I love shelfcheck

Who is a librarian

*sigh*

I have worked very carefully to nurture my student assistants. I want them to enjoy the job as well as performing to standards set both by the main library administration and by me. I make every effort to reward good performance. (I even keep the candy jar filled with chocolate.)

Most of the time I have no complaint.  However, I can’t say that about today.  It is not only the end of Spring Break, it is Easter Sunday.  The library is open from 1-10pm.  I sent out an email to the students on February 28 stating that the library would be open and they would be expected to find subs if they couldn’t work.  I repeated this several times.  I knew that one student wouldn’t be back (lucky thing got to go to Italy for break) and I figured that the student who got viral pneumonia and missed two weeks of class before Spring Break was questionable.

I wasn’t particularly happy, therefore, when I got a call from the Grad. Assistant saying that she was all alone. So, I came in at 1:30 and here I sit.  Haven’t heard from either the young man who was supposed to be here from 1-5, nor from the young woman who was supposed to be here from 5-10.

We have barely a handful of patrons…Tony (the GA who came in at 5) could handle the place by himself.  That isn’t right and, who knows, we could get hit with a wave of users later in the evening. (Don’t laugh, it could happen.) I could go to my bi-weekly D&D game and enjoy myself.  Instead, I’m working on things for the upcoming week…it will make my life easier.

I am going to speak sternly to the students who didn’t show up.  There’s not a whole lot else I can do.  I can’t ground them.  I can’t fire them (I could, but that would punish me more than anyone else).  I guess it’s time to pull out the cast iron bitch boss persona and raise a little hell.

*sigh*

Time flies when you are having fun

As part of the new service model for my university library we are working on closing some units and merging them to form larger and more effective service points for our patrons. In fact my library, which is one of the larger departmental libraries on campus, is going to be absorbing a smaller unit this summer. This will permit the smaller unit to have increased hours and services that aren’t currently available to their users.

I’m part of the committee that is implementing this merger:

my job is to come up with a plan and present it to the librarian in charge of the group. Then I get to parcel out the different parts of the plan (or give them to her to parcel out) and THEN I get to make sure that the various parts of the plan are being accomplished (even though my level of authority is such that the only people I can tell what to do are the undergraduate student assistants. I don’t tell librarians or other staff what to do…I just have to come up with a good enough plan so that everyone will see things my way.

Today I tried to make sense of the notes I took at our last meeting. I consulted with the facilities guy who will be moving the books (goddess bless him…he and his team have a thankless job.)

I took measurements and counted shelves and figured that we are going to have one hell of a shift no matter what we do…I want to send more material to remote storage, but that takes approval from above and since we are on Spring Break my librarian, who is a great guy, is home with his kids.

The two other staff members and I had an impromptu meeting…Even though we are staff and not faculty we all have MSLS degrees. G. is a cataloger which means that we don’t have to use the centralized cataloging group for most problems and E. understand her collection backwards and forwards and is ready to help us integrate her material as painlessly as possible.

The hard core get it finished deadline for this project goes something like this:

The administrative stuff has been going on for a year. Some final decisions were made in January-February 2008 and we were given a more concrete idea of what the faculty in the different departments wanted and how that compared with reality. I have started my plan. Finals end May 15. We have to shift one library, close the other library, process, box, move, unbox, shelfread and shake down the new entity by June 30. (The last time I was involved in one of these moves I wasn’t in charge and it took 11.5 years to finish the last of the problem boxes.)

I will try to keep track of my progress in this record.

no comment

Thanks to Michael Stevens for the pointer.  Originally posted by the Shifted Librarian.

Associates: the electronic library support staff journal

The new issue of Associates is available.

http://associates.ucr.edu/journal/

Hard copy reference

As my library is going to be doing some serious weeding of reference this spring in anticipation of bringing in the CPLA library I have been thinking alot about the reference collection.  It’s not really my decision, but I have been looking forward to pulling a lot of stuff that never gets used and putting it back in the stacks.  This article on print reference has given me some new ideas.

I still think we could get rid of some material, but I will look at the contents more carefully and check the bibliographies and resources before I do.

Semantic web

Tim Berners-Lee in a video explaining the coming semantic web. WOW!

UIUC Health Portal

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0304health.html

UIUC has a new health portal which provides information for health professionals and students, coordinated by Mary Beth Allen of the Applied Health Sciences library.

Congratulations!!!

It’s free

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/02/wired-cover-sto.html

Chris Anderson talks about his upcoming book, Free. While I have long been a proponent of TANSTAAFL, this whole idea intrigues me.  Free is good.

read an ebook week

http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2008/30-benefits-of-e-books/

I didn’t realize it was read an ebook week.  Ebooks are an excellent adventure.  One of these days I’m going to have an eee and be able to read ebooks more easily.  I’m not crazy about audio books, and I’m not crazy about carrying my laptop around (it’s heavy) but I read Zen to Done the other evening in eformat and it was okay. I like the opportunity to read articles electronically.  I find it more pleasant than reading photocopies.

One of my partners used to read books on her palm while waiting for whatever…(the palm is no longer functioning and she doesn’t have to wait for rides as much)  …she actually found it fairly useful and pleasant.