Connecting Librarian

Hi, Day 2, hope you have survived Day 1 of Blog Every Day of June. If you’re interested, you’ll be able to check out a daily summary of what’s been talked about on various participants blogs at Libraries Interact.

I was inspired for this post by a video compiled by Kathryn Greenhill of Librarians Matter. She interviewed librarians attending the ALIA Online conference in Sydney this past January, asking them What is a library and what does a librarian do.  Check it out….

It was as I was watching that a couple of the interviewees mentioned connections.  And that thought linked in to a lot that I have been considering. I have been reading everywhere about the future of libraries, with books about to disappear (lol) and everything being on the internet (lol and yawn – heard it before).

The future of public libraries has been of interest to my workplace too, as we work with our Councils to plan and build some more new libraries in the next few years. If libraries are going to be obsolete, then why do we need the buildings?

I think that our librarian interviewees have got it very right. Libraries and librarians have always been about connections. Libraries until recently at least, have mostly been about connecting the library user to the right book or the right information. (not ignoring the DVDs, CD’s, magazines, digital resources or many other things that libraries do). But if and when the book finally becomes less of a feature of libraries – due to online availability and wider accessibility, what will libraries and librarians be about then. We will still be about connections.

Whether its connecting users to facilities – whether its study space, online connections, equipment, meeting facilities, or connecting users to resources – whether its online or physical, in whatever form it may take, or even connecting users to other users – for learning, for sharing common interests, for a common goal or more. Librarians are connected to their libraries, to their users and to their communities, so are ideally placed to help others make whatever connections they need or want.

I don’t know what the library of the future is going to be like, but I do know that it will be about the connections that our communities need and want and that librarians will still be needed to make them happen.

Yesterday, Tuesday 1st March 2011, was International Hug a Librarian Day. It was well spread across the Internet, with many a mention on Twitter, many blog posts and even a Facebook event.

Responses to the whole concept of International Hug a Librarian Day ranged from “don’t touch me” to full on embracing (lol) of the idea.

Hug by jiunn kang too, uploaded to Flickr 2.1.2010, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The only people who knew about it at my library, were the ones I told.  We didn’t advertise it, because I didn’t want to see people getting injured trying to lean across our desks to hug a librarian, or have library staff running away trying to avoid a hug, lol.

The most common response I noted, both in person and online (at least from the Australians in general), was don’t touch me, but virtual hugs were welcome.

So the whole idea raises a couple of questions for me.

1. How did we get an International Day for this?

2. Why does someone think librarians in particular, need a special day for a hug?

1.  It is not an official United Nations event, not recognised on Wikipedia as a day belonging to any international agency and even Jane Curtis at the ABC who hugged three librarians, couldn’t find its source. But it truly was an international event, with librarians chiming in from all around the world on their thoughts and experiences.

There was even a Facebook event, International Hug a Librarian Day, created by Dinoslav Maganjicky.  So far, I have not been able to find out anymore than that. (the power of something going viral on the web!)

2. According to the Facebook event, the day was on  “Because librarians are cool and they help and love everyone!” Which we are and we do, but do we really need to get hugs, from mostly complete strangers?  I know a LOT of people who are very uncomfortable with that idea.

Librarians are people too and we need hugs like everyone else, but I would think that also like most people, we are choosy about who we accept them from. I am sure we have all had our share of experiences of having our personal space invaded by someone unwelcome!

Although I am unsure as to whether I like the idea or not, I can appreciate the desire to thank our wonderful librarians for all they do. We go above and beyond the call of duty, are not the best paid profession around, are very community minded and service-oriented, and are generally really nice and huggable people.

Although it was mostly only distributed by librarians to librarians, it was nice to see that some libraries advertised it to their users and that even places like the ABC picked it up.

I didn’t get a hug for being a librarian yesterday. I got something better that had nothing to do with the day. When I came home for my dinner, in the middle of my late shift, my family presented me with flowers, chocolate raspberries and a lovely hand drawn card.  It was a thankyou  for working so hard for them, with their dad’s new food restrictions, cooking two meals a night, doing so whilst unwell and still caring and working hard for them. (summarised from the card) Needless to say, I cried.

But enough about me, what about you? Did you do anything in your library to celebrate International Hug a Librarian Day? If so, what and if not, why not? Would love to hear of your experiences and whether you think its a good thing or not and how to cope with the overwhelming need for others to touch you, if it continues to grow and become more popular.

We had a great time in Papua New Guinea and its something that we saw there that gave inspiration to this post.

SIL Base Ukarumpa

We visited the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) mission base in Ukarumpa in the PNG Highlands. It is the largest mission base in the world and supports the translation and literacy work in Papua New Guinea (with 869 languages), the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It is home to around 1000 people, so as expected, it has its own primary and secondary schools.

With the schools comes the school libraries, as well as a separate research library for the work SIL does and a public library for personal and recreational needs. We visited the primary school and research libraries and one thing of obvious note was that they were running on different LMS’s.

Both my husband and I immediately thought about the wasted opportunity this was.

My public library is in an LMS consortia and our borrowers enjoy the benefits of having access to the collections of 15 public libraries, through one catalogue search.  At Ukarumpa, they have a small geographic area in a controlled environment – ideal for enabling cross borrowing between the libraries, but that facility is not available.

Who would such a thing be good for? Initially I thought mainly for the secondary school students, who may have research to do on the work of SIL or on more specialist topics relating to Papua New Guinea (the research library’s survey maps were wonderful).  But then I started realising that it could go much broader than that. The public library is not large, so a base resident looking for a book from their childhood to read to their children, might find it at the primary school library. Someone wanting to satisfy their curiosity as to the history of a particular time period may find it at the secondary school library. Someone studying literature might find related works at the public library.

How could this translate into our environment?  As I said, my public library already has access to both our consortial library catalogues and then broader to the greater Victorian public library network with Library Link Victoria. But what about other libraries and what they can access?

I know the National Library of Australia has a vision for all libraries to have their catalogue holdings live on Libraries Australia and I love that vision, but it could be overwhelming for the borrower wanting to find something in their local area.

So what am I suggesting? I keep thinking that my kids at school could find it useful to be searching their school catalogue and at the same time, if required, be able to see the holdings of their local public library too. I would like to see our public library catalogue able to search the local university for anything that our library doesn’t hold. I’d like to think that all the different sorts of libraries could overcome their differences and restrictions, in a way that is still fair to their primary users of course, to make their materials available to whoever wants it.

Pipe dream or not?  Love to hear what you think.

Its Day 29 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and after something that happened today, I was wondering about serendipitous discoveries that have been made in libraries.

We went to Mt Baw Baw in the Victorian Alps, taking the kids for their first visit to the snow. Left early, made sure we had all the gear, etc and got there at a not unreasonable time, only to discover that we had selected the correct chains for our car, but they did not fit.  So we had to turn around, go back down the mountain and collect a new set. All up, it added an extra hour to our travel.

Pretty upsetting really, with kids being so excited and having to deal with car sickness on all those windy roads. Turned out that having to do that and put up with all that was serendipitous indeed.

On our second trip back up to the mountain, we came around a tight corner and I watched in amazement as a pair of lyrebirds came floating down from some treetops on the right and landed on the road ahead of us. I drew the family’s attention to them as I slowed the car. They briefly walked down the road away from us, displaying their beautiful lyre tails and then raced across the road and disappeared up and left, back into the forest.

We couldn’t believe it and just wow’ed for almost the rest of the way back up the mountain. Even my daughter realised that we wouldn’t have seen them if it hadn’t been for the problem with the chains.  We all felt immediately better about the problem and it was pushed back further into the ‘not to worry’ category after having a great time at the snow.

That was our little moment, what of  other discoveries? I know that there have been a number of chemical discoveries which came about by accident, including gelignite, silly putty, teflon, scotchguard and artificial sweeteners. In the medical realm, important serendipitous discoveries have included penicillin, nitrous oxide, viagra, anti-pscyhotic drugs and some cancer treatments. (great write up in Wikipedia)

Serendipity in the library, happens pretty much every day. You are looking for some information for a patron and find some for another one, a borrower browses looking for a particular author/title/genre and finds something they weren’t looking for, but are delighted to find.

But have there been serendipitous discoveries that have changed projects or libraries, or even affected the profession in some way? I am sure there are, but I can’t think of any.  Hopefully you’ll be able to think of some – if so, please let me know through comments.

Its Day 28 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and I’m inspired today by another quote.

I have just started a Quote of the Week in our staffroom at work – picking up on the groundbreaking Word of the Week started by my predecessor.  I was inspired by a quote forwarded to me by my husband, who has a blog – Quote for the Day.

Anyway, the quote is as follows:

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”  Jo Godwin.

The staff have delighted in this quote, its one they can relate to quite easily as we have enough complaints about someone being offended about something in the library.

The more common complaints are about (at least in recent years):

• Having games consoles to play on (used to be the Internet computers)
• Having graphic novels that are too graphic (same was said for romances a decade ago)
• Having pictures of human bodies in anatomy type books that kids can access (that one has been consistent since forever)
• Too noisy
  
• Not given enough time on the computers – just to finish ……
• Not trusted to do x without x (eg. borrow without their card, or borrow if they promise that they will return their long overdue item the next day, etc, etc)

What sort of things does your library do/offer or not, that causes offense to some?

Its Day 27 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and today’s post is inspired by a TED talk by Chip Conley – Measuring what makes life worthwhile (which is worthwhile checking out) and in particular the following quote he used in his talk:

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. ” Albert Einstein.

The world is so fixed on statistics, in libraries as well as in life.  We seem to be caught up in the cycle of needing numbers to justify everything, yet not being happy to be relying on only the numbers that those tangibles give us to justify what we do.

3D Bar Graph Meeting, uploaded to Flickr on December 25, 2007 by lumaxart

We report our numbers to our governing bodies, who use those numbers to report back to their stakeholders and to justify the money they spend on their libraries. Are they any happier with only having tangible numbers to work from?

I’m not saying that numbers are bad – they are valuable and do give a view of how our libraries are being used. As we have been using those numbers for so long, they are also giving us a picture of how libraries and their use are changing. But those numbers have never been able to give the whole picture.

How do we count the value of the interactions we have, such as those I described in my blog post, The importance of librarians.

I know I am far from the first person to ask these questions and I won’t be the last. But until we find a way to measure these things and to break away from the cycle we are locked into regarding the tangibles we count and report, nothing is going to change.

Libraries are valuable above and beyond that we can currently count. So I’ll throw these questions out to the universe – How do we count the intangibles in libraries? How do we report these to our governing bodies? How do we get everyone to accept these counts as legitimate expressions of what libraries do and how they contribute to our society?

I hope that the work that Chip Conley and others are doing with the GNH will be able to answer those questions and we will see some different counts coming out of our libraries and being accepted by our governing bodies,  in the not too distant future.

Its Day 9 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and a comment from Penny on my last blog post got me thinking. Unfortunately its only a quick ponder, but  I would appreciate hearing your ideas.

So what’s the question?

If we weren’t such sticklers for privacy in our libraries, what could we do?  Penny’s comment was about having swipe cards to gain access to our public toilets, to help stop the issue of vandalism.  My immediate thoughts were both yes, protecting our facilities and users and no, protecting individual privacy.

But apart from the negatives we could protect from, what could we do if weren’t concerned with privacy?

We could have recommendation options such as those done by Amazon and take it further and link our users to other users who have similar interests or enjoyed the same titles. Taking it further, we could send recommendations or place holds on titles for our users, before they even realise that they would be interested in a particular title.

We could compile profiles on our users, based on their borrowing and useage patterns and then strongly focus our marketing to users who match the profile of any event or program we are running.  We could then use any and all of the contact details they provide us with, to get that marketing straight to them – personalised!  Or even just send them a confirmation with an opt out function.

There are plenty of more ideas out there I am sure and I would love to hear them, but having started to blog about this, I am confronted by conflicting emotions. First is excitement about the amazing level of service that we could offer to our users. Second is apprehension at anyone have control over that amount of information, even if it is initially only to be used for good! Once its collected, there are no guarantees that the line won’t move and things won’t change.

So what will happen to privacy?  Are we heading to a truly open society where privacy will be an out-of-date term that doesn’t really mean anything anymore?  But I think we’ll be losing out in some way, regardless of which way it goes.

Its Day 5 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge, its Saturday and I worked today, so I thought I’d share a bit about working a weekend shift in a public library.

It seems to be a habit of ours to start work on a Saturday, trying to predict what sort of day its going to be. Is it going to busy or quiet? This is not just dependent on numbers, you can have low numbers on a day, but still be very busy because of the type of interactions you have with users.  They could be lengthy inquiries, long interactions, complaints or problems or everything could run as smooth as silk.

I’ve worked one Saturday where it felt like twice the number of people had beent through, because just about everyone needed that extra time. And I’ve worked other Saturdays where it felt quiet, but was extra busy, because everything went so smoothly with very little demand.

So each Saturday morning we try to predict what sort of day it will be. We try to take into account factors such as weather, other events on either locally, city-wide or national, whether’s its holidays or a long weekend and more.

Today, we wondered if it would be quiet as the weather was very chilly and dreary. It did start quiet and stretched beyond what we usually thought of as a slow Saturday morning start. Then briefly the sun came out and all of sudden, everyone was streaming through our doors.

So it was weather, we thought. No. A few hours later, it starting bucketing down with rain and it didn’t get any quieter, people just kept coming in (and not for the shelter). We ended up with numbers reflecting a busy Saturday which meant that with the slower start in the morning, we ended with more people over the course of the afternoon.

So do I want a job predicting use patterns for our library? Considering the dedication of our library users in the face of such weather and our record for predicting such use patterns, I think not. I’ll stick with managing the branch and providing the best user service we can, regardless of how busy it is.

We all know that our users don’t really care all that much about copyright. If they did, they wouldn’t be ripping CDs and DVDs or illegally downloading a wide variety of content in a wide variety of formats from the Internet.

We know it happens, but apart from the producers of such content and formats, libraries are amongst the last bastions of copyright protection.

photomastergreg, Uploaded on August 17, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

So I don’t know why I was suprised at the response of one of our users to – what to them anyway, seemed like a straightforward request.

She had been told of a small publication which covered a local history topic in which she was interested. She had contacted the small history group holding the publication and somewhere communication got crossed and she ended up on our doorpost, wanting to get a copy through our library.

Several problems with that request: it was an interstate publication, there was only one library who had holdings and it was not available for inter-library loan, being more pamphlet sized than book.

So user, understandably in a way, wanted it now and expected that it would be delivered soonest.  That’s where the problem started.  She wanted it now, so was expecting that we could just get an email copy and hand it over to her in minutes. Up popped copyright considerations. We couldn’t do that – it was in breach of copyright. But we couldn’t find a way to explain copyright and the implicaitons to her in a way that she either cared about or understood.

In the end, we helped her get her own email address and she contacted the library herself, to see what they could do for her directly.

So how do you explain to someone that doesn’t understand, that the thing they want is not on the internet and can’t be just scanned and sent without legal obligations being filled. Especially when for many things, they can just go on the internet and download it?

How can we explain them in ways that they can understand, that copyright is important and that everyone’s intellectual property needs to be protected in the way the creator wants?

Creative Commons - Some Right Reserved - Algunos Derechos Reservados

Or instead of trying to explain copyright, do we instead get everything licenced under a Creative Commons attribution and save everyone a lot of time and grief.  I have used Creative Commons images here and am doing so in my presentations. If you don’t know what it is, I strongly suggest you check it out!

Would love to hear your stories, your solutions and your thoughts about copyright and your users, I can’t be the only one having these experiences.

Today, 25th January, was Round 4 of the Library Day in the Life Project. The aim of the project is for librarian’s to document what they do in a day, for others to discover.  So here’s mine.

To give context, I am an Information Librarian working for the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation – a public library service serving 300,000+ people in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.  We have 7 branch libraries and a mobile library.  My main area of responsibility is our online services, but I also work at our biggest branch.  I work half-time – Mondays, Thursdays and alternate Tuesdays.  Monday I work at HQ on online services – all day.

So here’s today.

8.30am – Arrived at work at our Regional HQ, which I do every Monday. Spent the next 30 minutes checking email, printing off articles for later reading, catching up on memos, bookmarking sites of interest, returning and renewing my loans and a brief moment catching up with the Finance Manager on the progress of our intranet development.

9.00am – Checked for updates to Drupal modules for our website and downloaded, then uploaded the only one required.  Also took the opportunity to delete old versions of modules that were no longer required, both locally and on our IPS’s server.

Discussed adding information about our mobile library’s forthcoming renovation to the website.

Posted a review received from one of our local teens via our website, to our teen review blog.  Added an image and a catalogue linking before publishing it and then refreshed the feed on our website so it would appear there too.

Updated a post on our Staff training blog, with information emailed me by the reviewing staff member. Made some minor additional changes to that post of my own as well.

9.30am – Posted information on our website in several places, about the Mobile Library renovations.

Being the day before a public holiday, we were very quiet at HQ as many staff took the opportunity to enjoy a long weekend. So I spent some time filling in urgent requests for stationery etc that were phoned in from the branches.

Worked on the agenda for our forthcoming Information Services team meeting that is on the week I return from leave.

10.00am – Lots more bits and pieces (did I mention that there were lots of people taking a long weekend).

Chatted briefly with my boss, who was seconded to help out at one  of our branches, which resulted in me taking on the answering of email questions for the day. Quickly cleared up a few procedural queries, started the process on a claims returned and sought further information on an inter-library loan request from a staff member at one of our local Councils.  Was quite pleased that I found the article he requested, even with minimal information and so was he when I emailed him both the full citation and a link to the full article not long afterwards.

11.00am – Morning tea done after successfully completing that information request, it was now onto a new blog post for our library news blog. Spent some time looking for inspiration and accidently came across links on our catalogue that I hadn’t noticed before. Ended up blogging about the public holiday tomorrow instead, as one of our libraries will be open to support the Book Sale that their Friends’ group is running.

11.30am – Did a backup of our email newsletter subscribers lists. Not very exciting, but very necessary. Then investigated further the new catalogue features and with the assistance of a colleague, figured out exactly how they worked and started thinking about how they could be taken advantage of by our users.  That’s another blog post in the making – but not today.

12.00noon – Received an information request from the mobile library on behalf of one of their users (via email). Rang the mobile to clarify the request and the context and within the half hour I had a emailed a list of websites and book titles to be passed onto to the user.

12.30pm – Lunchtime and I escaped the building for a short time. Normally I would go out to lunch with my HQ partners in crime, but they were either on leave or elsewhere.

1.30pm – Played with ideas and images for a new slide for our website’s events slideshow. Gave up on it afer a time – software kept crashing and I couldn’t find the inspiration to make the slide more than bland.  Will get back to it on Thursday.

2.00pm – Had a quick revisit of Event Brite. We are trialling it for online booking of library events, for a seminar we are holding in February. Chatted again with my boss to catch up on the day’s happenings and the week ahead.

Spent most of the rest of the time trying to work out how to get an imported Javascript working in Drupal. Lots of cutting, pasting, saving, trialling and repeating the process all over again. Got it working, but with lots of extraneous information, which when I remove it, kills the operation of the form. Its working for now, so will look at it again on Thursday.

4.00pm – Checked my Google alerts and Twitter searches for mentions of our libraries and service in those areas. Twitter mentions are growing slowly and we always get plenty of mentions on Google.

Began reviewing our brochures on online resources. Started considering how I could get the content of two to three brochures down into one.

Created three new book cover images and associated information to use in our books slide show on our library homepage.  Uploaded these and then deleted the three oldest ones – we have a 4 weekly cycle on these.

Filled it out with other bits and pieces (did I mention there were many people away) and then called it a day just after 5pm.

So that was my day – never realised how busy it was and how much territory I covered until I documented it.  Hope you find it interesting.

See you next Library Day in the Life Day!