Connecting Librarian

One of my colleagues was excitedly telling me about a delivery she was waiting on, a limited edition re-creation of the first ever Melways Street Directory (Melbourne). Melways, which is a Melbourne institution was first published in 1976 and my colleague is a local history buff, so this is pure gold to her. (and I admit that I am also curious and can’t wait to get a look-see).

Which got me thinking about what other sorts of publications could generate that sort of excitement for a librarian.

I visited the USA in 2007 on a study tour and one of my stops was OCLC’s Head Office in Columbus, Ohio. There I saw an early edition (I think it was 2nd) of the Dewey Decimal System which had Dewey’s handwritten notes in the margin – making the foundation for the next edition. What was even more amazing was that is was only around 20cm H x 10cm wide and about 2cm thick! (Imperial 8 inches W by 4 inches H by 1 inch thick).

Which got me wondering if there are any other “Holy Grails of Librarianship” out there, and if so, what and where are they?  What would you be sure to go and see if you happened to be in the area?

I’m not a patient person generally. I want things done and I want it done now.  But I have learned the value in patience in life in general and in the library as well.

Much as I want all the new things, changes, adaptations, removals etc to happen at the time that they are all shiny and new, my enthusiasm is not always shared with those that these changes will affect. Whether it be managers, fellow staff or library users, sometimes it takes a bit of patience to make a success of something new or different.

This patience may be required so that the kinks can be worked out of the system, so that the plan can be laid out for all affected and so that people can get used to the idea and think through all the implications (which is often of help to me, as I don’t always see the potential issues).

This patience has stood us in good stead in the last 6 months or so. We took longer to relaunch our discovery layer, to get our new website launched and to start with our first e-book platform and we are reaping the benefits. The benefits have been the rolling out of a good, stable product and wide acceptance (and often applause) from our library users.

You may not always get what you want, when you want it. Be patient. Sometimes it just takes time, some education and your persistence. Its worth it in the end.

Today I spent a half-day completing my Level 2 First Aid Course – an update from having learned it a couple of years ago, after a very long separation in time before that.

Wow, how things have changed, both since I first completed the course in the 90′s and even to two years ago.  Not only were the changes interesting, but what humanity has learned about the human body and has therefore impacted on our ability to provide improved First Aid, is amazing. (if you ever see me, ask me what I learned about potential spinal cord injuries – very interesting).

It was also great to reinforce things I have already learned, especially when it has not been used, but you want to be able to access the information from somewhere in your memory when the need arises.

Which just reminded me that is becoming so much more difficult to function effectively in our world today, without being on a continual lifelong learning track.

I am fully committed to ongoing professional development in librarianship and regularly plan, attend, provide and seek out new learning for myself and staff at my library. But I had not really thought of a personal development plan.

Of course that means that my reading/training/seeking (at least in my own time) is going to broaden quite dramatically, but I am always keen to learn, regardless of what it is, so I am sure I will come up with a way to make it happen. Having inquisitive kids is very helpful for this, as is being a reference librarian, because if I don’t have the answers to the questions they ask, I will find one.

So my personal learning program may be distinctly more casual than my professional, but it will definitely be worth the investment.

Do you have a personal learning plan, totally separate to your professional one?  I would love to hear about it if you do.

Tonight we attended a little celebration for a friend of ours who has just had her first book published. She has been writing since her teens and has been married with kids for quite some years, so it has been far from an overnight success. She has been serious about her craft, has been part of writing groups and conferences, run  and judged writing competitions herself, employed editors and agents to refine her work and has won numerous competitions, but it has taken decades and many, many rejection letters to get to this point.

And it was a combination of both luck and skill that has brought her to this point. She is excellent with language and always got positive feedback in her rejections. Publishers appreciated her writing, but she wasn’t able to find anyone who could accept her genre of writing. Until a publisher asked if she had anything else and she discovered an older story of her’s was exactly what they were looking for. Now she has been published by a subsidiary of one of the big six publishers.

I have had a chapter published in a book and am just about to have my sixth journal article published, all on library related topics and by library science publishers, but it was never as difficult as this for me. Then again, I never had this big a publisher or this broad an audience to reach and I also had some hefty demonstrated professional expertise and years of blogging behind me to help.

Matthew Reilly tells how he had to self-publish his first book, as no publisher would take him on and now of course he is an international best-selling author (and a lovely guy too), with a big publisher publishing his awesome stories.

I don’t know what the situation is in more mainstream non-fiction publishing, but it seems that becoming an author in fiction at least,  is just as difficult as becoming an actor, except that most would be authors are not working as stereotyped waiters until they get their big break.

So when I see a new author come out in a genre I enjoy reading, I think I will be better able to appreciate exactly what they have gone through, be more likely to give them a try and be more likely to recommend them to a library user (even before I have tried them). After all, they have had to go through so many reviews, re-edits, rejections and more, that to being actually get published, especially by one of the big publishers, must mean that it is very good indeed.

It’s easy to think that the user experience of a visit to the library is pretty stock standard. Nothing exciting, no different to going to the supermarket or the petrol station, or one of the many other places we go or things we do on a regular basis.

But the user experience is different for each one and it could be that although most visits fit that description, it can take one visit to make a real difference. So we discovered recently when we asked the question of our Facebook followers. We asked what experience of using the library had changed their lives and got some interesting stories.

One was from a lady who had been given an old coin by an elderly relative when she was younger. She came to the library as an adult and out of curiosity, checked out her coin in our coin value guides. Turns out it was quite valuable. This has since spawned a lifelong hobby for the lady and she is thrilled to bits about it.

Another was from a lady whose family understood that a great-grandfather had gone to immigrate to the USA, but had changed his mind and returned to his home country. Again out of curiosity, they investigated the library’s genealogy resources and discovered that he had immigrated to the USA and stayed there! A long held family myth was laid to rest and was talked about much amongst the extended family for quite some time afterwards.

As I said, it is easy to treat the library visit as stock standard and many will be, but we need to open to the possibility that it could be so much more and that it could change someone’s life.   Who wouldn’t want to be a part of making that happen?

I lost my mobile phone last night, whilst out at a meeting.

I have torn apart my clothes, my car, had the meeting place tearing their place apart, asked the parking garage and called the phone repeatedly.

I’m an optimist at heart, so it took me until midday today to acknowledge the likelihood of permanent loss and organised a partial bar on the phone. Partial, because I want to keep trying to call it, in the hope of getting a response. But I also took the next step of reporting it missing at my local police station. I know its not likely to turn up at this point, but as I said, I’m an optimist.

And its just reinforced how important my mobile phone is to me.  I carry it everywhere. Its my emergency contact point – for family, so they can get me anywhere, anytime. I am so serious about that, that when ducking out tonight to grab dinner, I took hubby’s phone.

Its also my ‘inner reference librarian’ lifeline. And this is where my phone gets the majority of its use. I am such a reference librarian that when someone asks a question, even a retrospective one, I have to find the answer. My mobile phone was the ultimate tool to fulfil that need.

So now I have to bite the bullet, accept the loss (and everything is backed up and there is nothing too personal on there to worry about eg. no PINs, etc) and quickly try to get myself sorted into a new mobile phone. I don’t really know how long I can survive without it and I don’t really want to find out.

What’s your ‘can’t do without’ device?

Today I had cause to write a note repeatedly. It was less than 20 words, but I chose to write it out the 8 times required, rather than type it, because I thought it would be quicker and easier.

Not only was it not quicker, but my hands got very tired, very quickly.  That’s when I realised, that I type so much these days, including short notes, letters and of course blog posts (lol), that I don’t use my handwriting for much more than signatures.

Is handwriting dying then?  Hopefully not, but in reality, at least in my work and in my life, which is so computer-centric, yes it is?  Not in my children’s lives as yet. They still do a lot of their school work with handwriting, but I am sure that the further they progress through school, the more that will change.

Is that good or bad? In a way its both. I like having the skill, but I find it so much quicker, easier and neater to type than to write.

What about you – is your handwriting skill suffering like mine and how do you feel about it, or are you cultivating this skill through deliberate choices?

I read for pleasure and I read for work and sometimes it is both.

I have very established reading patterns as well, something that I hadn’t really thought about until the other day.

When I read for my profession, it tends to be articles, blog posts, and the like.  And I read them from paper. I print them out to read. And then I read them in specific locations.  I read them whilst waiting for my kids to finish after-school activities and I read them whilst taking care of other business, at home, in the privacy (with kids, ha ha) of my bathroom.

I read print books.  But those are overwhelmingly fiction and are read overwhelmingly in bed before I go to sleep. Sometimes on my bed at other times (though those times are rare) and very rarely sitting in any form of chair.  Even more rarely whilst I am waiting for my children to finish out of school activities etc.

I also read fan-fiction but that is predominantly on my desktop computer – nice big screen, read on the web, no downloading or file transfers required.

I have also started reading e-books.  But I am doing that at the moment on my e-reader at work during my lunch break only.

So why the dramatic differences in reading locations and content?  Don’t know really, except that:

• I can’t be bothered with uploading a whole bunch of articles to my e-reader – I tend to want to deal with them at the time I see them (eg. print), rather than saving them up for a bulk upload
• They are ideal to read when I am unsure of continuity of reading time – eg. kids activities or bathroom
• When I am going to sleep I like continuity and something that will relax me – hence the fiction – its also a comfortable position to read in
• I have too much fiction in print to be thinking about reading e in bed at present
• Lunchtime at work gives me time and space to stretch my e-reading muscles and get used to the device

Once I run out of print fiction to read, I’m sure I’ll give the e-reader a workout in bed and I definitely plan to load it up for travel, but in that case, will probably add longer professional reading as well.

So if I am as quirky as this and I am a librarian – how diverse are our library users’s reading habits?

Are your reading habits as diverse as mine?

We planned an afternoon out and thought it would be nice to eat lunch somewhere close to our intended destination. So I went online, looking for eatery options and discovered a range of reviews available for the one I chose to focus on. The reviews were mostly very positive, but a couple were not, focused on bad experiences due to time attended, or cost for non-meal food items. The eatery did not have a website of their own that I could find, so these reviews had been posted on the numerous eatery review sites around.

Which got me thinking. How many of these people actually told the eatery manager their problem with their experience?  From my own experience, I would say not many. The problem with not reporting bad experiences is that often it can be resolved at that time, if only someone said something then. Instead many people take their complaints to the Internet.  But how are the cafe management to know, and potentially fix and/or respond?

Social media monitoring is essential in keeping on top of potential issues for pretty much everyone who is out there ‘serving’ the public. We have a social media monitoring set-up, using Net Vibes and Google searches compiled using Yahoo Pipes.  Complicated I know, but it was created a few years ago and was created as such to try to pick up all the variants of our many branch libraries names.

It has worked well for us and we have picked up some interesting social media mentions – mostly positive, occasionally negative. Where it has been negative, we have made a concerted effort to investigate the issue and resolve it where possible, even if we haven’t been able to contact the ‘complainant’ directly with the outcome.

But now we need to look at improving our social media monitoring, because social media has grown so much. I will be looking at Hoot Suite and any other options I can discover.   Do you monitor social media for your library and what do you use to do the monitoring?

I went to the market the other day with the family and as we had a bit of time to spare before our next appointment, hubby suggested we do some ‘spelunking around the market’. This involved wandering around stalls and shop and looking for and at things we would not normally buy.

We ended up buying and trying a handful of new things.  The coming weeks will determine how successful those choices were, but the ‘spelunking” around the market idea itself was a winner. The whole journey of exploration and discovery was both insightful and enjoyable.

I enjoy ‘spelunking’ with work as well.  We see our libraries day after day and get used to the way things are, so it can be hard to see what could be.  So whenever I visit another library, or visit a library website, I take on that task of exploration and discovery to not only see what’s there, but to also see what we could use in our library.

Much of our website development over the years has been inspired by other library websites. And every time I visit another library, its an opportunity to explore how they use their space and for what purposes, the publications they produce, their arrangements and so much more.

There is much to be learned from just exploring another library. Even if you can’t take something directly back to implement at your library, often there is something there that will inspire you, or can be adapted to work for you.

And if you can’t explore another library, then explore it through others eyes; through blog posts, journal articles, through links on Twitter, through asking questions via email, conferences and the papers they generate and so much more.  Librarians are a sharing lot and I have found are always happy to share the good and the bad of their own experiences.

My next ‘spelunking’ opportunity is in a couple of weeks, with a visit to a new Melbourne public library.  Where’s yours?