Library 2.0 (circulation)

There are debates all over the blogosphere about library 2.0 and the Librarians Who Love 2.0 vs the Librarians Who Hate 2.0. Apparently, the debate is over who is really service/patron oriented or who is not. (I refuse to call library patrons “customers” or “users.” Too much experience with retail and computer geeks, I guess.)

Personally, I think that all libraries should be patron centered, and if a librarian or staff person is not more interested in providing service to patrons than anything else, s/he should get out of the business…that’s not my point for today however.

My problem as a library staff person is with the librarian who gets so caught up in the Next Shiny Thing(tm) that s/he neglects to tell staff what s/he is doing, why she is doing it, and what it has to do with improving library service.

Aggregators that bring different search engines together and provide access to various electronic resources are good. Lack of documentation is bad.

IM, chat and other forms of improved reference service are good. Spending huge amounts of time providing pretend reference service to a pretend virtual clientele is bad.

Blogging is both good and bad. I love blogs by librarians. It feeds my soul to here what other people in the profession have to say about Life, the Universe and Everything(tm). It is easy to spend way to much time reading blogs, which lead you to other blogs, which soon overwhelm any free time you may have (not to mention the fact that, at least at the university library staff level, we shouldn’t be playing on the “interwebs” at all, even though we need to share information between departments in our libraries and need to know how other libraries have solved problems that are universal in nature when one is dealing with either technical services or the public. I have found more staff postings on Live Journal than in regular blogs because it feels “safer.”

Google is good. Google calendar keeps me organized, google docs let me work on the student schedule over the weekend, google reader keeps me focused on the different topics I find useful, amusing or entertaining, sticky notes on my igoogle page remind me of things I need to do (and they are harder to lose), and gmail is a blessing direct from the goddess. I can keep, file and find everything I need. I cen even email myself when I need to tell myself to remember something.

I’m sure there is more to say on the subject of Library 2.0 and the benefits to staff in libraries, but I have to take care of the library now.

i want to ponder this

victorian scholarship and the miscellaneous

This article is yet another “library vs. internet” discussion, Weinburger quotes Leary who says:

It has been often and rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

It’s time for folks to realize that it shouldn’t be “library vs. internet” because research types compliment each other. Wikipedia can provide ideas and sources that can produce a whole raft of sources that are in print references that can produce phrases to put into Google that can reference…well, you get the idea.

More books

(I also posted this in Journey of a Kitten)

I just discovered a new thing called Daily Lit thanks to Librarian in Black . It will email you a chunk of book about the length of the average email daily, so you can read it. There are several hundred books available…it’s perfect for a blackberry or iphone or for a break between projects.

I just subscribed…I’m starting with Cory Doctor’s Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. I’ll keep y’all posted on how it turns out.

finding

from librarybytes:

http://www.librarybytes.com/2007/08/everything-is-misc-sloppy-copy-quote.html

Scheduling and budget

One of the joys of being a circulation supervisor is the opportunity to do scheduling based on a combination of the number of students working, the hours they are available, and the budget I have available for the fiscal year.

It’s like doing a puzzle in many ways. I have my students give me schedules as soon as they know them (and I hope against hope that they don’t have too many changes) with both the hours they can’t work and the hours they prefer to work indicated. I fill in the hours that each student is available and I mark each students preferred hours first and then see how many hours have double coverage and where the holes in the schedule appear. I also count the number of hours that they are available and compare it to the number of hours they want. Then I get rid of as much double coverage as possible so they won’t have too many or too few hours. Generally by the end of this process I end up….

[This post was started on Sunday and it is now Tuesday morning]

…end up only having to revise the schedule a few times before it is fine. I posted version 1.0 on Sunday and by Monday at 5 I was at version 2.1. It still needs a few tweeks, but it is pretty much set. All I have to do now is set up the sub sheets. Not bad, if I do say so myself. I used to have people sign up for hours and not create a set schedule until after Labor Day.

Budget is a bit more difficult. The State of Illinois (like the State of Confusion(tm)) raised minimum wage to $7.50 per hour as of July 1. Gov. RodBlog didn’t pass the state budget until last week. The university budget ain’t great and the library budget isn’t fantastic. We got money to cover the increase to the new minimum wage $1 per hour, but it was left to my discretion to increase the students who were making more than $6.50 at the time of the increase to a wage of more than $7.50 after the increase. I think most of my colleagues decided against this. It is easy to spend too much (or too little…which means you don’t get as much in the student budget as last year) but I haven’t had much trouble having enough desk coverage in the past and I figure my students are worth it.

The raise is based in small part on length of service (the less turnover there is the easier my job becomes) and in large part on the fact that my kids (that’s a poor term…I prefer minion, but that’s not PC)[ my undergraduate circulation staff] work their behinds off. Almost everyone is responsible for a special project as well as basic patron service and stacks maintenance. We dealt with over 10,000 items that were processed for remote storage in FY2007, plus the record cleanup for same. That’s quite a bit of work and it was almost totally entrusted to a handful of undergraduate employees.

If they hadn’t been qualified and capable, it would never have been done.

I love Shelfcheck

http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=40826

crossposted in Journey of a kitten

TGIF

It’s very quiet today. The lab in 509 was in use for graduate assistant orientation and I got to meet one of our two new GA’s. A nice young man named Tony. (English and history major and a Masters in History…means he’d be a great barrista.) I really shouldn’t say that because it sounds insulting, but that’s isn’t the way I mean it. I was an English major…it didn’t help me get a job since I gave up on teaching after 1 year, but I can hold my own in a conversation.

I am going to be in charge of the initial training of the GA’s in the ACES library and I both dread it and look forward to it. I’m not a very good teacher. I already know that. I have my list of things to cover, though, and I have Saturday to get ready. It’s important that they know the little things, like quirks in the collection and basic rules of conduct (both written and unwritten).

I took a couple of hours off yesterday and I am taking a couple off today for appointments of a health related nature and I am coming in at 6am tomorrow to let some Facilities people in to work on a damaged window sill. I like that I have flexibility like that. Some staff say that it is not our job to “cover” for librarians. I don’t feel that way. This is my profession and I take pride in my library. Nobody asked me to do it, I volunteered. The sill needs to be fixed, because we have donors coming next week to hang a picture or plaque or something in the room (all of our study rooms are named for donors.

to everything there is a season

The semester is right around the corner and that means breaking in new student help, both undergrad and grad. Orientation and training manuals. Checklists. Follow up. Stress.

Hopefully, there won’t be too much stress coming up, because I have quite a few returning students and on 50% new GA’s. The Main Library home page is new, but the ACES page isn’t. (Hopefully it can be revamped fairly quickly.)

The library as a whole is attempting to become more efficient while saving money…not the easiest thing in the world…especially considering that Illinois hasn’t passed the state budget yet. People in key positions are leaving or changing jobs which tends to add stress and one thing that the University Librarian and the

Want

http://www.cafepress.com/monsterl.109066973

There are a lot of creative people out there.

Decent Library Gateway Page

I have just been looking at the new gateway page for the UIUC library and it is really good. Compare it to the current gateway page which is ugly, awkward, uninformative and just plain icky.