- 7:30a: Staff meeting. I warn them about an upgrade to XP that I’m working on (The city is currently running Win2000, believe it or not).
- 8:30a: Add instructions to the staff support wiki about how to find Remote Desktop if someone has erased the shortcuts.
- 8:45a: Discussed complaint with two staff members. (Our circ staff are awesome.)
- 9a: Emailed staff regarding patron troubles logging into Userful.
- 9:05a: Setup laptops for staff webinar on downloadable.
- 10:30a: Work with Mark to do a quick n’ dirty digitization of some historic slides to illustrate a blog post.
- 12:30p: Covered the Information Desk.
- 1:30p: Lunch.
- 2:30p: Processed photos taken from slides, uploaded them to flickr, and scheduled the blog post.
- 3:30p: Work on the Art Room Information desk.
- 5:30p: Home!
I was out yesterday and did nothing librarian-ish at all, so we’ll just skip ahead.
- 8:15a: Arrive.
- 10a: Meet with Director to review stimulus so far.
- 10:30a: Enjoy a latte while updating Twitter and reviewing @manchlibrarys
- 11a: Back to the stimulus package. Director was unimpressed with bad news. Interruptions:
- Patron can’t login to public computers
- Guide Page to finding a replacement workstation for one that has lost its ports.
- Diffused an irate patron situation.
- Troubleshoot staff photocopier and phone the company for support.
- 1:25p: Finished stimulus draft (yay!) and sent to director for additions. Prep for lunch.
- 1:30p: Go home for eggplant curry.
- 2:30p: Meet re: this morning’s patron.
- 3p: Review and approve the new draft of the stimulus package.
- 3:30p: Work on technology inventory.
- 4:45p: Set up some workstations for staff training tomorrow.
- 5:30p: Home again.
I’m on the night shift tonight, but I ran across two interesting links in my morning ramblings. Looking for a cocktail to serve at your lawn party this weekend? Try the Darien Librarian. Yumm, whiskey. Chris pointed out Bibliotherapy to me – ‘just what I’ve been looking for’ – but don’t librarians do this for free? It does look deeper than simple reader’s advisory… maybe we should do it?
- 12:30p: Arrive.
- Review emails and voice mails. Review final draft of the City’s web site content policy and requests for Library exemptions.
- Check on a public computer that didn’t come back up after yesterday’s stormy power flicker. Report dead computer to city IT.
- Report another software problem to Userful.
- 1:20p: Tackle the stimulus application. [I had been hoping to do something more exciting for my readers, but boss lady wants to review my progress on Thursday. Better have something to show!] Deal with interruptions:
- Contacted Leslie Poston [@geechee_girl] to invite her to come talk about Twittering for Dummies.
- Fax invoice for new monitors to City IT.
- Make copies of the class materials for tonight’s Intro to the Internet.
- Make plans to celebrate Brian’s birthday tomorrow.
- 4:15p: Break before dinner to write piece for the newsletter about Twitter program.
- 4:30p: Home for dinner – cuke salad and curried eggplant.
- 5:30p: Greet our volunteer and help her set up the laptops for tonight’s class.
- 5:40p: Have to leave the volunteer to help a patron connect to our wireless network.
- 6:30p: Flip that the wireless thing took a whole hour. Send a trouble file to vendor for bug investigations.
- 6:40p: Go back down to the computer class to replace the cable on the projector. Then return to trouble shooting the file for a vendor.
- 7:15p: Send file and hang my neato computer hardware chart poster.
- 7:20p: Return to the stimulus… for five minutes. Then comfort a staff member whose cat died today.
- 7:45p: Another attempt at the stimulus.
- 8:30p: Collect money from registers and close the building.
I am a little slow on the uptake here, not sure how it got away from me. But I’m always up for some navel-gazing and I have a fairly decent memory so I’ll participate in the Library Day in the Life Project 2009. If I understand correctly I’m supposed to live blog every day this week.
- 8:15a: Say a brief hello to my VISTA who is spending the year organizing a staff training program.
- 8:25a: Leave almost immediately to go to a City IT department meeting.
- 9am: Meet briefly with the Director regarding our stimulus application.
- 9:30a: Escorted technician to a sick computer.
- 9:15a: Crack open the tome that is the stimulus application. Spend the next three hours filling out the first three pages.
- 12:30p: Rush home for lunch and spend 20 minutes reading Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare (good stuff).
- 1:30p: Back to work and begin the executive summary for the stimulus application.
- 3p: Can’t write more. Start reviewing the technology inventory my Page has been doing and begin making a list of tasks for him for Wednesday.
- 3:30p: Start worrying about my presentation to the Board of Trustees. Months ago they asked how many publicly accessible workstations we ‘should’ have, the information didn’t exist so I did an informal benchmarking study.
- 4p: Join the Trustee meeting and present the results. Conclusion: we are at the low end of the range of the appropriate number of computers.
- 5:15p: Leave the meeting just in time for the power to flicker in the middle of a fantastic thunderstorm. Canvas the building to be sure the computers come back up.
- 5:30p: Head home.
It’s awesome that most of us enjoy state libraries that provide centralized job listings, but the reality is that most of us would like that kind of information in RSS. Am I right?
I’ve been taking an informal survey of North American library job listings and happy to find out that most are, especially in the fine New England states. I was especially impressed with the Calgary Public Library who is always accepting applications for
Librarians (Full-time, Part-time and On-call) If you’ve got lots of energy and ideas, leadership skills, and a MLIS, we want to talk to you. Our preference is for candidates with good general experience. Knowledge of current and emerging technologies and their best use in public libraries will make you stand out from the crowd.
Unfortunately, my beloved home is not among them. But luckily, I am a can-do type of girl so, it’s with great pride that I present you with the new NH Library Jobline, now in RSS! Yay! This is all brought to you after a few ridiculous hours, some geeky fun, and Feed43. A pretty neat tool
We all get frustrated with work, right? Yesterday I had to vent it on Twitter:
Remind me again why I thought becoming a Tech Librarian was a good idea? Sometimes I think I’m a professional joke.
I got some great responses. Sometimes the best way to get some perspective, I suppose, is to ask for it. And the thoughts of people NOT in the profession are invaluable.
This from a woman with whom I went to high school and to whom I have not spoken in over ten years:
Sarah: Think of what you do as an art – i wonder if libraries will cease to exist – tragic on many levels but if books are available on the Kindle ( might have wrong nic nac name ) But if the book is fading out – what about their home? Please don’t be angry i think your profession is awesome… but surely its come up – NPR talk radio did a huge segment on the topic and left me sad I love too read a book a week sometimes I get books on tape- huge fan of the not having to alphabetize – bane of my existence
Lichen: Hi Sarah. Thanks for your thoughts! Honestly, I don’t believe Libraries are about books, they are about community and freedom.
You’re right that the way people read is changing and Libraries have got to keep up with that change. Some are, some are not. It’s hard to know what needs to be done to save them, and encounter only resistance from my colleagues.
Sarah: how so? i think i get the freedom part and local community it enriches by its presence as do museums- resistance how?
Lichen: Some librarians do not like change. Most of them refuse to see that the way people collect information is changing.
Lichen: They just stick their heads in the mud and resent anyone who points it out.
That person would be me.
Sarah: Pioneers you are- like beastie boys were to rap music-
Lichen: YAY! I’m a Beastie Boy!
From another friend via Facebook:
Because in 5 years you will be the only one that still has a job at a library?
And from my fella who often works with librarians:
Lichen, you’re a librarian, in a public library. Your job is the definition of uphill battle. It’s hard work and red tape and low pay and no respect from anyone about how hard it is but it’s a great service that you’re doing….
So it is all worth it, in the end. Here’s to hoping the discouraging days are few and the friends are true.
James Kingsbury made an entrance into my life over the last year. My mother has been transcribing his diary as a fundraiser for the Cook Library Friends Group and often phoned me with details of his agrarian life and accounts of our Tamworth. From the bookjacket:
This young lad writes cautiously at first but, as he warms to the task, he gives us a sharp and concise picture of the life of a teenager of that period. Each member of the family worked hard and long on the farm. They were active in town and church. Family life was close and loving; school was fitted into the farm schedule where practicable; religion was a basic part of their life; and there were also some lighter moments to savor and remember. There was much visiting near and far among family and friends. There were birthday parties, berry picking, mountain climbing, swimming, picnics, sleighing, orating, debating and entertainers coming to town. The Fourth of July was perhaps the highlight of the year and long to be remembered. Read on and see life in the mid 1800s through this teenager’s eyes.
James was a young school teacher with hopes to attend university. The Journal is mostly an accounting of daily life in rural Tamworth, NH. Some mundane, some charming, and somehow he’s become part of the fabric of our family life. Mom shares his latest dispatches over suppers. A favorite from a New Year’s Eve journal entry:
Ere another year shall have passed, we may be numbered with the forgotten and the dead. And our words- with however bright a luster they may shine while we live- be covered with oblivion’s pall. If our deeds are worthy of heaven’s countenance, they will be registered in heaven and will endure when earth’s provided monuments have fell.
According to an letter to his family, James was aboard the the David Tatum, a steamer transporting troops north. But in early August 1863 he vanished at a landing at Helena, Arkansas. No one heard anything again.
Diary of a Tamworth Boy, 1849-1852: Journal of S. James Mills Kingsbury is set to go to print any day and for some reason this morning, I made it my business to find out what happened to young James. Ancestry was first and according to the US Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, James was “mustered out on 12 Aug 1863 at Helena, AR.” If he had been discharged why hadn’t his friend known it and why hadn’t he come home to NH?
I searched for Union cemeteries in Helena and found nothing. Figuring James for a mere foot soldier lost to history, and as a last effort (and flying in the face of my fancy librarian training) I googled his division, the 9th New Hampshire Infantry, and there, five results down on the page the Internet Archive led me to the History of the Ninth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (1895). The index showed the Mr. Kingsbury had been misidentified as Kingsley. The rest is, indeed, history:
Another sad incident of the morning was the falling overboard of James Kingsley, of Company K, from the upper deck: so swift was the current that before a boat could be lowered he was lost to sight.
In the space of a Sunday morning, the internet let me trace the lifespan of a neighbor who lived 150 years ago. James Kingsbury, no longer among the forgotten and the dead, welcome home. It’s a good day to be a librarian.
Our local chamber hosted a Breakfast Forum this morning focusing on social media. Enjoying a lovely view from the Derryfield, we chit chatted with the others at the table. Shooting for common ground a baby-faced real estate broker commented on how much he loves his Kindle and answered some of the librarians’ questions about it. Pretty unanimously, the librarians responded with reasons why they could never be interested in this. They didn’t sneer. They weren’t rude. But what message does this send to the people at the table? I worried it was along the lines of ‘librarians are not interested in new things nor do they have open minds.’ Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than judging what someone else is clearly passionate about. How often do we do this to our patrons?
I wish, above all else, the response from my colleagues had been more along the lines of, ‘gosh, that sounds really neat, maybe we should start lending them at the Library.’ Even if we don’t mean it! Here the message is more like ‘we are open-minded and here to serve a public, you are the public and if you’re interested it deserves our attention.’ It turned out to be apropos for the following hour of presentations.
I did not bring my computer, for once, but wished I had for live-blogging purposes. I did manage to capture some great snippets analog-style:
George Wallace, Discovery Communications Group (Quotes are his, other is my annotation)
If you are not in this space in six months your competition is going to own it.
And despite what we like to think Libraries DO have competition, a lot of it. We have to be proactive about maintaining our important role in our communities.
We are all biologically predisposed to connect with each other.
Libraries are built around connecting people with each other. We are the beating hearts of our communities. It’s natural that we would also be this for an online community.
Strategy:
What are your clients?
What are they interested in?
What do you want to hear from them?
What do you want to talk to them about?
What value can you offer?
[I missed a couple and can't find the slides - will update if I get more info.]
These sound suspiciously like writing my online library policy (still to be written). The more I think about this the more LIKE businesses I realized we are. Also, are businesses an under-served user base?
Your website is a hub.
YES, it’s a place to gather all your divergent web presences. Think of it as ‘home,’ you still go out to meet people at the Facebook club or bowl at the Twitter bar, but then you bring those relationships and experiences home and they become part of your identity there.
People trust friends over companies
It’s true and libraries are beautifully positioned to be both. We can leverage our resources and staff to provide the coverage of a large organization, but we can be personal like a friend. THIS is why it’s so important to speak in your own, personal voice on the internet and not as The Institution. Too many libraries think blogging their press releases is blogging. No. If you talk like that you netizens id you as a business and you lose credibility with them.
Leslie Poston, co-author Twitter for Dummies
You MUST respond.
Inviting comments, as in a form on a blog or a wall in Facebook, and then not responding too the comments folks make is a little like picking up the phone and not saying hello. Or worse, saying hello and then hanging up. It’s just bad manners. The days are the static web are dead. You must commit to interacting with your patrons online.
Be human. People want to hear from YOU.
In my Library that usually means what you are reading, but I often write about technology or the latest cool knitting book or whatever I’m interested in. People respond better to other people – don’t you?
Tweets should be a ratio of 9:1. Nine personal and one business.
This could, of course, apply to all social media. I think the same should be true with a blog.
You do not have to follow people back.
Despite our desire to collect friends and reach as many people as possible, libraries are here to serve a geographic community. My unofficial following policy for the Library is that if you list Manchester, NH as your location or it’s clear from your profanity-free tweets that you’re associated with Manchester, I will follow you. I bend it for the greater Manchester area or even as far as all of NH. But I really want to see my ‘followers list’ as a collection of Manchester-based twitterati.
My final take away from this info-packed hour came during the Q&A session and resonates on a number of levels:
It’s the easiest thing in the world to think of reasons NOT to do something.
You can’t be a librarian without being interested in the future of THE book. But I prefer the future of books. In other words, what happens when the useful life of a book is done? It’s outdated; no longer popular; unwanted.
Imagine an elderly patron’s surprise upon finding that her book sale find had already been re-purposed:
If surveillance turns you on more than contraband, Photojojo gives instructions for a bookish clandestine camera case. [Via Craftzine.] Might come in handy to photograph babes with books.
“Can I save my work to a floppy from 1993?… [desperately]… What am I supposed to do then?”
Sound familiar? It’s a routine conversation around here. We generally offer our bargain-basement $10 flash drive or explain how to save to the desktop and then email their file to themselves. Neither of these are particularly elegant solutions, but with a public computing system that returns the machine to its original state upon logout, it’s the best we can offer.
That’s why I was particularly interested to read about the feature of Dropbox that allows a file to be placed in an online folder and then assign in a unique url. It seems especially suited to Tom’s ingenious use in Document Delivery (Your email admins will thank you.), but I am considering how it might solve our ‘you can’t take it with you’ dilemma too?
ps. If you do work in ILL or document delivery, do read Tom’s post. Gold.
