Connecting Librarian

I worked today, a Saturday. All I can say is people are amazing. But they just seem to amaze me more on the weekend shifts than they do during the week.

Here’s just a few examples from today.

I came out of our staff area, to find a grandmother, sitting on a trestle table and hauling up her granddaughter to sit beside her. Being a trestle table, I could just see it in collapsing with the combined weight and the lack of supporting legs on the corner.  Needless to say, I asked them to get down (nicely of course). Aren’t grandmothers the ones who normally tell you to get off the table?

The other one was a lady who came in saying her card had a virus and it was stopping her from going on a computer. Her library card that is. The staff member checked her card, which had a fine. She paid the fine and was booked on to a computer, muttering that when she did and the virus came up on her card, that she would be back to “show us”. She didn’t come back.

Then there was the young fella who needed scrap paper and thought the best place to get that was from the photocopier tray and gave a blank look when it was pointed out to him that it was stealing. (you pay for the paper too, not just the copy – to be fair, he came back and apologised) And the gentleman who wandered behind our desk, to check out when his son could get onto the games consoles, because he couldn’t wait a half second for a staff member to finish serving another library user. And the library user who swore we were using old brochures of library hours, that were different to the ones in other branches – turned out he got them mixed up with the Family History Group hours.

But it was all OK. They were all treated with respect and politeness. They weren’t difficult or nasty, just quirky, so we can live with that and it gives us a smile and something to shake our heads over when we have a spare moment.

I love public libraries – we serve everyone equally, regardless of demographics, or level of quirkiness.

What sort of quirky behaviour have you comes across in your library recently?

And no I checked, the full moon isn’t until Wednesday.

I am pleased to say that at our library, we most often discover to our delight, that we have exceeded our users expectations. We have more, offer more, help more etc, than they expect – give good quality content and good customer service.

But I also have to admit, that we also get people who expect the earth.  They expect us to have the fastest internet connections on the earth and to know that they need this title NOW and have it waiting for them right this moment. They expect us to wait while they finish this urgent email/photocopy/research, even though the library closed 10 minutes ago and they have known this needed to be done for weeks.

We all know this story, it happens in our libraries in different ways all the time, with only the names and the places changed.

My response to the former is to preen a little – I love being able to surprise people with better than they expected.  I enjoy giving good customer service that catches people by surprise. And my response to the latter is usually, “what do they expect from a free service?”

That’s not to say that we don’t give it our all – we do. Our collections are keyed to our community, our internet is the best we can get and afford and more.  We have to match the community need with the privacy and other issues, so there is always a balancing act.

So I admit, I tend to write off the naysayers, acknowledging that at times we aren’t even going to be able to meet people’s expectations, let alone exceed them. But on thinking about this post, I realised that I could be missing an opportunity. One to investigate the unsatisfied expectation and see if there is a way, in amongst all our constraints, that we could improve in that area, so that the next person is satisfied, or even better, walks away happily impressed.

Continuous improvement, with our users pointing the way. That’s not to say we are going to be able to satisfy every expectation (no, you can’t get compensation because something happened that you didn’t like, but you agreed to when you accepted the conditions of use). But we might be able to discover something useful out of their complaints/observations and make things better for everyone, including staff. If that’s what can come out of it, I think its worth a bit more consideration than “what do they expect from a free service.” So that’s what I’ll try to give it.

This morning I got a call from my mum, saying she had seen on the news that there had been a fire at my kids’ school. A bit of quick research on my part and we discovered that overnight, a fire had severely damaged the new gym. The gym has taken 18 months to build, was 6 months late and handover was going to be Monday. The gym was a joint use facility, with the school using it during the day and local Council using it for basketball comps and other events after hours.

We are all a bit distressed about it. From what I could see of the building this morning, at least half of the building has fire and/or water damage from floor to ceiling. The one thing that I quickly picked up, from both conversations around the school and then from talking with people at the shopping centre next door, was a sense of community ownership. This event hasn’t happened to an objective building, it has happened to a community. People who have no vested interest in the school, but who just live or work locally, are just as outraged as those of us who do. Its gratifying to experience that sort of camaraderie.

Which got me thinking about this in relation to the things I have blogged about in recent days, as part of Blog Every Day of June.

Do our communities have that same sense of ownership of our libraries?

Do our communities actually see the library as their own, or do they see it as being owned by the library service and the library staff that work there? I am sure that there are many users who do see it as their library, but how many?

I think of it in relation to all the library closures overseas in the US and the UK. Do our communities feel the ownership enough to fight for us, if we were threatened with the same closures? I know they have fought and won in the fight to build new libraries, would they fight to save the old ones.

I’d like to think they would. But we have to make sure that we continue to give them something worth fighting for. Do what we do well, connections, in whatever form that takes.

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.