Connecting Librarian

I have been reading a lot of blog posts and articles on what should be taught in library schools in the year 2006, but this has also been expanded to include skills that all librarians should have now and things we should be doing.

The skill sets vary greatly, although as expected there is a lot of emphasis on technical/internet type skills. I found it all very interesting, so here’s my thoughts and links to those posts.

CW at Ruminations talks about “Connecting“, making connections with other people and going outside your comfort zone. She talks about Michael Stephens list of tips for new librarians, but points out rightly, that some of them would apply to all librarians. They include:
Read far and wide, Work and play nice, Manage yourself in a professional way, Avoid technolust(I have to watch that one), Listen to seasoned staff and Remember the big picture. All great advice for anyone in the profession, new, old or otherwise. Check it out for CW’s views and links back to Michael Stephens original post.

Meredith Farkas from Information wants to be Free, blogged about her views on library education, after finishing a chapter on it for a book she is involved with. Her blog post
Skills for the 21st century librarian is her thoughts on what should be taught at library schools, but again I think they translate to all librarians – some of them not easily though. She recommends basic tech competencies: ability to embrace change, comfort online, troubleshooting technologies, easily learn technologies, keep up with new technologies. Her higher level competencies include: project management, evaluating library services, evaluating stakeholder needs, vision for online library service, comparison and critical evaluation of technologies, marketing.

I think the basic tech competencies is where I see the most resistance with some staff at my library service. Whether it is out of fear, weariness at the amount of change we have and are experiencing, or some other reason, I don’t know. All I know is that this is where we are headed and so all staff will need to have at least a measure of these skills to enable us to best serve our users.

On the other hand, I would love to have learnt about the higher level competencies at library school – all my achievements in those areas have been on the job – for better and worse!

Meredith then followed this up with
Further thoughts and comments, which arose from the initial post. Thoughts included: was a qualification necessary, the need for customer service training, pushing ourselves out to the community, as a service provider and as a profession. They are not necessarily library school subjects, but they are all something that librarians need to further themselves in, whether independently or through their workplace or professional assocations.

Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian picked up on Meredith’s post and offered some thoughts of her own in her post LibraryLand Skills. Librarians need to have cunning, impatience, pessimism, fiscal horse sense, cajones, feistiness, stubborness, high grubbyness tolerance (lots of scut work) and luck. They may sound like negatives, but when you read what Karen intends with each one, they make perfect sense.

I would add my own here now too:
Perseverence – it takes a long time for things to get through. Sometimes your timing is not the right time for the organisation. If you can stick with it, keep advocating your cause (in a positive, best for the organisation type manner) your time will come.

Optimism – I’m an optimistic sort and I never would have made it this far in my work if not for my optimism. There would have been times where discouragement and lack of progress would have gotten the best of me. However, I always believed that things would improve and they did.

Self-improvement – has to be a focus of yours. Regardless of what training your workplace sends you on, you need to be doing things outside of work to expand your knowledge, to keep ahead of the curve. A lot of what I have learned in recent years has been through reading blogs, doing book reviews, listening to podcasts etc – all done in my own time and at my own initiative. That doesn’t negate the responsibility of your workplace to train you – but they have limited resources to do so. Besides which, its fun!

Would love to hear any other words of wisdom you have out there.

I have a pile of things that I have been meaning to blog about for some time, but things have been so hectic of late, that it just hasn’t happened. Rather than leave them on the boil any longer, I thought I would blog a brief bit on each one and leave it to you the reader, to decide whether you want to look at it any further. They are in no particular order.

If you want to know about bloggers, then Pew/Internet is your source. They released the results of a study “Bloggers: a portrait of the new storytellers” in July of this year. The full report is quite long, but the summary of findings at only 5 pages, is enough to give the gist of the report. The study was based on “a telephone survey of a nationally-representative sample of bloggers”. I found it interesting to see where I as a blogger, fit into their results.

Jessamyn West, of Librarian.net fame, did a great write up for Web Junction – “Those darned users“, on public access computers (PACs) and the best way to manage them in the library environment. It is short and full of good practical advice of getting the best of out your public PCs, both from a staff management and a patron use view.

The difficulties of being a manager are very eloquently expressed by T.Scott in his blog article “Decision making“. He talks about his experiences as a manager, trying to balance staff and work priorities and how realistically it doesn’t always turn out best for both those groups. A great reality check and reassurance for all managers out there.

One that I came across today through Digg. “RFID acts a life saver for miners” talks about a mine operation in Sweden, which has all its miners tagged and with readers distributed throughout the mine so they know where each one is at any given time. A fascinating use of this technology. Makes you wonder what else it could be used for.

There has been a lot of discussion and concern about how the short cut language used in text messaging and instant messaging. A study has been conducted over 2 years, on 71 Canadian teens and their more than one million words of text messaging. The result – only a small part of the text language is being shortened and it is being done in such creative ways, which could strengthen language skills. Check out the report at the Toronto Star newspaper “Texting doesn’t hurt grammar: Study“.

Finally, an article from Jack Maness of the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, “Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and the its implications for libraries.” He tries to define what Library 2.0 means, as there is no real definition as yet. It will be interesting to see if his definition and theory get taking up as the standard.

I am very excited about the innovative things happening in my home state and in my home library (but more on the latter, later). In my home state of Victoria, the Local Government Minister Candy Broad recently launched an Australian first innovation entitled “Library Link”.

Library Link when fully functional, will allow users to search all Victorian public library catalogues and place an inter-library loan for any given item, all through the one portal interface. This gives any Victorian resident, access to over 10 million books and other items.

The Library Link project is a statewide extension of the Murray Link project, which has been operating in the north and west of the state for some time. At present the library services of Darebin, Boroondara, Casey and Cardinia are coming on board, with Port Phillip to follow soon and the rest of the state thereafter.

I have seen both sides of portal, having been able to search it as a user would, but also seeing how it operates from the point of our inter-library loans officer. For a first off project, it works pretty well and although my library service is not yet operational on it, with good media exposure we have already had quite a few enquiries about its availability.

Its very exciting as a new tool for librarians and as a new option for library users and it will be very interesting to see how it impacts on our inter-library loan statistics, both for books coming in for our users and for those going out to other libraries.

More…..