business. I see people from all walks of life age 0-100.

But really, my true calling is working with teens age 12 to 18. Maybe it's because I remember the angst of junior high and high school well, but I just relate to them better than the adults and the kids. =)

2008-05-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

Welcome to a work in progress! We're still figuring things out, and this is a living, growing beastie that will take shape over time. But let's start with the basics:

We Two are librarians.

I'm the "he" part of the We. I am an academic librarian at a mid-sized private university. I answer reference questions, do collection development in a couple of academic disciplines, and teach information literacy to students. I used to be an Information Technology manager, so I'm also the Reference Department "tech guy," keeping things up and running, and exploring technology as a tool to better serve library patrons near and far.

Why are we here? To share our thoughts -- with each other and with you. We'll muse about our respective careers, their similarities and differences. We'll share stories. We'll rant and rave about frustrations, and rhapsodize over good tidings. All things library-related are fair game. And, if you look around a library, you'll notice that just about everything is library-related. That makes it easy for us, doesn't it?

See you again soon!