The Library Ass

The end!

2007-10-10T00:11:00.000-04:00

Well, it's official - this morning I got the call! After working for over ten years as a library ass(istant) I will start my first professional job on Monday as the new Head of Interlibrary Loan here at the Big Library. Which means it's time to bid this blog farewell. To be honest it's been hard to find the time for blogging of any sort, be it library-related or personal, and though I hope to start a new blog chronicling my career as a librarian I believe I will have my hands full for the foreseeable future getting up to speed in my new position.

I will keep the archives active, but this will be my last post. Thanks for tuning in, folks! And wish me luck...

Real Library Heroes, pt. 2

2007-08-20T11:17:00.000-04:00

Today we also salute you, Mister I Need A Form So I'm Just Going To Reach Over The Top Of The Desk And Grab Whatever Looks Like What I Need Without Asking First...

Real Library Heroes

2007-08-20T10:29:00.000-04:00

Today we salute you, Miss I Don't Care If My Portable Scanner Is From 1986 And Whines Like A Giant Mosquito When I Use It...

ARGH!

2007-08-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

There is a special place in library Hell for patrons who think that it's okay to put Post-It™ notes in books that are over a century old. In case you're wondering, the effect is a lot like when you put Silly Putty on a newspaper comic strip, except instead of pulling a microscopic layer of color off the newsprint you actually pull the paper clear off the page and out of the book. Eep!

Curiouser and curiouser

2007-08-12T22:05:00.000-04:00

Okay, well I didn't get the job... but I may have landed a different one in the process. I really wish I could elaborate right now but I can't. Yet!

The beginning of the end (part two)?

2007-07-28T15:48:00.000-04:00

Got the call for the second round of interviews - I go back on Thursday!

The beginning of the end?

2007-07-19T10:06:00.001-04:00

Big interview tomorrow. I'm so nervous!

We also do bail bonds

2007-06-28T10:25:00.000-04:00

"Can you guys run a background check on someone for me?"

Welcome to the East Coast

2007-06-26T14:44:00.000-04:00

Someone is shouting in the reading room, which is odd enough for any time of the week, let alone a Tuesday morning, when the room is usually dead. Today however it's quite busy - I blame the ninety-degree heat (plus humidity) outside for driving people into our climate controlled space. But as I look up from my computer I realize that there seems to be a confrontation in progress at one of the tables along the South wall. Surely it hasn't been hot for long enough to drive us all batty, or has it?

A regular patron comes up to the desk. "Can you help me? There's a person telling me that she doesn't want me sitting across from her."

This is a new one. I smile at the regular, a gentle and unassuming man who almost seems apologetic even to bring the matter to my attention, and amble over to the patron who was yelling just a few moments ago.

"Is there something wrong?"

A woman in her twenties looks at me with an irritated expression on her face. "Yes, this person just sat at my table without asking me or anything."

"Huh," I say, choosing my words carefully. "Well, this is an open reading room. People can sit wherever they want."

"'Open reading room'?" she asks. "I've never heard of that before. It must be an East Coast thing."

As I attempt to process this observation, the woman continues:

"I'm from the West Coast. We don't have open reading rooms there."

I'm fairly certain that this is not the case, but I wisely choose not to contradict her.

"Well, this room gets pretty full so you're going to have to share the tables."

"I hope with someone my own age, at least!"

I frown. As far as I could tell, there wasn't much age difference between the two patrons. Something isn't quite right here, but as long as she's gotten the message it's not really my business to get to the bottom of it. Nevertheless the woman continues to talk:

"I'm from California. I used to go to X university, but I didn't want to get the Ph.D. there so I came here to get my Masters."

Wow. Non sequitur city. I nod pleasantly, smile, and back away slowly, hoping that this is the end of the disturbance. But no sooner do I sit down and go back to my email than I hear her raising her voice again at a different patron.

"Are you a Muslim?" I can hear her ask the clearly surprised young man, who is unaccustomed to being challenged upon taking a seat in this room. Rather than submit to her interrogation he simply gets up and chooses a chair at another table, but unhappy with this exchange I walk back to where she's sitting and clear my throat.

"Excuse me, but you can't keep yelling at the other patrons if they want to sit down at your table. There is no reserved seating here."

The woman looks at me somewhat blankly. "Oh, I'm sorry. I was trying to study in the dining hall but people kept on sitting down at my table."

Putting on my best customer service face, I try to be helpful. "If you want more personal space, you could always try the main reading room up on the second floor. There are many more tables there."

She dismisses this suggestion with a shake of her head. "No thanks, I want to be as close to the basement as possible."

I open my mouth and close it again, pretty much at a loss now. "Well, this room tends to fill up during the day, so you'll have to be considerate to the other patrons, okay?"

"What's your name?" she asks instead of acknowledging that she understands my request.

Uh, oh. Here we go. I tell her and prepare for the situation to escalate. I've never had to 86 a patron from my room before, and to tell you the truth I wasn't really looking forward to doing it now. But instead of loudly demanding to see my supervisor or the head librarian or the dean of the college she considers my name thoughtfully:

"Tom, huh? We don't have many Toms out on the West Coast. That must be an East Coast thing."

There's really no sense in responding, so I just stand there.

"I'm from California."

I do my best to smile again and break eye contact so as to return to my desk, because if I stay I'm pretty sure this conversation isn't going to come to a meaningful conclusion anytime soon. Mercifully the woman returns to her studies and I get away again, although as patrons file into the room I wince as they approach her table. As luck would have it, however, no one decides to sit opposite her, so the room enjoys about an hour or so of Tuesday-morning normalcy before she begins to make noise again.

This time she's laughing hysterically to herself. At this point I'm pretty much ready for anything to happen, but before I can worry about the situation I notice that the woman is packing up her things and getting ready to leave. Fair enough. As she walks past the desk, though, she stops for a moment:

"I'm going to go home to study because it's too hard for me to concentrate. You guys are too good-looking!"

Wow. Just, wow.

Why networked printers and integrated library systems are the tools of the Devil

2007-05-15T16:02:00.000-04:00

Here at the Reading Room Desk we have two staff workstations that share a printer - one through a direct connection, the other a networked connection. In their infinite wisdom IT chose to configure the student workstation (aka the "Chewbacca Seat") directly to the printer, which means that in the morning when I log in I get to flip a coin to see whether my printer settings have changed or not.

Most of the time they have, owing to the fact that I split my day between the public service desk and my office. This wreaks total havoc on my personal profile, and despite all of the best efforts to stabilize the situation the best I can hope for is that at the very least I'll be able to "see" the printers in my network and not have to reinstall them on the network from scratch.

Needless to say this is extremely irritating, especially when I'm working in our Circulation module and generating slips for items to be placed on hold in the room. If I forget to check to see if the Reading Room printer is in fact the default printer - and not "Adobe PDF" or even worse Microsoft "XPS", neither of which I can deselect as options since I don't have adminstrative rights to make the deletions stick - then I have to go back into the item record and reset the hold manually for each slip that failed to print.

This is of course as much a failing of the Circ module as it is our printing situation. Why in the name of Melvil Dewey a simple "Reprint Hold Slip" option doesn't exist in this system is entirely beyond me. But that's the world of Integrated Library Systems for you in a nutshell. Large universities that could easily farm out the task of creating a homegrown client and OPAC to their own Computer Science Departments shell out untold amounts of money for bug-ridden platforms just because everyone else in their peer group is doing it. So instead of an ILS that is responsive to local needs, you end up with a shared system that pleases the lowest common denominator if you're lucky.

A curmudgeonly software engineer friend of mine who was once a Library Ass such as yours truly once demonstrated how the school we were both working at back then could spend half as much for an in-house ILS system than contracting with a third-party vendor. Predictably his opinion was ignored in favor of a system which proved to be an absolute disaster to implement and was abandoned shortly thereafter, but his math still holds true - especially in this radically-decentralized Web 2.0 kind of world we live and work in nowadays.

You would think that Virginia Tech's success in developing the ILLiad management system for Interlibrary Loan would inspire similar innovation on the ILS front, but rather than leveraging their own native engineering talent the big research libraries play it "safe" and commit themselves to products which serve neither their staff nor their patrons. Using the logic of a spouse who marries someone in hopes of being able to effect change from the inside of the relationship, we think that these vendors' imperfect products can be improved from within, forgetting that owing to some pretty major mergers in the ILS world these days even a big-name client is just another customer.

Granted, the profession itself is also to blame here, as it is more convenient to move from job to job if we all use the same ILS systems. This perhaps makes us more complicit than we should be in our choices, not just for library systems but for all of our software needs. Does the siren song of Microsoft Certification blind us to the advantages of homegrown and/or open-source solutions? No doubt there is a break even point between local needs and universal demands, between optimization and convenience, but I think many of the big schools have simply grown a little too lazy in their decision-making processes. We could and more to the point should be driving innovation in these regards, not taking a back seat to what's trendy at the vendor expo at ALA.

(Huh. I'm not sure how this post went from a gripe about networked printers to a full-blown rant about the state of academic libary innovation, but there it is.)

Ever see a book with sunburn?

2007-05-11T12:16:00.000-04:00

This is a living relic from the days when our library used to expose the collection to a "healthy" amount of fresh air and sunshine - the light from the sun actually bleached the cover where it wasn't protected by the latticework of the bookstack.

Pretty neat, eh? The moral of the story: even books need sunscreen!

On the value of clutch hitters

2007-05-03T11:41:00.000-04:00

Time and time again I have the same conversation with my evening and weekend full-time staffer about student employees who in her opinion aren't quite up to snuff. She always wonders why I keep certain people around.

"So and so is bad with the details," she'll tell me. "X always forgets to do this, and Y never remembers to that unless I remind her."

While I'm not saying that attention to detail isn't critical in a library setting, I tend to be a little more forgiving in this regard than my coworker (whom I often refer to my "enforcer"). This is in part because of the economics of work-study - on our campus the library jobs tend to be the ones that pay the least, so aside from a spike of interest at the beginning of each semester there are often few takers no matter how aggressively we advertise - but mostly because I've discovered an interesting correlation between "more" and "less" reliable workers: namely, that the former, while consistent, are less available at clutch times than the latter.

Of course this is not some mysterious principle at work, as kids who already have their life together at 19 tend to know when they are overcommitting themselves and give me plenty of advance warning to schedule themselves off duty to accommdate their papers, exams, and everything else that needs their attention as the semester comes to a close and free time is squeezed down to zero. Whereas the ones who tend to be a little flakier during the regular semester are suddenly the students whom you depend on to man the fort when everyone else is home studying - they're the clutch hitters, to borrow a baseball metaphor (sorry, I've got Sox on the brain, especially this season!).

I've worried about this phenomenon, mostly because as a supervisor in a higher educational setting I don't want to be taking advantage of this second category of students. But insofar as they are adults - albeit young ones - if they want to pick up the extra hours I will gladly take the help during the tumultuous end of the each term, as I'd be dead in the water without them. I try to communicate this to my enforcer colleague, and I think she gets it sometimes, but I know that deep down inside she'd rather have students who are both reliable and there when the chips are down.

So would I! But just as my beloved Red Sox dare not part with their at-times brilliant, at-times lackadaisical slugger Manny Ramirez, neither can I cut loose my clutch-hitting students. Because sometimes when you're down by three runs in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, only a player like Manny will do.

Should I be proud?

2007-04-27T12:38:00.000-04:00

This blog comes up in the first page of results when you Google the words "delicious ass". Sorry folks, but everything here is SFW - unless you're interested in some hot library porn, in which case may I recommend Michael Griffith's excellent book Bibliophilia?

GTD vs. TCB

2007-04-25T13:27:00.000-04:00

By now you're probably familiar with the term GTD - short for Getting Things Done, a philosophy for approaching one's work/life productively that encourages its practitioner to collect his or her tasks in a central location (or "bucket") and deal with them in a systematic fashion. As my life has complexified and my available free time inches its way ever closer to zero, I've become more and more a devotee of GTD, which has proven to be an absolute lifesaver in my work life since taking on some additional duties that were not originally part of my position.

Sometimes however Getting Things Done is hard to do when you work at a service desk, where first and foremost one must be Taking Care of Business (or TCB*). Whereas GTD is a proactive principle of organization, TCB by its very nature must be reactive, as it usually involves spur-of-the-moment decision making and problem-solving that just won't wait, mostly because the person you're helping is standing right in front of you. To be fair, GTD espouses a "two-minute rule", whereby any task that would take you two minutes or less to complete should be done right on the spot, but whereas these are exceptions to the GTD method they are the rule in a TCB workplace.

The tricky part then of course is figuring out how to combine these two philosophies on the job. I've discovered that the best way to do this is designate GTD time away from the service desk, as even the most iron disciplinarian will find it hard to Get Things Done when being interrupted at unpredictable intervals. It has gotten to the point where I actually need to schedule an entire day off-desk every week for GTD purposes, and even then that still only seems to take care of a fraction of everything that I should be doing.

The funny thing is that I could probably spend the entire week downstairs in my office instead of manning my desk, which is the complete opposite of how this job was described to me originally by my former boss. In his defense the position was a little more circumscribed than it is now, but nevertheless it has always been the sort of job that would respond positively to the amount of extra work one could put into it above and beyond the daily expectations of TCB. Only now after a year and a half am I beginning to appreciate this interesting paradox and figure out how to make it work for me, but I suppose it takes that long to truly settle into any kind of job, doesn't it?

* For those of you who are fans of Elvis Presley, you may already know that TCB was a favorite saying of the King. TCB also happens to correspond to my initials: Thomas Charles Bruno. I've been fond of the mantra myself ever since I worked at a bakery/coffeehouse who derived endless mirth out of this coincidence, addressing me as "TCB" in as Memphis a drawl as he could muster. On one of my two (!) trips to Graceland I picked up a TCB coffee mug - it's one of my most treasured possessions.

What's another hat?

2007-04-25T12:33:00.000-04:00

Recently I took on the added duties of supply ordering for my entire department, an alleged temporary move due to a staffing change elsewhere that I'm beginning to suspect may turn out to be permanent. This would not be an unwelcome development, as it adds some complexity to my job and allows me to finally attend to the material needs of the Reading Room without jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops.

For instance, we finally acquired some alphabetical dividers for our 10-Day Hold Shelf, after my having agitated for them since I took on the position a year and a half ago. Granted, it was taking us a while to figure out exactly what we needed, but as I've mentioned previously here it is amazing how little you can take for granted when it comes to a library patron's experience of your space and his/her abilities to navigate it.

Even when something about the library - such as the alphabetical arrangement of our self-service hold shelves - seems completely intuitive, one must always bear in mind that our perceptions of what is clear and what is not have been warped by being in the library for a goodly portion of our waking hours. Habit and intuition are not one and the same, and any organizing principle based on the former is doomed to cause more problems than it addresses.

We've come a long way with our hold shelf system since the Reading Room's inception several years ago, moving from a completely opaque scheme where patrons were arbitrarily assigned shelves (each with its own barcode for charging items out to!) to one where our library users could feel comfortable making sense of without compromising the privacy of our patrons and the anonymity of our books. But inevitably we would find people stymied by the lack of adequate signage on the 10-Day Hold Shelf.

Well now we've invested in some nice double-wide alphabetic dividers that can be seen clear across our cavernous Reading Room, so short of hiring a bunch of helper monkeys to assist our most befuddled patrons I think we've done all we can do. Hmmm. I wonder what billing code I'd use to purchase a helper monkey...

Of course what would be really cool would be to have a hold shelf that worked like the wine rack at Aureole in the Las Vegas hotel resort Mandalay Bay, where "wine angels" in harnesses fly up and down to retrieve bottles of wine from the four-story tall glass and steel structure.

Book angels, anyone?

The question of questions

2007-04-25T10:31:00.000-04:00

(This post originally started as a response to a query on an email listserv, but it occurred to me that it made a pretty good Library Ass posting in its own right on the topic of interviewing prospective student workers. So here it is!)

I am responsible for hiring and supervising between 8-12 student workers and a handful of temps. My desk is a point of service for both regular library patrons accessing rare or noncirculating materials as well as visiting researchers who access the entire collection through us, so there is a very large customer service component which requires a certain kind of temperament and/or work ethic. The trouble is that library jobs tend to be the lowest paid work-study jobs on our campus, which means that many times our "interviewing" process actually works in reverse, as prospective student employees shop around for the best gig for that academic year.

That being said, there are a few standard questions that I ask:

1. "How comfortable are you in a library?" While we try to keep our desk covered with one staff member and one student at all times, during breaks or book pages it's entirely possible that the student worker will be manning the desk on his/her own and subject to all manners of informational questions. Bearing in mind that by the time patrons get to our desk they've already been bounced around a couple of times we try not to send them away without the answers they need (with the exception of bonafide reference questions, of course), so that requires a certain familiarity with how our library and university library system functions. It's okay if a prospective student employee has no such experience or familiarity, provided that he or she demonstrates an eagerness to learn those skills during the interview.

2. "Do you consider yourself a 'people' person?" We are public service desk that interacts with scholars visiting from all over the world and who aren't afraid to make unflattering comparisons if we fail to live up to the other members of our peer group. As luck would have it, these same patrons tend to be the ones who require the most hand-holding, especially where technology is concerned (sometimes there is also a language barrier or physical disability). While our Circ Desk is much more production-oriented and is trained to make quick and efficient referrals when needed, in the reading room we need student workers who are above all patient, understanding, and willing to go the extra mile.

3. "How well can you multitask/prioritize?" Although our reading room has an hourly paging schedule and periodic deliveries from off-site storage, there is absolutely no regularity to our workflow from day to day, even hour to hour. I'm impressed that people can dash off an email while staffing our desk, let alone read a book for class or write a paper, but as long as students give their undivided attention to any patrons who comes to the desk we're pretty much laissez-faire about what they can and can't do with their free time. We're well aware of the fact that due to our abysmal wages we need to sell this fact in order to attract and keep a regular schedule of students, but that requires a certain kind of worker who is able to keep one eye or ear open while cranking out a problem set at the last minute.

4. (Perhaps most importantly of all) "Can you stay in touch and keep us in the loop?" I don't pretend that the 4-10 hours that our students work for us every week is the most important thing in their lives, and I'm not particularly interested in trying to teach them 'life lessons' about keeping a job in the real world. What I do expect, however, is for my students to read every email I send and respond when asked to, as well as give me advance notice of any upcoming problems in their schedule so that I can plan accordingly. I also ask prospective students how comfortable they feel with being contacted via IM or through Facebook for work matters, as I'm well aware that email is increasingly taking a backseat to social messaging. If through the initial contact period I suspect that there will be a problem on this front, I tend to turn away the students right then and there.

In truth, however, it's pretty hard to tank an interview with me. This isn't simply a function of campus economics, but an acknowledgment on my part of the limitations of trying to evaluate an employee's worth in the space of the first 10-20 minutes that we know one another. I've had students who interviewed impressively but were absolute basket cases on the job and vice versa, so unless there are any serious warning flags during the hiring process I tend to err on the somewhat lenient side. I guess I'm just a big softee that way...

Holy crap

2007-04-18T15:08:00.000-04:00

It's National Library Week!

This explains everything

2007-04-17T14:27:00.000-04:00

From the BBC:

Fighting fires may sound taxing, chasing criminals
demanding, but a new study says that working in
library is the most stressful job of all.
Librarians are the most unhappy with their workplace,
often finding their job repetitive and unchallenging,
according to psychologist Saqib Saddiq.

He will tell the British Psychological Society that
one in three workers suffer from poor psychological
health.

Sure, now they tell us!

God is dead - what's your excuse?

2007-04-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

Don't get me wrong - I like Easter as much as the next guy (it's in my top three of resurrection myth celebrations, along with the Festival of Dionysos and the Evil Dead trilogy), but as a supervisor I hate scheduling desk coverage for the holiday. Since we're not a religious institution, we don't close or even go to reduced hours for Easter, which means I need to try and divine the religious beliefs of my staff and students without making an ass out of my self with a wrong guess or faux pas.

This is much more difficult than it seems, mostly because even if you have an inkling as to a person's religious affiliation that doesn't necessarily mean that you have a clue as to whether that person actually practices their faith or not. I've found this is hardest when dealing with people from the former Soviet republics, who may be nominally Orthodox or Jewish or what have you but are actually still old-school atheists. My super slick way of attempting to suss this out is usually something like: "So. Got any plans for this weekend?" hoping that some telltale mention of ham, lamb, or the Passover Seder will be elicited.

Of course the bonus nuisance this year is the fact that Western and Orthodox Easter coincide*, which means that I can't rely on my Greek, Armenian, or Ethiopian students to bail me out like I normally do. This is why the public services manager learns to instinctively dread any time of the year that encourages families to spend quality time together. At least on the Federal holidays we lock the library doors...

* It's a long story, but due to the contested interpretations of reckoning sacred time Orthodox and Western Christians can celebrate their Easter holiday as many as five weeks apart from one another. Wikipedia has a decent roundup of the controversy, if you're interested in that sort of thing! But the upshot is that because that the Orthodox reject the Julian calendar reforms when computing the date of Easter, there will come a time when it will be impossible for the two Easters to coincide (in fact, in the far future Orthodox Christianity will be roasting their Easter lambs in midsummer if they stick to their guns!). Bad for ecumenical Christianity I suppose, but good news for anyone who has to put together a desk schedule!

Oh, please

2007-04-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

I admire J.K. Rowling as much as the next librarian, but this is just too much:

FARMINGTON, Utah — No peeking.

The publisher of the new Harry Potter novel has strict rules for libraries handling the book this summer.

Among them: Libraries must limit the number of employees who handle the books before the July 21 release and provide names and contact information for each branch manager, according to the contract from Scholastic Inc.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is the final book in J.K. Rowling's popular series about the boy wizard.

Davis County Library director Pete Giacoma got a contract on March 28 and shared it with county commissioners. "I think we better ratify," Commissioner Bret Millburn said. "I think we'd get a spell cast on us."

The contract says failure to keep "Deathly Hallows" under wraps until July 21 could get libraries scratched from future embargoed titles. "We acknowledge and agree that any such violation will cause irreparable harm to Scholastic and the author, J.K. Rowling, and that monetary damages will be inadequate to compensate for violations," the contract states.

I'm sure there are probably all kinds of crazy legal issues at work here in attempting such a silly gag order - especially when it comes to public library employees, whose First Amendment protections are far more broad than those of us who toil in the semiprivate sector - but there's also the simple matter that this is the last installment of Harry Potter anyway, so what kind of leverage does Scholastic really have if anyone leaks spoilers or a review?

And not to put too fine a point on it, but advance press only hurts you if your work sucks (cf. George Lucas).

Review: The Entitled

2007-04-02T19:25:00.000-04:00

Howie Traveler, manager of the Cleveland Indians, has reached the metaphorical bottom of the ninth inning of both his career and his life. After years of never quite succeeding as a ballplayer and a coach - not to mention as a husband and father - Howie is on the verge of being fired for costing his team a shot at the World Series when he becomes embroiled in a scandal involving his star player, Cuban-born slugger Jay "El Jefe" Alcazar. Everyone knows that professional athletes make their own rules (especially players like El Jefe), but when a troubled Jay seemingly crosses the line will Howie do the right thing and speak up, or will he let his MVP outfielder get away with the unthinkable?

The Entitled is the latest novel by sportswriter and NPR commentator Frank Deford, whose previous works include Everybody's All-American and Alex: The Life of a Child. Deford deftly interweaves an insider's look at baseball with a plot that takes the reader from the Major League dugout bleacher to Fidel Castro's Cuba in a story that is equal parts thriller and encomium to America's national pastime. Drawing a cast of memorable characters who at the same time evoke real-world sports personalities is a formidable challenge, but Deford succeeds admirably in this regard.

While I couldn't help but think of Howie Traveler as Grady Little, the Red Sox manager whose fateful decision in 2003 to leave Pedro Martinez on the pitcher's mound in Game Six of the American League Championship Series against their mortal enemies the Yankees will forever live in infamy, Howie is nevertheless his own person, a man clearly haunted by his failures both on and off the baseball diamond. So too is Jay Alcazar not merely an imitation of a current marquee superstar but a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a modern Latin-American ballplayer - Frank Deford manages to capture the internal contradictions of the latter-day immigrant without resorting to platitudes or tired stereotypes.

If Deford stumbles anywhere, it is in the final act, as his resolution of the main plot feels somewhat rushed and the ending just a little too pat and Hollywood for its own good. Considering the seriousness of the subject matter being addressed - professional athletes and inappropriate sexual conduct - one can't help but wish that the accuser in the story comes off as something more than a convenient plot device, but unfortunately she is the least developed of the novel's characters. These minor considerations notwithstanding, The Entitled is a well-written and compelling tale, one that will satisfy both diehard sports fans and casual readers alike. As yet another baseball season begins, Frank Deford has given us the perfect reading material for that inevitable rain delay.

(Disclosure: Sourcebooks, Inc. provided me with a free advance copy of this book for review. My opinions, however, are entirely my own.)

Meme me up , Scotty!

2007-03-27T09:54:00.000-04:00

Because all the cool kids are doing it, here are five non-librarian blogs that I read on a regular basis:

1. Miss Snark, the literary agent. A daily hit from the cluegun keeps this wannabe writer on his toes.

2. Parent Hacks. Crowdsourcing child-care wisdom since 2005. I only wish I'd discovered this site sooner!

3. Whedonesque. All things Joss. Because I have a problem.

4. Simply Recipes. Food porn at its best!

5. High Maintenance Machine. The online sketchbook of Matthew Reidsma, one of America's up and coming indy comic artists (the fact that I occasionally appear in his strips have absolutely nothing to do with this plug*).

* Don't believe me? Check out Fleen's recent review of the genius that is Matt Reidsma!

Why don't you Twitter?

2007-03-26T11:51:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, there's a new Web 2.0 craze making the rounds: Twitter, a social networking service which allows you to post short dispatches from your browser, instant messenger, or even your cell phone. Posts are instantly broadcast to anyone who subscribes to them in their preferred method of delivery, making Twitter a real-time method of communication regardless of the platform. Since the format is intentionally truncated - 140 characters or less - Twitter encourages rapid-fire posts and is thus best suited for updates on the fly.

Not surprisingly there's been a lot of skepticism about the whole Twitter thing, not just from the Old Media (which reflexively hates on anything which threatens its hegemony, a la a recent article in the WSJ which went out of its way to knock both social networking and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards) but from the established powers of the blogosphere as well - Wil Wheaton wonders what the point of it is, although that hasn't stopped him or someone impersonating him from creating a Twitter account - along with a coterie of 69 followers waiting for him post something!

I think this lack of interest may be a function of one's ability to blog in an unfettered capacity, as what Twitter does is enable someone who might otherwise be inclined to blog if not for his or her daily constraints of work and life to blog nonetheless, albeit in attenuated form. Perhaps my newfound obsession with Twitter would be less intense were I not so busy these days that blogging has become a rare luxury for me? I like to joke that Twitter is the crack cocaine of blogging, but maybe it's actually more like methadone - a way to get your fix, when the real thing ain't forthcoming.

At any rate, Twitter is worth a second look, especially for those of us in library-land.

(And if you feel like stalking someone, I'm oodja)

UPDATE: The folks at The Joy of Tech give us an amusing summary of "what not to tweet about on Twitter".

Dispensing all kinds of reference

2007-03-13T13:43:00.000-04:00

"Excuse me."

I look up from the Reading Room desk to find a very perplexed-looking elderly gentleman. "Yes?"

The man looks at his wristwatch, up at our wall clock (which is still running an hour behind, natch), and back at me. "I was under the impression that this room closed at 10pm."

"We do."

The man looks at his watch again. "Was there some sort of time change that I missed?"

Daylight Savings - always good for at least one chuckle at a public service desk, though usually it's not three whole days afterwards! The frightening thing is that this guy has been running late for everything in his life since Sunday, kind of like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld when he decides to spring ahead before everyone else.

Mmmm, delicious feeds

2007-03-13T13:38:00.000-04:00

Like any good information professional I'm always on the prowl for interesting and useful RSS feeds. Well, here's a whole boatload of them, courtesy of Resource Shelf:

ResourceShelf friend Pete “RSS” Weiss sends along the following. For some of you, these might not be new. However, for others they will be and worthy of a quick mention.

+ Library of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office Feeds
Feeds include:
++ Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly Lists
++ Library of Congress Classification Weekly Lists
++ New on the Web
++ New Webcasts
++ What’s New in Science Reference
++ Copyright Office: Current Legislation
++ Federal Register Notices

+ Historic Documents from the National Archives
Always something interesting. To see a historical document from another date, use this url:
ResourceShelf friend Pete “RSS” Weiss sends along the following. For some of you, these might not be new. However, for others they will be and worthy of a quick mention.

Share and enjoy!

The Library Ass gets a gig

2007-03-13T13:22:00.000-04:00

No, that's not a gigabyte, it's an actual (non-paying) gig. A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Sourcebooks, Inc., an independent publisher located in Naperville, Illinois, who wanted to know if I'd be interested in reviewing some of their more recent imprints with no strings attached. Flattered as all get-out, I of course accepted, and yesterday I came home to find a DHL package on my doorstep that was chock full of books. So expect a couple of readers' advisory-style posts over the upcoming weeks!

Apropos of my imminent mancation to Florida to take in some Spring Training baseball with my brother and his friends, the first book I'll be featuring is The Entitled, a work of baseball fiction by six-time National Sportswriter of the Year and NPR commentator Frank Deford. At least now I'll have something interesting to read on the plane!

Coolness

2007-02-26T11:45:00.000-05:00

Remember that thing I couldn't tell you about the other week? Well, now I can...

Ever since I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, I've been enamored with the plugins that allow you to do a search via the engine of your choice through a simple text box and drop-down menu interface. Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, tags for Flickr and del.icio.us, and even OCLC/Worldcat are now just as easy to query as Google, but what I've really wanted has been a plugin for searching HOLLIS, the online catalog for Harvard University Libraries.

Well finally I got my wish, as this week the good folks on the MetaPAC Committee officially unveiled Harvard LibX, a Firefox extension developed by Virginia Tech University Libraries -- that's right, the folks who brought us ILLiad! LibX not only offers a HOLLIS search toolbar, but other embedded search functionality as well, such as the ability to right-click on selected text anywhere in the web and search it against Harvard library resources.

Is there anything that those Hokies can't do, I wonder?

What it's all about

2007-02-19T11:54:00.000-05:00

This video created by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, has been making the digital rounds via just about every conceivable method of sharing (email, Google Groups, Facebook, etc.), but it's so damned good that it can't possibly hurt to share it one more time:

Can't stand losin'

2007-02-19T10:17:00.000-05:00

So I get a call over the weekend* from my regular staff member, who is freaking out because her workstation crashed and she can't bring it back to life. While normally such hardware problems simply boil down to plugging in an unplugged doohickey or a cold restart and a kick to the CPU, this time it's the dreaded Blue Screen of Death™, which means IT is more than likely going to have to swap out the machine. The fact that this leaves our desk with half its operating capabilities means that having two people at the desk all weekend is just plain silly; moreover, my staffer not having access to "her" machine is a morale issue in and of itself.

Unfortunately however our IT department doesn't do weekends, and it's a long weekend to boot, which means that we're going to be a computer down until Tuesday morning at the earliest. Since I was scheduled to come in today anyway, I decide to make an early shift of it and see if I can't coax the bloody thing into booting past the BSOD - I restart in Safe Mode, try to restore to the Last Known Good Settings, and even try to make a boot disk only to be rebuffed at every attempt. Almost ready to resign myself to sending my work-study student home and flying the desk solo for the day, it then occurs to me that I could simply swap out a CPU from downstairs, as the Circ Desk uses identical hardware to ours and has a ton of idle machines on a holiday like today.

IT will doubtless not like this solution, but then again they aren't exactly making house calls today, are they? And it seems silly to declare ourselves dead in the water and put ourselves at a staffing disadvantage when all I have to do is unplug the wonky CPU and replace it with a fresh one. So this is exactly what I do, and now I don't have to worry about extraneous desk help or an irate evening and weekend staffer. Besides, it's always better to ask forgiveness than permission when these things happen anyway...

I get a kick out of exactly this kind of problem-solving. It makes me feel like Captain Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, who found his way around the dreaded Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario by reprogramming the simulation to allow for victory. When asked by his son why he would do such a thing as cheat on what Starfleet regarded as the ultimate test of character, Kirk responded simply: "I don't like losing."

Me neither.

* Yeah, somehow I'm always on call. Go figure...

Live by the Meeting Maker, die by the Meeting Maker

2007-02-15T10:33:00.000-05:00

As continue to settle into my job as supervisor, I've noticed that I go to a lot more meetings than I used to, as what was billed as primarily a desk job takes on increasingly managerial (and dare I say professional) aspects. While some of this is a function of a recent change in leadership, I would hazard that a lot of this is simply the result of my being interested in the big picture and stepping up to take on additional duties and responsibilities whenever possible.

The price for such a go-getter attitude is a perpetual scheduling crunch that only seems to get worse as my available free time on the clock moves closer and closer to zero. This has been a blessing in disguise, however, as it's forced me to do something that I probably never would have done under my own steam in a million years: i.e., get organized.

Right now I'm using Google Calendar instead of the customary Meeting Maker supported here in the workplace to keep track of my time, as well as Remember The Milk! for staying on top of my tasks. What I like about this combination is that it's possible to do a mash-up the two services, so that your RTM tasks can be imported directly into Google Calendar. Remember The Milk! can also be updated by IM or text messaging from your cellphone, so it's relatively easy to jot down a task on the fly without having to completely stop whatever else you were doing.

I've also been experimenting with Zirrus as a to-do list manager, as I'm fond of the very simple "whiteboard" interface featuring colored tags that grow in font size depending on priority. In the end I might keep Zirrus as a personal to-do list and RTM as my taskmaster for work, since I don't seem to want to spend as much time fiddling around with the latter when I'm not on the clock. After all, isn't the point of productivity tools to save time?

Darn it

2007-02-15T10:12:00.000-05:00

I was all set to gush about a cool new development here at the Big Library, but realized just a few seconds before hitting the "publish" button that we're not supposed to say anything about it publicly for another week and a half.

Darn darn darn darn...

What's so funny about alphabetical order?

2007-02-08T10:18:00.000-05:00

"How does it work here?"

"Huh?" I look up from my computer, still at least three cups of coffee away from full functionality, to find a patron with that oh-so-familiar vaguely confused look on his face.

"I have a book on hold here. What's your system?"

This is of course where it gets tricky. 'On Hold' means a couple of different things in our Reading Room:

1. That the item has not been picked up yet since the patron ordered it

2. That the item has been placed on our 10-Day Hold Shelf by the patron

I can't tell you how confused both patrons and staff alike can get trying to determine which of the two above situations is in fact the case. Most of the time patrons are unaware of the fact that there are two separate 'hold' operations going on, and assume that an item once ordered will go out to 10-Day Hold rather than being held behind the desk until it is picked up for the first time. Insofar as many of our patrons use the Reading Room (which deals mostly in non-circulating items) much more infrequently than they do the Circulation Desk, I try to make sure that my staff is as patient and forgiving as possible in the process of figuring out what our patrons are actually looking for.

But sometimes it's hard, even for the supervisor.

"Umm," I dig deep for every last available ounce of my pre-noon social graces and empathy, as this is where the interview process can go south in a hurry. In these situations we have stock questions we ask of patrons without thinking that can very easily be interpreted as being accusatory in nature.

For example, my least favorite is 'When did you get the email?' From a staff worker's point of view, this is a perfectly rational question to ask, as it helps us determine where the item is located in our somewhat complex filing system. To a patron however this question can sound a lot like the staff member is challenging him or her for proof that there actually is an item on hold; even if not, about a third of a time it is a question that requires additional clarification and/or explanation from the staff member, somewhat defeating the time and labor-saving purpose of asking it in the first place (especially since the staff member can quickly determine the item's precise hold date by scanning the patron's ID and looking at the transaction record). Personally, I find this kind of Socratic method to be unnecessarily passive-aggressive at a public service desk, so I always try to find a more intuitive way of eliciting my patrons' needs.

But as I said above, however, some mornings you just have to settle for the "20 Questions" method.

"Did you order the item from the Depository?"

"Yes."

"Have you used the item yet?"

"Yes. Then I returned it to your desk. You hold those items, right?"

"Did you ask us to place it on hold for you?"

"I think so." This is another potentially confusing point of Reading Room procedure. Often a patron will pick up an item at our desk, use it in the room, then return to us assuming that we will automatically continue to hold that item... which we don't, under normal circumstances (the exception to this rule is in the case of non-circulating Interlibrary Loan materials and special collections, which remain behind the desk until their specified due dates as stipulated by the lender -- with these materials the exact opposite procedure applies!). This is why I try to train staff members to ask a nice leading question when a patron returns the item, such as 'Are you finished with this?'.

"Okay, well then it should be on the 10 Day Hold Shelf."

"Yeah, but how does that work?"

"It's alphabetical, by last initial." You'd think this part of the process would be pretty straightforward, but you'd be wrong. A long time ago the Reading Room used to assign its Hold Shelf space to specific patrons, going so far as to charge these items to separate 'pseudopatron' accounts in the Circulation system that were created specifically for each designated portion of the shelf. Mercifully we junked this system soon after I took over as supervisor, as not only was it a time-consuming process but one which ate up an inordinate amount of shelf space. Now we simply file everything together, using the patron's initials instead of last names or ID numbers in order to protect their privacy and shelving the material spine-down to make the books 'invisible' to browsers while they're checked out to the room.

Piece of cake, right? Well, aside from the not-as-rare-as-you'd-think instances when patrons think the item is being filed by the author's initials, there seems to be a little difficulty with the idea of arranging materials by last initial (using the first initial to file within that letter range and any possible middle initial as a way to further disambiguate in the case of popular 2-letter combinations, such as 'JS'). Either that or alphabetical order is becoming less and less second nature to a generation of human beings who search for things primarily by keyword.

"Oh, I see!" I'm not sure how the patron was looking for his book before he ventured up to the Reading Room desk, but now he seems to know where to find the missing item, and lo and behold after a couple of seconds he's retrieved it from the shelf at long last. Whew! So at least I didn't have to troubleshoot beyond that point, because from there on in things get unpleasant. If any item isn't on the Hold Shelf where it should be, sometimes it's merely been transposed when the patron's initials were accidentally reversed by a desk staff member or the patron him or herself when filling out the Hold Slip. This is why I would almost always rather that we fill out these forms, although I can understand when there's a rush (say at closing time) that pushing the onus back onto the patron might make sense, especially if he or she has a large pile of books to be held.

Of course if the item hasn't been misplaced in such a manner, it is almost certainly the case that the 10-Day hold period on the item has elapsed and the material has returned to whence it came -- either the Stacks or the Depository. Given that items on this kind of hold aren't attached to a patron's record in any way, shape, or form and thus can't be tracked and renewed electronically as normal loans, it's perfectly understandable that patrons will lose track of when these items are due to come off the shelf. This is why we try to be as accommodating as possible in removing materials from 10-Day Hold, holding the expired returns in the room until the end of the day before sending them to Stacks for reshelving. But even then it's inevitable that we'll get at least a couple of patrons per week who are caught off-guard by the date and are forced to track down or re-order the materials they had placed on hold, sometimes after exerting no small amount of painstaking effort in order to gather them up in the first place.

But this one was an easy save. And on Thursday mornings (especially when you're short both on caffeine and additional desk staff), we like easy...

So how was YOUR day?

2007-02-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

From the NYT Books section, a fascinating and harrowing account of Iraq's chief librarian and the trials and tribulations he endures to keep both his collections and his staff safe:

"Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.”"

(You can read Mr. Eskander's Library Diary here, courtesy of the British Library.)

I am never, ever* complaining about my job again...

* Never, ever = approximately 15% of the time

Our new motto

2007-02-07T12:21:00.000-05:00

"The customer is always* right."

* Always = approximately 85% of the time

Jersey goes Google

2007-02-06T09:41:00.000-05:00

Princeton University's library will become the 12th library to join Google Book Search, according to an article this morning that I found on Lifehacker's Daily News Roundup (credited to Yahoo News, ironically enough!). Score one for the Garden State!

This is of course wonderful news, as it demonstrates that after an initial period of uncertainty about getting involved in large-scale third party cooperative digitization projects, the big university libraries are beginning to see the benefits of letting the private sector help them with some of the heavy lifting. And from a practical standpoint, the more libraries that get involved with Google Book Search, the better chance they'll have to smooth out some of the rough edges in the existing service.

While it's great to have even just one copy of a rare or out-of-print text available, a lot of these books have experienced some significant wear and tear, so it would be nice to be able to consult multiple copies of the same edition scanned from other libraries. Not only would also vastly improve quality control to have additional copies available online, but from a digital Preservation angle the built-in redundancy would help Google and the library profession guard against any accidental data losses that may crop up in the medium and long-term.

And although as a librarian I naturally frown upon the practice of writing in a library text, in the digital aggregate these marginalia could one day prove as valuable as those found in the Medieval manuscript tradition. Imagine if these handwritten comments were also indexed by Google Book Search, such that when you looked at a particular item in a library's collection you could compare it against annotations made in every other known copy of that book as well. It seems a trivial thing until you reach a certain critical threshold of participation, at which point the study of library book marginalia could easily become a legitimate field of inquiry!

(Hmmm. I think I may have a thesis topic for a future Ph.D. here...)

Chaos

2007-02-05T14:51:00.000-05:00

The transition from semester to semester in an academic library is always an unpredictable thing, especially if you depend on work-study students to fill out your desk schedule as much as we do in Access Services. Sometimes you switch from Fall to Spring with nary a hitch, maybe bumping a shift here or moving some hours there, and other times everything goes to Hell, as if the schedule had been written on an Etch-a-Sketch and someone decided to shake it up for no good reason.

This is one of those latter transitions, I'm sorry to report -- it seems every single one of my work-studies wants to swap out their hours as they settle into their new class schedules, so it'll be a legitimate miracle if I can somehow get them all situated and not have huge Mack Truck-sized gaps in coverage here at the Reading Room Desk. Ah, well! And I thought the end of the semester had been a bumpy ride!

However what this situation does do is give me the impetus and opportunity to hire a new crop of students to help fill out the schedule. Ever since we've had a change of supervisor I seem to acquire a new responsibility with each passing week. Mind you, this is a good thing, as not too long ago I'd begun to worry about stagnation on the job (whereas now the situation is anything but, although I'm still keeping my eye out for a chance to land that first entry-level professional gig). What this means though is that I have to schedule myself off the desk much more than I have up until this point, so I can give myself at least even odds of getting all this extra work done without clocking in overtime.

But that will take more coverage, which means more students. Which of course means more hiring and training, which naturally takes time -- the one thing that is in painfully short supply (and isn't that the reason why I'm doing all of this in the first place?). Oh, well. No one ever said life in the Big Library was going to be a cakewalk...

Some new media business advice

2007-01-18T12:27:00.000-05:00

Hey, content providers! Want to guarantee that your ebook venture will not exist in 5 years? Create a business model by which you force end-users to wait in a queue for the "copy" of the ebook you've sold access to. I'm sorry, maybe I've missed something here, but isn't the whole point of electronic books the fact that patrons can have these items when and where they want it, rather than placing holds and recalls and all of those other annoying dead tree library antics?

Unfortunately NetLibrary doesn't seem to have gotten the memo on this one. A rare misstep for parent company OCLC (short for Online Computer Library Center, Inc.), which is normally out on the cutting edge of the intersection of technology and books, NetLibrary tries to turn back the clock to the days when library patrons would literally come to blows over who got to use the Silverplatter CD-ROM next. It sucked then and it sucks now, especially when there's no reason on God's green earth for a library to agree to such crippling restrictions on ebook resources.

Maybe this is the library world's way of trying to persuade the publishing houses that we librarians are in fact not the enemy, but if the price to be paid for soothing Big Paper's nerves is committing to products that are as user-unfriendly as NetLibrary, maybe it's not worth it. I Googled "netlibrary sucks" just for the hell of it and got some independent confirmation of the kind of frustration its engendered among academic library users. Sez Leigh at Video Game Spaces:

It’s not very functional. It loads each page of the e-book (if you could call it that) separately. This means that, for one thing, it’s very slow to turn the page. It takes anywhere between 1-2 seconds to much longer than that to load the next page, depending on the time of day and the site traffic. The other aspect of the single-page loading feature is that you can’t just save the pdf to your hard drive and view it offline. No, you have to load the slow site with its clunky interface to view the book one page at a time.

That sort of interface is appropriate for something like Amazon, where it makes a lot of sense to put limits on the book viewing because they’re trying to sell a physical copy of the book. However, with an online library service it’s severely limiting. This sort of restricted viewing would be nearly last on my list of choices of how to read a book… slightly below a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book, and slightly above a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book that also has dead insects and vomit stains on the pages.

One of the other things that consistently irritates me about Netlibrary, other than this slow loading time, is that it logs you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. This means that you can’t take a break from reading or eat lunch or whatever unless you first write down the page number, because when you come back you’ll have to go through the lengthy process of loading the web page, logging in, finding your e-book again, and finding the page you were on, which is pretty slow because of the delay in loading each page individually.

It’s also only compatible with Windows, which means that if I want to read a Netlibrary book while I’m at school, I have to find the time to install Windows on my Macbook, which is really annoying. I’ve seen a lot of students with Macs this semester and these are all students that don’t have access to the service because of the poor design and limited compatibility. Also, it also doesn’t work for me in Firefox. I have to instead load Internet Explorer, with all of its security issues. Plus it occasionally hangs for no apparent reason (other than poor design), leaving me to spend a few minutes either trying to get it to load, or starting all over again with logging in, finding my book, and then slowly loading my page number.

Of course, the really insulting thing about Netlibrary is that they put all these restrictions in place at all, when they are a library service. I should be able to save the book to my hard drive, to be viewed offline at my convenience in the pdf reader of my choice. What am I going to do, try to sell it? You have to be a student at the library to even use the service in the first place… and who’s going to be interested in pirating academic books in the first place? It’s not going to be highly sought after like a new blockbuster film or new popular music. They should follow the model of allowing downloading, like article search sites do. Sure, I could download an article and then email it to someone… but who would I email it to that isn’t already a student somewhere — someone who’s already paying for their own access to these services? And then there’s the really insulting element of proprietary control of knowledge in the first place (emphasis mine).

I couldn't have said that any better. Not to sound too much like new media prophet Jeff Jarvis, but it's this simple: evolve or die. Any ebook scheme involving DRM so strict that you might as well check out the paper copy is doomed to failure. End of story. So that's the first and last time I'm going to use NetLibrary -- someone give me a call when publishers finally come to terms with Google and let them offer copyrighted works alongside of their growing library of public domain books, because right now this dog won't hunt. If the purpose of ebooks is to replicate all of the shitty features of paper books, why bother with the new technology at all?

Update: The Wired Blog has a timely post about the library world's flirtation with dubious forms of DRMfor its electronic content, focusing on the OverDrive Media Console. The amazing thing about both this and NetLibrary? No Mac functionality. While I'm by no means an Apple conspiracy theorist, you have to wonder how deals like these get made with public institutions and institutions of higher education.

Strange geographies

2007-01-16T15:30:00.000-05:00

We have somewhat of an odd arrangement for materials on hold here in the Reading Room. Items which have not been picked up yet are assorted first and foremost by the date of arrival: those which come in today are shelved on their own truck (marked "Today's Delivery", natch), which after 24 hours gets bumped one slot over and re-labeled "Yesterday's Delivery". Anything that isn't picked up within those 48 hours then goes to our infamous Cage, where they will spend the next eight days if not claimed before being returned to the Stacks, the Depository, or whencever they originally came.

This would be an ideal arrangement if people picked up most of their materials within those first two days, but quite a bit of it ends up going back into our Cage, which isn't even in the Reading Room but a dedicated section of secure space within the Stacks that we have to access by leaving the room, which means leaving the room unattended when there's only one person working the desk. That and it can be a real pain in the ass to run back and forth to retrieve the material, if the patron has ordered a large quantity of them, not to mention the unnecessary wear and tear we put on the Cage's lock by turning it dozens if not more times a day.

The solution of course would be to install some bookshelves behind the desk, and I have heard rumors that such a thing may actually be in the works. Until then, however, it's the Reading Room dance for me. At least I'm getting my exercise!

(And I haven't even mentioned the twenty-odd stairs just to get in and out of the room...)

I'm just a barcodin' fool

2007-01-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

Although I always sort of kind of regret it when the alarm goes off at 5:30 in the morning, I really do enjoy working on these Monday holidays. The subway is nice and empty and yet still runs reasonably on time, the lines at the Dunkin' Donuts are short, and since we don't have a Depository delivery the desk is fairly quiet unless we get a bevy of visiting researchers trying to take advantage of the rare day off from their own regularly paying jobs as faculty, students, or whatever it is that independent scholars do when they're not writing the next monograph. As it turned out this morning, we didn't get so much as one book page request through lunchtime, nor did we have to retrieve any material from the Cage for Harvard ID holders.

(Yes, we have a Cage. Where else are you going to lock up your problem patrons and/or student werewolves? Okay, just kidding about the problem patrons...)

What we did have, however, was about an entire book truck piled with returns consisting of items without barcodes. Most of these are volumes of periodicals or monographic series, both of which escaped the purview of our "Smart Barcoding Project" (our most recent attempt to get the majority of our holdings online and trackable down to the item level). So when a visiting researcher either pages these things or a Harvard patron asks to have one of them put on hold in the room, it falls on our shoulders to barcode the thing before re-releasing it back into the wild that is the Widener Stacks.

Most of the time we're only dealing with one or two volumes here and there, so my students and staff can fill out a barcode form and I'll generate the item record for it the next morning or thereabouts, but in the case of large amounts of books -- say, an entire run of an obscure 19th century serial -- I'll let the desk workers skip filling out form and just catch the books when they finally get returned. Even though we may lose a little bit of transparency by doing so, this way we can prevent tying up desk workers with filling out dozens of little yellow forms and get the material to our visiting researchers as soon as humanly possible. Besides, most of these items can't leave the Reading Room, let alone the library, so if an emergency arises and we need to locate these materials in a pinch they're not going to have gotten too far away from our Tracing staff.

This morning a couple of visiting researchers' primary source materials were coming off the Hold Shelf, which is why I ended up getting swamped with unbarcoded returns. Thus far I've been able to knock out one of the series, but I'm afraid that the other one may have to wait for tomorrow or later in the week, as not only does it have extremely irregular enumeration (not to mention mostly unhelpful data printed on their spines), but many of the items are experiencing some serious red rot as well and are in generally poor condition overall. So I had better remind myself not to wear light-colored clothing this week!

Size matters

2007-01-12T14:57:00.000-05:00

Noticing that our patrons were constantly jamming our Swingliner trying to staple their photocopies or computer printouts at the Reading Room desk, I asked my boss to purchase a heavy-duty stapler. Unfortunately when we ordered it we also got the absolute largest staples you can possibly get for such a stapler -- 15/16 of an inch, which are meant to staple 200 pages at a time! Try to do any less than that and you end up with an ugly mass of twisted metal instead of a staple, which doesn't exactly help anyone. So needless to say the heavy-duty stapler will be taking a sabbatical while we order some new staples which don't also double as construction rivets.

Do no harm

2007-01-10T16:41:00.000-05:00

As the supervisor of a "medium-rare" book collection, there's nothing more cringeworthy for me than to see one of our items with Post-It notes attached to the pages. While I love Post-Its as much as the next person, even the gentlest of adhesives can leave a chemical residue on the paper that can shave years off the life of a book when the glue breaks down (little critters enjoy eating many kinds of adhesives as well).

So what's the poor bibliophile to do? Use Book Darts! These thin metal clips will not only mark the page you want to remember, but since they're fashioned in the shape of an arrow you can actually use them to highlight the exact line of the text you're interested in as well. The brainchild of a former teacher, librarian, and archivist (as well as a boat builder, woodcutter, and printer!), Book Darts seem to be the perfect alternative to sticky Post-Its or who knows what other kind of horrors employed in the service of marking one's page.

I'm seriously thinking about buying a couple of boxes for the Reading Room and loaning them out as we do our bag weights.

More treasures from the Depository

2007-01-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

Pasted to the front cover of an 1823 copy of the Boston Directory:

Charles Stimpson
Bookbinder

Blank Book and Stationary Store,
No. 30, State Street

At the above Store are kept constantly for sale BLANK BOOKS manufactured of the best materials in the most approved style, and at the lowest cash prices, Wholesale and Retail

ALSO -- Blank Books RULED to any pattern, and bound at short notice
A good assortment of Rogers' and other Pen and Pocket Knives -- Writing Paper of all kinds,
Quills, and ready made Pens,
Wafers, of all colours and sizes,
Wedgwood and other Inkstands,
Ink and Sand Glasses -- Dividers, different sizes,
Middleton's and other warranted Lead Pencils,
Morocco and calf skin Pocket Books and Wallets,
Cloth, hair, nail, teeth and shoe Brushes
Crehore and Ford's best and common Playing Cards
Music Paper, all sizes,
Portable Writing Desks, with brass Clamps,
Bibles, School Books, &c.
Morocco Pocket Books repaired, and made to any pattern,
A general assortment of STATIONARY,
BACK GAMMON and CHESS BOARDS manufactured, and kept constantly for sale, by the dozen or single,
WARRANTED GOLD and SILVER LEAF, by the pack or single book

OLD BOOKS, RE-BOUND, AT SHORT NOTICE.

Feed me!

2007-01-08T12:25:00.000-05:00

La-La-Librarian reports that the MIT Libraries now have RSS Feeds detailing the latest acquisitions in their catalog. What a great idea! This is like having a "Just In" shelf for the entire collection, something that patrons still ask for in these parts. Although the logistics of maintaining such a physical display for Widener would be for all intents and purposes impossible (contrast this however with Lamont, whose smaller collection lends itself nicely to putting its most recent arrivals up on a separate shelf), an RSS feed would be easily enough implemented. I wonder if something like this is already in the works here?

Already I've signed up for MIT's Manga and Graphic Novels feed, in anticipation of my upcoming gig for Magazines for Libraries. The best part is that as a former MIT Student, I'm entitled to get a library card there -- my wife just started working there as well, so she could always do some book paging for me!

Why I prefer snow

2007-01-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

The glass roof of our lovely Reading Room is leaking... again! The part that always gets me is how patrons will come up to inform me that they felt raindrops, but then they'll go right back to work in the exact same spot. I guess if you move your $2500 PowerBook just half a foot to the right, it may not get wet, but really, why do you want to take that kind of chance?

The agony of "de feet"

2007-01-04T12:23:00.000-05:00

Oh gross, there's someone in the room with his shoes off and his feet up on the table. I know it's a comfortable space, but come on now...

So much for my master plan

2006-12-27T14:28:00.000-05:00

When I originally decided to work between the holidays, I made sure I'd have enough coverage to permit me to work "off-desk" for at least half of the week so that I could finally tackle a couple of projects I've been chipping away at during my down time -- some policy stuff, such as exploring the possibility of turning our desk into a full-blown Reserves desk for rare and noncirculating materials, and finally assembling all of my emails about existing procedures into a searchable online archive using our new iSite capabilities. Then my number two staff member called in sick, and I've been tethered to the desk all day today as a result, with the distinct possibility that tomorrow will be the same drill.

It's not that I dislike working the desk in the slightest -- on the contrary, it's the public services nature of the job that I find so enjoyable and energizing. But it's very hard to work on large and open-ended projects here at the desk, since it's impossible not to work with one ear open at all times. Being at the desk means committing a significant portion of one's energies to being available at a moment's notice, preferably a moment or two before the patron even is aware of the fact that he or she needs your assistance, and even on a slow day like today it keeps me from doing anything that is sensitive to interruption or which requires me to have more than one window open on the old desktop. Monitoring the email for requests, questions, and communications with the staff is just about the limit of my attention span while on-desk.

And maybe, of course, the occasional blog post as well...

Another cool bookplate

2006-12-18T10:33:00.000-05:00

From Eighteen hundred and twelve: or, Napoleon's invasion of Russia. An historical romance, by Ludwig Rellstab (New York, Stringer & Townsend, 1849):

Rules of the Boston Library. Franklin Place.

Not more than THREE volumes shall be taken out at the same time, and no books shall be permitted to be taken or used, but by the owner of a share, or his family.

For the first year after the admissions of a Book, a fine of ten cents is incurred for each library day it may be kept beyond the time limited on the cover; and, after the first year, of five cents per library day, if detained beyond five weeks; -- for abuse of Books, the value thereof when new. If any Book be lost, the same must be placed by a similar volume, or by paying the current price of a new volume: if it be part of a set, the remaineder must be tkane, paying the current price of a new set.

THREE DOLLARS assessment must be paid previous to the delivery of any Book, after the annual meeting.

All books must be returned to the Library, for inspection, on the Saturday previous to the annual meeting, which is always on the second Friday of May; the fine for noncompliance is one dollar.

Books must be called for by their numbers, and not by their titles.

The LIBRARY is opened every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons, from 3 to 6 in summwer, and 3 to 5 in winter; -- also, every Saturday forenoon, from 10 to 1 o'cl'k.

No person shall be allowed to go within the railing, or to take down any Book, without the written permission of two Trustees.

The present price of a share is 25 dollars.

Behold my mighty book fort!

2006-12-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

As the semester winds down, you'll inevitably have a day when a whole boatload of books are coming off your hold shelves. Today was that sort of day. Now here in the Reading Room we have two kinds of hold shelves: one for non-circulating items which have not yet been picked up by the patrons who ordered them from remote storage, and another shelf which patrons can check materials out to in order to consult for extended periods of time -- like having a study carrel, only in the reading room itself.

While some mornings I will do the weeding for the former hold shelf, I usually prefer weeding the latter on account of the fact that it gives me a chance to do a little cleanup as I go. Whereas our internal hold shelf is touched only by staff, the other is open to patrons, so there's often a lot of creative filing being done during the day by those with no respect for alphabetical order. In order to preserve the privacy of patrons using the hold shelf, we file their books by initials only, and shelve them spine-down in the room so as to discourage browsing.

For some reason the "last initial first" system of filing bewilders more people than I would have expected, and although it is clear that we prefer that the books be shelved spine-down every morning I have to reorient a goodly percentage of them which have been turned upright by the patron for their own convenience. But that's not nearly as bad as those who shelve rare or non-circulating materials spine-up, putting all sorts of undue stress on what's left of the binding as gravity pulls the freehanging text block downward. I wish we could put flags in the books when patrons do things like this:

"Shelving books spine-up makes Melville Dewey cry!"

Of course I should talk, as when I take tons of books off the shelves as I did this morning I have little choice but to pile materials up in a precarious wall of books, some of which would scarcely survive a fall were my impromptu book fort to come crashing down all of a sudden. The worst is when someone from our Preservation department comes up to drop something off or ask me a question, only to find me peering out from behind the Great Wall of Books™. While bookquakes are in fact quite uncommon -- librarians I believe have a sixth sense for such things as stacking books so as to minimize the chance of toppling -- I always live in fear of aiding and abetting the high crime of bibliocide.

Or not

2006-12-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

Okay, today is statistics day. No, really, I swear!

Shooting down the helicopter parent

2006-12-11T14:46:00.000-05:00

I've heard a lot about these so-called "helicopter parents" in the media, but strangely enough although I work in public services I had yet to encounter one of these people who are unnaturally involved in the minutiae of their children's education until this afternoon, when a parent attempted to order an item from remote storage on behalf of her daughter. Unaware of the fact that we have extremely tight restrictions on who can pick materials up for whom and who is authorized to make requests for library materials on another's behalf, the parent and I got into a fairly Abbott and Costello routine about policy and procedures until she realized that she was better off telling her daughter to order the item from the Depository herself (which she was).

Fortunately this parent seemed in reasonably good humor about the whole thing, but I can see from a service point of view how things could degenerate fairly quickly, to the tune of "I pay so-and-so's tuition, so I think I can damned well order her books for her." I wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg?

Today is a good day to count tiny slips of paper

2006-12-11T14:30:00.000-05:00

I love statistics, but I hate gathering them. From hash-marks on a calendar to counting hold slips and carbon copies of request forms, ever since I took over the Reading Room the first day of the month has become invested with a feeling of dread, as this is the day when I must (on top of everything else I'm doing) cull the stats from all our various bins, binders, and doo-dads taped to the desk.

Counting them often takes another week or so -- longer if it's a particularly busy time of the year, as the run-up to the holidays inevitably is at any university. While I try to give myself at least a couple of hours away from the public desk so that I can attend to such matters, recently my afternoons have been taken up by other departmental concerns, with the result that it's taken me ten days to sit down and crunch these blasted statistics.

Part of the problem, of course, is the manner in which the stats are originally collected. Too many historical processes have lead to all of these physical forms of tabulation which are not easily replaced with a digital equivalent. I have done my best to replace unnecessary paper files, but there is a certain critical threshold beyond which I would require significant outside assistance in order to get rid of some of the more outdated methods of statistics-gathering.

Fortunately, the new supervisor seems not only willing to help, but capable of doing so as well. So perhaps my days of counting little slips of paper are numbered! A man with too many paper cuts on his fingers can only hope...

Satisfaction

2006-11-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

I've been having a nice little streak of what I like to call "job satisfaction days", when I actually feel like I'm in the right place and doing the right thing, instead of compulsively checking the RSS feeds for library jobs and wondering whether I should go back to graduate school for my doctorate. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I've never been happier with my writing efforts, just finishing up a successful first attempt at NaNoWriMo, finally getting to the editing phase of the novel I'd been working on for three years, and already several chapters into a third effort as well. But I think it's more than that. I think my hope that this job could be grown into something more has gone from being just that to a genuine possibility, making me excited about the prospect of hanging around here for the forseeable future and seeing what I can make of it. If that isn't satisfaction, I don't know what is!

(Okay, so I still compulsively check the jobline feeds. But that's just because I have a problem...)

Just when you think you've seen it all

2006-11-28T09:14:00.001-05:00

How clueless do you have to be to use a Snickers wrapper as a bookmark?

Google and copyright: back to the future?

2006-11-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

Recent proposed changes to Australian copyright law have brought an ancient conundrum -- in terms of the World Wide Web -- back to the fore regarding intellectual property rights and search engines. As early as 1996, when Google was still being run out of a garage on the Stanford University campus, the search engine was generating complaints from website owners, who accused Google (née Backrub) of "stealing" their online content.

Insofar as Backrub's approach to indexing the Internet was entirely new, the content owners could be forgiven for their suspicious response. Whereas previous search engines merely used top-level keywords to generate their results, Backrub looked at as many pages on a website that it could get its little spidery appendages on, so when some robot hailing from the Stanford Computer Science Department starting requesting every last blasted scrap of html on the web servers of museums and other early online resources it set off all kinds of warning bells. Fortunately the folks at Stanford and Google were able to head off any legal action by assuring the content producers that their page requests were not an attempt at massive virtual theft but merely a means to an end that would benefit all parties involved.

But fast forward ten years to the present: now that virtually every content producer out there is also an online content producer as well, the stakes are completely different than they were back in 1996. While the gentleman's agreement that Google had with the people whose websites they had copied for the purpose of indexing now is still mutually beneficial, the owners of virtual intellectual property -- riding a wave of a decade of successful lobbying on their own behalf internationally -- are now attempting to renege on their end of the symbiotic bargain, having somehow convinced themselves that they don't need things like Fair Use and Net Neutrality now that the digital age has come into its own.

At the heart of this conflict is the issue of control. Content producers/providers have a vested interest in things like portals and "sticky" websites, whereas increasingly users just want what they were looking for in the first place, thank you very much. This isn't to say that they're not interested in serendipitous finds, but that they would rather make these discoveries through disinterested parties like social networking software and tags rather than via product synergy or payola schemes. This is why MP3's are now the basic unit of music instead of the album, because why pay for the other eleven tracks when all you want is the one you like? By the same token this is why online newspapers and other periodicals vigorously oppose the practice of "deep linking", which takes you straight to the article you want to see rather than forcing you through a front page portal loaded with all the other crap they'd like to look at as well.

Who will ultimately prevail in this tug-of-war? While the content producers have managed to rig the legal table fairly well in their favor, even they are beginning to realize that even if you have the law on your side that doesn't mean the public will fall in line and behave as you wish them to -- something that even the recording industry finally seems to get. Even the most hard-line intellectual property types are starting to understand that when millions of people turn to "illegal" methods for acquiring the information and online commodities they desire this represents a failure of the market to deliver a desirable option, and offers an opportunity for innovation rather than representing a threat to Western Civilization as We Know It™.

In the case of this proposed Australian law, observers are not exaggerating when they say that if enacted it will effectively cripple the Internet as we know it, just as the legal blocking of such efforts of Google Book Search will only hurt authors rather than help them. Despite every effort on the part of the old guard to paint Google as a villain, the public continues to reward the search company for understanding our needs and working to meet them; and though it may be that Google's legal challenges may be far from over, I think at the end of the day it is they that will still be standing.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the original story link!

I don't need no stinkin' IT department*

2006-11-27T10:20:00.000-05:00

For some reason the staff printer at the Reading Room Desk hates me. Every time I so much as sneeze the networked printer decides either to unselect itself as my default printer or disappear from the network altogether, prompting me either to call IT or hope that left to its own devices the problem will eventually correct correct itself. I was hoping that these troubles were a function of our former printer, an HP 1200 that was so old by office standards that we were one major malfunction away from a mandatory upgrade, but no sooner did my elation at the arrival of a splufty new HP 1320 peak than I realized that the old printer's animus against me had trickled down to its replacement via some form of digital Aeschylean blood guilt.

I had blissfully forgotten that I had left my printer situation unresolved when I abandoned the office last Wednesday at 5, unwilling to saddle the IT department with yet another call from our unit before the extended holiday weekend (we're already on the frequent flier list thanks to our Bookeye overhead scanner, a totally awesome piece of technology that nevertheless needs lots of care and attention due to almost constant use when the library is open). Opening up the room this morning I recalled when I tried to print something that I'd punted the issue, and was just about to reach for the phone when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Hadn't the IT guy shown me how to figure out how to configure a networked printer before? The details were fuzzy but I sat down and tried to remember exactly what he'd done, and lo and behold, after only a few errors I cranked out a test page and did a little victory dance for the bleary-eyed Reading Room regulars.

Score one for the information professional!

* Yes, I do.

Wow, that's lazy

2006-11-20T12:55:00.000-05:00

It's bad enough that I don't take the stairs when I'm in the Stacks on a book page unless I'm headed in the same direction as gravity, but I have no idea why I occasionally press the automatic door opener on my way out of Pusey 2 back into D-Level of Widener. Not only doesn't it save me any time, but I almost always grow impatient with it and force it all the way open manually anyway. Sooooo lazy:

Homer: You guys work on the movie?
Teamster: You sayin' we're not working?
Homer: Oh, I always wanted to be a Teamster.  So lazy and surly...
          mind if I relax next to you?

(From "Radioactive Man", Simpsons episode 130, originally aired September 24, 1995)

One Year Later

2006-11-09T11:26:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted to NEXGENLIB on Google Groups)

Question: So if you have the option between a paraprofessional position in the library you would kill to work in, versus a professional position in a library you would like to work in, would it be better to choose the professional one even though it's not in the type of library you want?

I have wrestled with this very same question for the past year or so, so I hope you don't mind if I share my experience in trying to find an answer. I've been working as a library assistant since 1998 (and for three years before that as well, from 1992-1995, with a break in between jobs to go back to school in order to finish my BA), so when I finally took the plunge and went to library school I assumed that the first thing I'd do upon graduation would be to leave my current parapro gig and land an entry-level librarian position.

But no sooner did my final semester approach than a job opened up several grades above me in the department I was working in. Yes, in relative terms it represented one heck of a raise, an opportunity to get some management experience, and work with rare library materials and visiting scholars from all over the world -- and at what I consider to be one of my "dream libraries", no less -- but it was still a paraprofessional position. What to do?

On the one hand, I thought of the numerous reasons not to apply for the job: not only would I be working for less pay and with fewer responsibilities than a professional librarian, but I would be taking a perfectly good parapro position off the market for someone else, with no guarantee of making the transition from library assistant to librarian no matter how many years I clocked within the system. And darn it, didn't I deserve a professional job? Hadn't I just finished my MLS after years of thinking about it and several difficult semesters finally doing it?

But then I thought about the reasons *to* apply: while the pay and responsibilities were less than I had hoped for as an entry-level professional, I would be making a full-time salary that added up to more money than I'd ever brought home in my entire life (at the time I was working a half-time but benefitted position and making up the shortfall in pay by teaching adult ed and staying home with my daughter a couple days a week rather than pay extra for a full week of childcare), and for the first time in my career as a library employee would be directly responsible for managing a crew of roughly a dozen staff members, work-study students, and temps. And although it was true that I knew all too well that "getting a foot in the door" didn't count for nearly as much as it used to in academic libraries, it seemed silly to pass up an opportunity to stay just because it didn't give me the title I wanted.

The ethical dimension of the question was not so easily resolved, however. Wasn't I contributing to the watering-down of the profession by "settling" for a parapro job whose duties and responsibilities read very similarly to that of many of the entry-level librarian positions I was scoping out elsewhere in the region? Moreover, at the same time didn't my entrance into the applicant pool for non-professional library work unfairly raise the bar of qualification for other would-be parapro job seekers? And hadn't I *sworn* to myself many times before that I didn't want to contribute to either of these problems upon graduation and instead take the high road, however far that might take me from my ideal library in the short or medium (or possibly even long) term?

Did I mention that we really, really needed the money at the time, though?

To be fair, I think the ethics are more complicated than that. While libraries have indeed enjoyed a long period during which there has been a somewhat strict delineation between professional and non-professional positions, it wasn't always that way, and perhaps we should view the modern trend towards deprofessionalization as an inevitable correction in the always-fluid relationship between labor and management. We are by no means the only professionals for whom times are currently less than ideal, so perhaps the changing realities of the library are less a function of choices such as mine and more a reflection of the early 21st century American workplace -- more public service, more flexibility with one's job definition, more ambiguity overall.

So I took the job -- and promptly freaked out for the next few months. What had I done? How could I have so little faith in my own abilities? Was I dooming myself to a life or paraprofessional hell? And pity my poor wife, who got to feel both frustrated at my own turmoil and guilty that we as a family had put ourselves in a financial position whereby we had little choice but to take the proverbial bird in the hand rather than hope for the two in the bush! I told my boss that I was actively looking for work as an entry-level professional (I'm lucky that he understood my situation and didn't begrudge me one bit) and blanketed the Northeast Corridor with applications, even getting a callback or two along the way. Still, nothing materialized that made it worth my while to leave, so I just kept looking for jobs and feeling sorry for myself.

But as time went on, you know what? I started to realize that the job I currently had, while not professional in name, certainly had the potential to be a lot more than I had originally made it out to be. As I worked my way through an entire academic year, I began to feel more attuned to the rhythms of the library's workflow, and more specifically I started to appreciate what role I had played in not only making my department function not just smoothly but better than I had originally found it. I began to reflect on the faces I'd seen over the year, the research I had assisted, the problems I had solved, and the knowledge I had acquired along the way. And I realized only then that after almost twelve months of pining for my big chance to make myself as a librarian, I had already done exactly that, title or no title.

We'll see what happens next...

Kind of a long and rambling post, I know. But I guess the long story made short is: if the alternative to taking a parapro job is not working in a library at all, then you should by all means choose the option that will allow you to make money doing something that you are passionate about. Whatever the ethics of the situation, your education and skills will serve you well on the job, and perhaps open up opportunities in the workplace that may not have otherwise been available -- for example, I have recently given a couple of talks to various departments in my library about the Google Book Search service, as I had taken a course in library school which had focused on Google's digitization efforts and fashioned myself into something of a guru on the subject.

To make the short story even shorter: do it. Because life is too short not to be working in a library, in whatever capacity.

Flying solo

2006-11-08T12:02:00.000-05:00

I've yet to find work-study coverage for Wednesday mornings, which has thus far been the most difficult shift to schedule during the week. It's funny -- you have morning people and you have evening people, you have weekend people and you have the Monday people, but I have yet to see someone who is a genuine Wednesday Person. Sure, it's "Hump Day", but that's just an attempt to sugar-coat a day which has no redeeming values whatsoever. Those of us in the 9-to-5 workforce are obliged to show up on Wednesdays like any other day, but those who do shift work have no such incentive to be here.

Fortunately this desk can be manned by one individual, although visiting researchers can make it so that that solitary desk worker doesn't get a moment to sit down and catch his breath or even blog (Dewey forbid!). It does make the day go by in a blink of the eye, however. All you have to do is stay hydrated, keep smiling, and blog when no one's asking for their stuff.

It melts in your hands

2006-11-02T14:55:00.000-05:00

Yick. I love old books, but I hate when their bindings crumble into black or red powder that is a pain in the ass to wash off your hands (or out of your shirt!)...

Feeling my age

2006-11-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

This is another one of those situations that they never prepare you for in library school: I'm at the Circ Desk downstairs when a gaggle of young female students (all wearing matching t-shirts, no less) come running in my general direction. The leader has a piece of paper clutched in her hands that she pushes at me with a cryptic explanation...

"We're not allowed to look this up on the computer. Can you help us?"

Hmm. I glance down at the paper, which appears to be a checklist of short-answer questions -- the kind that don't generally appear on college exams.

"It's a scavenger hunt." The ladies giggle. "We need the answer to this question here."

I read the indicated question and immediately turn a bright shade of red (or, more appropriately, crimson) -- it asks the scavengees to locate a book about the time-honored act of sexual relations in the library stacks. The book they're supposed to find is none other than Michael Griffith's Bibliophilia, a book that I've actually checked out from Widener myself and read, but right then and there I'm drawing a complete blank. It's bad enough that I'm now twice the age of the average freshman, so the prospect of even beginning to find an answer to this question just feels like twenty different kinds of wrong.

All I can do is shuffle, stutter, and pray for an unannounced fire drill when one of the student desk workers takes pity on me and deftly handles the question for me. Thank God! As the young women check the item off their list and continue their scavenger hunt elsewhere, I thank the student employee, who laughs off my sheepish grin and my still-flushed face with her characteristic good humor. This helps me feel infinitesimally less mortified, but nevertheless...

Geez, I'm getting old.

We don't judge you here

2006-11-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

...okay maybe just a little.

The only time I ever see library patrons get sheepish here is when they come to pick up material that is pop-culture in nature, be it the Complete Far Side folio edition, season two of Felicity, or the latest graphic novel to grace our ever-burgeoning collection. It's interesting. We have an entire library's worth of Nazi ephemera and other equally repugnant (if invaluable from a research perspective) items which people check out and use without so much as batting an eye, but the same patrons will invariably make whatever lame apologies they can if the item waiting on the Hold Shelf for them is a comic book or television series on DVD.

It's okay. This is the 21st century. Even at Harvard, we're allowed to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Really!

Interesting find

2006-11-01T12:03:00.000-05:00

From a bookplate pasted onto the front inside cover of volume 3 of Travels through the United States of North America, the country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797; by the Duke de La Rochefoucault Liancourt (London, R. Phillips, 1800):

Rules of the Boston Library Society.

Not more than one folio, two quartos, or three of smaller size, shall be taken out at the same time; and for each set that is not returned in five weeks, a fine at the rate of three shillings per set, for each week, as long as it is detained.

If any book or books are abused or lost, the same to be replaced by a similar volume or volumes, or the current price for the same to be paid. The delinquent, in such case, will have his privilege suspended till this rule is complied with.

The Library to be open every Thursday and Saturday in the afternoon, from 3 to 5 in Winter, and from 3 to 6 in Summer.

If a subscriber lends a book, his privilege shall be suspended one year.

That one dollar be paid by each subscriber at the annual meeting in March, or when he first takes any book from the Library after the March meeting in every year; and the Librarian, in no case, deliver any Book to any person a second time, without the said assessment's being paid.

That all Books be returned to the Library on or before the 15th of February, in order for inspection by the annual Committee; -- and that delinquents be subject to a fine of one dollar for each set not to be returned.

A number of very valuable books are deposited, which may be examined without being removed from the Library-Room.

Having never heard of this Boston Library Society, I did a Google Search and found the following historical blurb in a finding aid of the Society's archives currently residing at the Boston Athenaeum:

The Boston Library Society (1792-1939) was the earliest proprietary library in the Boston area. It provided residents of Boston with access to the works of American authors, as well as to the classics and to European literature. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Boston Library Society began to lose its proprietors and subscribers to the Boston Public Library. The reduction in its membership made it difficult for the Society to expand its collection and maintain its library. In 1939 the proprietors were forced to close the doors of the Boston Library Society and agreed to operate under the auspices of the Boston Athenaeum. The Boston Library Society Archives consist of records, preserved by the Society and acquired by the Boston Athenaeum, that document the activity of nearly every division of library operations. They occupy a storage space of about thirty linear feet.

Very cool! Two observations about the aforementioned rules:

1. The provision against lending a library volume to a third party is interesting. So I guess file-sharing has always been frowned upon...

2. I particularly like the use of the term 'delinquent' to denote library patrons with overdue or missing materials. Can we bring that back perhaps?

But back to the book itself -- it's a thing of beauty! Each volume of the set includes fold-out maps of North America circa 1800 which are treasures in and of themselves. How amazing that I get to peek at these items for the first time before anyone else in the library, and often for the first time in decades. I wonder how these books came to be in Widener's collection? A search through the Boston Athenaeum's catalog shows that they have a copy of the 2-volume first edition (printed in 1799) in its Rare Book Room, so perhaps when the Athenaeum inherited the Boston Library Society's collection they didn't feel that they needed the 2nd edition as well.

Who knows? Perhaps the Athenaeum never owned this book at all, but it found its way from the BLS collection to Harvard by another route entirely. Perhaps some 'delinquent' borrowed it, never returned it, and later donated to the Widener Library long after the Boston Library Society had ceased to exist. That's a lot of speculation from a bookplate, and I'm sure someone here at Harvard is in a much better position to answer this question than I am, but it's an interesting way to pass the time this morning nonetheless...

I'm fixin a hole where the rain gets in

2006-10-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

Or at least putting a bucket under it...

It's back to basics here in the Reading Room, as I pull a rare Saturday morning shift to cover for my regular evening and weekend staffer. Astute readers of the Library Ass will remember that I used to work Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at the Circ Desk, so while I'm not a stranger to the Big Library on the weekends, it took something of a Herculean effort to drag my sorry behind out of bed this morning nonetheless.

As it turned out, however, it was a Very Good Thing (tm) that I made it in, for the following reasons:

1. The person who was supposed to open the Circ Desk early forgot her I.D., and was stuck in limbo at the guard desk until I was able to bring her in as my "guest".

2. One of the student staffers who was supposed to assist with opening got a jump start on Daylight Savings Time and slept in an hour later as a result.

3. The weekend Circ staff member who took over my position last year broke her arm last night coming to work. Although she did the heroic thing and came in this morning, she was still in a large amount of pain and was in no condition whatsoever to work.

4. My student staffer was a little late getting in, which would have meant that the room (although not very busy at all) wouldn't have opened on time.

5. Did I mention the hole where the rain gets in?

One of the features of our multi-million dollar Reading Room is that the glass ceiling tends to leak in driving rain. Since this is New England in the Fall, that only happens every time it rains, so whenever I see dark green on the Doppler I instinctively think of the room and whether the water has found yet another way through our defenses.

The truly annoying thing is that our Reading Room is a mirror image of another enclosed courtyard on the opposite side of the library which by virtue of not being under anyone's specific jurisdiction tends not to get checked for similar leaks in foul weather. As this room is the final resting place of our print copy of the National Union Catalog, it seems only proper that I make a point of wandering over when it rains to make sure that it doesn't succumb to the elements, as death by neglect and obsolescence are bad enough as it is.

Goodbye, but not farewell

2006-10-28T10:06:00.000-04:00

I think I may have changed my mind about the moving the blog elsewhere, at least for the time being.

Playing the heavy

2006-05-10T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'll freely admit it -- I'm not the confrontational type. Given the decision between calling someone out on their mistakes and letting it slide, I will almost always opt for the latter course of action. Call it the path of resistance, call it the coward's way out, that's just how I'm wired, and fighting it is a difficult thing for me to do.

Unfortunately in my newfound role as "management" (a.k.a. The Man), I find myself forced to fight my instincts on a daily if not hourly basis. It's hard enough to figure out when to draw the line with tardy work-study students and staffers creatively interpreting our policies and procedures, but most trying of all is when I have to deal with library patrons.

Take now, for example: as the end of the semester approaches, our normally placid and tranquil reading room fills up with students desperate for a quiet place to study for exams or bang out that pesky term paper. Which is all well and good, provided that they don't poach the tables that are reserved for people working with the rare and noncirculating material which are the reason for the room's existence. But suppose it's a slow day and the kids have nowhere else to sit -- do you keep the reserved seats empty, or do you let people use them to study, knowing full well that you may have to ask them to leave if a visiting scholar shows up?

Our other perennial problem is food and drink. While our patrons are pretty good about not bringing in a meatball sub or a tray of nachos from the local 7-11 and chowing down next to the Gutenberg Bible, they're not so observant of our beverage policy, which permits only water (and only in covered containers). A generation raised to expect a Starbucks in every bookstore is going to want to bring in his or her liquid of choice, and while other areas of the library have relented somewhat on the enforcement of this rule we as a "medium rare" books room try to toe the line on this issue.

But how far does one go? I'll stop people whom I see entering the room with a cup of coffee or tea, but is it a valuable use of my time to roam around and bust those who got past me when I wasn't looking? While I believe it's a good idea not to allow any kinds of liquids into a library environment, knowing full well that accidents inevitably happen, do these accidents happen often enough to justify such draconian measures?

Some would say yes, but only a person who doesn't supervise for a living thinks that absolutism is any way to run an operation. I know it's a little trite to say that you have to pick your battles, but this is unavoidable in management unless you want to spend every last second of your day correcting the behavior of staff and patrons alike. No, things may not be exactly the way that you want them to be, but if that is your goal not only are you never going to be satisfied, but you are going to make everyone who works under you absolutely miserable in your pointless pursuit of "perfection".

This is not to say that you shouldn't strive to do things well and constantly be on the lookout for ways to do them even better. However, it does mean letting the little things go if they don't really matter in the long run. Of course, the hard part is learning out how to divine which details to sweat, and which not to. But that's another post!

Ass no more!

2006-04-05T14:09:00.000-04:00

Well, sort of. Although in October I was promoted to the job of Phillips Reading Room Supervisor here at the Widener Library, and in December I completed the coursework for my Master's degree in Library Science -- making me official at least as far as the credentials are concerned -- technically speaking I'm still a library assistant, albeit a very well-paid one. So I guess the moniker of Library Ass still applies for now. While I'm actively looking for the big professional break even as we speak (I've sent out a nice boatload of resumes and even scored an interview), at the same time it wouldn't be the end of the world if I stuck around here long enough to finish my History degree and perhaps figure out whether I want to commit myself to a Ph.D. or not.

So this isn't quite turning out to be the "Dear John" post I thought it was going to be. Curiouser and curiouser...

Do I dare to eat a peach?

2005-05-21T14:21:00.000-04:00

Or apply for my first professional job, for that matter?

A position has opened up over at Salem State College Library--they're looking for a full-time reference and instruction librarian. Now while I'm not quite finished with the MLS, I'm wondering if I'm close enough to the end to go ahead, take a chance, and throw my hat in the ring (especially since I'll probably be done with my summer semester by the time they'd get around to offering anyone the job, which would mean I'd at that point only be one course away from having my MLS). It might be interesting as a dry run for the Fall if nothing else, but who knows...

Guess I'd better start polishing that resume!

Now with less ass!

2005-05-15T18:42:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a last-minute change in registration (switching my History of the Book class from history to library science credit), I've been able to leapfrog my way to being 5/8's of the way done with my MLS. Two more courses this summer and one in the fall and I'll be 100% librarian--a truly weird thought, considering I've spent ten of the past twelve years working as a library assistant. Professional librarianship is just around the corner now, and while I'm excited as all get-out to embark upon this career path, the question of exactly how I'll get there from here is beginning to become less and less theoretical and more dauntingly practical every time I think about it.

Of course I'd be tickled pink if I could stay here at Harvard--better yet at Widener!--but I'm more than prepared for the possibility that there won't be any rooms at the inn when I start my job search in the Fall. I know a lot of people graduate from Simmons and take library assistant jobs simply to get their feet in the door of the Harvard system, but I refuse to make a lateral move like that after all of this work. So I'm either moving up or moving out. Until I finish with my history degree we're going to keep the job search local, but if by thesis time I still haven't landed a decent professional gig we will expand our horizons. The wife has made it clear that she won't tolerate anything beyond the Northeast, but there may be some wiggle room in the case of California or Chicago.

Or perhaps Seattle...

Dead time

2005-04-24T13:32:00.000-04:00

Our system is down.

The IT folks have been running regular system upgrades on Sundays for the past couple of weeks, during which both the public catalog and our "back-end" functions are unavailable. Although previously they've been finishing the upgrades well before we open at noon, this Sunday I guess things didn't quite go as planned, and thus far we have been dead in the water for about an hour and a half, with no clear indication of when the system will be restored.

Fortunately we have backup procedures for checking out books by hand when the Circulation module goes down (a more frequent occurrence in the days when the system was new), but our patrons--who depend on the OPAC to find the materials they need in the stacks--are just plain screwed right now, although I have been encouraging people to go upstairs and try their hand at the old card catalog on the third floor.

No takers yet on that decidedly low-tech approach, however, even though the catalog is good for materials as late as the early to mid 1990's. How quickly we lose our nerve to do things "the old-fashioned way"!

It's not just me

2005-04-23T14:25:00.000-04:00

Checked out books to a classmate of mine from History of the Book, and there seems to be an emerging consensus that the second half of the course has not been nearly as interesting as the first half was. Whereas earlier in the term we were watching papermaking documentaries from the Czech Republic and casting our own hot lead type, now we have to endure three-hour lectures about preservation and conservation management and collection development, topics that are not just classroom Nyquil per se but ones we'll all be forced to cover again in various other library science courses. What made this class interesting was its novelty. Even an inspired lecturer such as Professor Berger can only do so much with the material beyond a certain point...

I wish we could have lingered over the "hands-on" stuff and jettisoned the lessons what would be duplicated elsewhere. Let's cast more type, make some paper, print our own folios. That would have been cool. But to chase a strong opening to the semester with canned lectures about library operations is just a recipe for disappointment.

Negative feedback

2005-04-23T13:41:00.000-04:00

I think I may have to have a little talk with the weekday help.

For the past few months I've been helping the 9-to-5'ers with their Hold and Recall processing, picking up whatever slack which remains by Friday afternoon and putting a dent in the workload that used to sit all weekend until Monday. All in all it's a couple hours of work each day to process the incoming Hold Shelf items and weed away those that have expired. It's a job I don't really mind doing, as it gives me something to do other than my homework or random websurfing, but as time has gone on I've realized that the amount of books waiting for me when I punch in on Friday afternoon has been steadily growing over time. Whereas it used to take me about two hours to get the Saturday processing done, sometimes I find myself working all the way up until my noontime lunch break to get it all squared away.

The culprit, I suspect, is the weekday processor, who has come to rely on the fact that whatever she doesn't get around to on Fridays will magically be taken care of by me over the weekend. While I don't mind having my efforts recognized and valued, it's quite another thing to start slacking because you know it won't be your problem anymore at the end of the day. But this puts me in somewhat of a dilemma--do I make an issue out of this or not? Given the nature of the problem, there's no way to address it anonymously. Even if I ask my boss to be discreet about bringing up the issue, it doesn't change the fact that I'm the only possible person to complain about it in the first place.

Ah, the hidden price of being an overachiever...

You can't bring that in here!

2005-04-22T18:26:00.000-04:00

Ah, the paradoxes of library rules and regulations:

Cameras are not allowed in the library, unless they're digital cameras and you're using them to take pictures of library materials.

Cell phones are not permitted in the library except in designated areas, unless you're using the phone in a non-verbal capacity (which presumably includes camera phones!).

As technology blends the features of one hand-held device with another, it becomes harder and harder to know when to draw the line with a patron. For example: this afternoon I was getting ready to call out a woman standing in line at the Circ Desk for using her cell phone when it became apparent that she was merely checking her voicemail.

Is it merely an infraction of our phone ban if you're not talking? Common sense would say no, but we have been so well-trained to bark at violators of our policy at this point that it's hard to catch oneself before saying something.

Crunch time

2005-04-22T17:55:00.000-04:00

Because I've been robbing Peter to pay Paul of late as far as my library school classwork is concerned, I'm going to have to make up for spending the past week on my History of the Book paper (which I still managed to turn in late--d'oh!) by becoming Super Terrific Happy Cataloging Man for the weekend. I fear that my overconfidence during the earlier weeks of the latter class may have gotten the better of me, as now I'm a few lessons behind and staring at the prospect of a final exam I have not yet even begun to prepare for.

Didn't take me long to find my old grad school form, eh?

Ready reference

2005-04-22T17:08:00.000-04:00

In case you've just been unfrozen from a glacier, let me be the first to tell you about Google Maps. Not only do you get a click-and-drag interface which is 1000% more user-friendly than Mapquest, but with the push of one button you can toggle between maps and satellite photos of virtually any region in the United States.

Not too shabby, although it would be nice to have scrollable maps for... um... the rest of the world? C'mon, Google!

In the meantime, why not take a gander at where I work.

(Hint: It's the big honking building in the center of the map!)

Because you* demanded it

2005-04-22T16:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a long semester.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm almost done with back-to-back-to-back consecutive terms, but I'm beginning to feel a little winded. Despite my best intentions, March and April have been chock full of enough real-life crises that there just haven't been enough hours in the day to get everything done on time and to my satisfaction. I guess this is the price one pays for going to graduate school while raising a toddler and trying to teach two nights a week on the side!

The funny thing is that last semester was objectively speaking more brutal than this one, although I seemed to weather it better. This has me somewhat worried about the upcoming intensive summer semester, but I fear not, fellow Library Asses--I have no intention of giving up the ship now, no matter how many icebergs are in the channel ahead of me...

* You know who you are!

Why I should be a reference librarian

2005-01-21T17:36:00.000-05:00

Question: "Do you know where I can find a good online calendar?"

Answer: www.timeanddate.com

Another Circ Desk blog

2005-01-17T23:24:00.000-05:00

Over at Librarian Ire.

Mmm. Disgruntled goodness...

Comments

2005-01-17T23:21:00.000-05:00

I've now enabled comments here. Be gentle!

Hurrah for technology

2005-01-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

Day Four:

Today was the big Technology Showcase, so I dutifully dug the car out of the snow and motored on in hopes of catching a presentation or two. I ended up only going to one - a demonstration of the Ebrary electronic resource, of which Harvard is a recent subscriber - that nonetheless turned out to be a good choice, as not only did I learn about something with immediate practical application at the Circ Desk, but my supervisor just happened to be in attendance as well. So I got points for actually being seen at the conference, a big plus considering I was doing so on paid release time from my job.*

Ebrary is fairly neat. It functions like a portal for your pdf resources, providing a system of organization and the ability to search within the text of the collection just as Amazon now lets you "Search in the Book" (only with Ebrary if your library "owns" a virtual copy of the book, you can read not just a few select pages but the whole damned thing). Looking towards the future, Ebrary wants to then make these internal networks browsable and searchable by other academic institutions and presumably the public at-large, leading eventually to a giant system of pdf content that is easy to manage and interrogate.

Of particular interest was the representative's teaser statement that Ebrary was attempting to secure the rights to make the text of theses and dissertations globally searchable - something that, if true, would be a real achievement. Right now that extremely lucrative (to the tune of $50 per thesis!) business is locked up by UMI/Proquest, and it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone else were to try and muscle in on their territory!

The Ebrary rep was using Standford University as their model client for the display, perhaps a poor choice owing to the fact that the network connection was either slow or kept timing out during the demonstration, an ongoing technical difficulty which greatly undermined the overall effect. But something which did strike me was that apparently Stanford checked its physical holdings against Ebrary's library and found that a third of it overlapped! The implication was that subscribing to Ebrary would therefore be advantageous to Stanford, which makes sense, but it's a fact that could easily be turned around in a Collection Development meeting with library administrators: if Ebrary can provide such a good collection of titles remotely to multiple simultaneous users (a trick pulled off by hosting each page separately), then why bother buying the paper copies in the first place or conserve the overlapping items already owned?

I guess that's always the double-edged sword of digitization and ebooks. Right now it seems that institutions like Stanford and Harvard are simply delighted enough to have the new technology not to start putting the screws to its traditional paper collection. But how long will the honeymoon last, I wonder...

* I also got to mention to my supervisor that the Annual Meeting in Chicago this summer will include a two-day "Meeting Within a Meeting" geared specifically towards library support staff. He said it sounded like a good opportunity for me and promised to help wheedle some money out of Harvard for the registration and travel expenses. Boo-yah!

"I'm your biggest fan!"

2005-01-16T16:16:00.000-05:00

Day Three:

Okay, I admit it. I'm a total geek. I spent the morning wandering around the vendor exhibits looking for companies whose products I've used at the library and telling their amused representatives how awesome I think they are.

I know - sad, isn't it? But at least that way I can make small talk while I raid their booths for free stuff...

Good news! One of the OCLC people told me that they'd be web-streaming their lecture about gaming and technological literacy in a few weeks. We truly live in an age of miracle and wonder.

Tomorrow's the Technology Showcase. Assuming I can dig the car out of the snow early enough in the morning, I'm planning to go and check out all the new and shiny stuff that'll put us all out of work within the next five to ten years. True story: I had stopped by one of the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) vendor booths yesterday and made a joking comment about how it was going to eliminate my job and all of a sudden the rep I'd been talking to and her two colleagues went into total crisis mode, insisting that RFID was all about "freeing me up to do the more important work" and not about layoffs at the Circulation Desk.

Yikes! Defensive much?

Truth is, I'm less concerned with RFID decimating the circ staff - let's face it, checking books in and out is menial labor and a recipe for future repetitive stress injury to boot (I enjoy my time at Widener but that has little to do with the scanning and stamping!)- than I am worried about the technology's potential for abuse when it comes to patron privacy. Of course this is a general concern of RFID, and not just something restricted to libraries. Last July's issue of Wired has a fairly good assessment of RFID's promises and pitfalls, and even addresses the lingering fear that it might just be the Mark of the Beast as promised in the Book of Revelation.

Now that's what I should have asked the vendor about!

It's Midwinter, baby!

2005-01-15T20:18:00.000-05:00

Day ~~One~~ Two:

At long last, the ALA Midwinter Meeting is here, and I'm psyched as all getout.

Although I'd planned to drop in on Friday and see what was what, my daughter came down with a fever and I was obliged to stick around the house (she's fine today though!) and miss an interesting-looking symposium offered by OCLC called Gaming and the Significance for Information Literacy Learning.

This being the age of the blog, however, I was already able to get the gist of the meeting from the PLA Blog, which is being updated continuously live from the con by members of the Public Library Association. Nifty!

Today I arrived in Boston around noonish and was immediately overwhelmed by the sea of librarians and exhibits, although I regained my bearings enough to snap up some free library schwag and chew the fat with some of the vendors. I made a beeline for the Economist Intelligence Unit to thank them for putting out their unbeatable series of country profiles and reports, and found out that the CIA World Factbook - the source most reference librarians go to first - actually cribs most of their information from the EIU! They also gave me a complimentary copy of the Economist and a free mousepad. I always wondered why I liked these guys so much. Ever since my days at Dewey Library at MIT, where as the social science, economics, and management library they paid for the extremely expensive full run of the series (and kept them at the Reserve desk, where I just so happened to work!), I've been a fan of the Economist Intelligence Unit and went out of my way to push their resources to my reference classmates.

Then I stumbled upon the booth for CISTI - the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information - and again I had to offer my gratitude, as CISTI's Urgent Service saved my bacon countless times when I was working for the Countway Library of Medicine as the chief interlibrary borrower. The outstanding performance of CISTI (and the British Library's Document Supply Centre) demonstrate just how good public libraries can be when properly supported and amply funded, and lays bare the ideological insistence upon market-driven, private sector solutions for information science in the 21st Century. Would that American libraries paid closer attention to these institutions!

Next I had a chance to speak with a representative from a Belgian company called Brepolis that is digitizing Latin authors and their works from antiquity to modern times, a remarkably similar endeavor to what my employers at The Greek Institute are doing with Greek. So I got a chance to pick the guy's brain and talk up the Treasury of the Greek Language project to boot! And I thought I'd have nothing to talk about with these vendors...

I took a few hours off from the exhibits to participate in a symposium offered by Simmons' GSLIS for potential library school students who are current undergraduate scholarship recipients through the Mellon Library Recruitment Program. As I myself wouldn't be in a library science program now if not for the gentle yet persistent efforts by former bosses and other concerned librarians, I felt it would be nice to try a little recruitment for the cause. The funny thing is that I've already been doing some on my own, talking up the GSLIS program to coworkers and former classmates. It never occurred to me before that I could be a recruiter in a more official capacity, but having thoroughly enjoyed the session today I wonder if that might not be an avenue to explore further down the line.

With about forty-five minutes to go until the exhibits closed for the night, I returned to the Hynes Convention Center to snatch some preview copies of books from the various publishing houses. I hear even the good stuff goes on sale come Monday, when exhibitors are eager to shed some extra pounds before heading back home. Sounds good to me!

More about reference

2005-01-10T10:52:00.000-05:00

Been thinking more about Dilevko and Gottlieb's book and the "conventional" wisdom they're now attempting to overturn - namely, that technological change mandates that librarians become computer people first first and foremost, and to that end library school should de-emphasize traditional subject training in favor of technology courses. I always felt that this was complete and utter bullshit for myriad reasons. Librarians are never going to be as tech-savvy as professional computer engineers, database designers, coders and programmers. And - take a deep breath for this one, my fellow librarians-in-training, this is okay. No one expects librarians to know how to replace the boiler in the basement or rewire the outlets in the reading room. Stripped of its Internet Bubble mystique, IT is just another utility, a means by which information is conveyed in, out, and around the library. While of course we want librarians to be computer literate, expecting an MLS to do the work of a trained engineer is unfair both the librarian - who is now expected to do two jobs for the price of one, and the lesser-paid one at that! - and the techie - who finds his career increasingly deprofessionalized by this insidious sort of outsourcing to people who aren't even close to being qualified to do the job properly.

In the second place, there is the rate of technological change itself. Even assuming a two-year turnaround at most library schools, any "technology" skills learned are going to be on the threshhold of obsolescence when the LIS students graduate and start looking for a job, whereas traditional broad-based training in library science should serve them well for their entire career. If I learned anything from my time at M.I.T., it's that technology can always be learned on the job - upon graduation, my friends were all being snapped up as computer programmers and HTML gurus regardless of what they had majored in at the Institute and irrespective of what programming languages they knew (or whether or not they had any experience coding whatsoever!). Do we really want to waste valuable credit-hours imparting ephemeral skills better learned during employee orientation and training? Unless the goal of library school is now to turn out half-assed computer programmers, in which case I'm just barking up the wrong tree.

But I think it's incumbent upon future librarians to ask themselves: what am I bringing to the table that's unique and irreplaceable? Because it's sure as hell not the technological skill set. Any teenager growing up today could school even the best-trained "information professional" on technical merits. Being computer literate may still confer some sort of status in the library workplace, but in less than a generation the techie skills being oversold in LIS programs right now will be common knowledge to kids (like my daughter) raised with a computer from birth. In the long term any survival strategy for our profession that relies upon mere technique will doom us to obsolescence - witness the erosion of library reference by the almighty Google. Librarians have to dig deep into their profession and find what makes us special, the ineffable essence of librarianship that cannot as of yet be replicated by centralized call centers or artificial intelligence. That is what we must draw out and hone in library school - if we must have technology courses there as well, let them at least be ancillary to this greater task and not overshadow it entirely as it now threatens to do.

And if we cannot locate that something special, well then perhaps we are doomed after all.

Who knew?

2005-01-09T17:25:00.000-05:00

Catholic University's School of Library and Information Science offers a joint program leading to an MLS and an MA in Greek and Latin. No fair! In fact their SLIS offers quite a few MLS/MA combinations, including Law, History, Biology, Musicology, English, and Religious Studies. Of course I was limited by geography to Simmons, the only library school in the state and one of a handful in New England, but I'm pleasantly surprised to see that many institutions recognize the value of a joint degree and the specialized subject training such a course of study can provide.

This idea is explored at length in Reading and the Reference Librarian, by Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb, a book I picked up over the holidays to linger over in my free time. The authors are of course primarily concerned with the broader picture of how librarians who actively and voraciously read both on and off the job tend to offer better reference services than those who don't in leaps and bounds.

However, they also discuss the relationship between academic reference librarians and the faculty and students whom they serve, finding (not surprisingly) that in order to thrive in a university settings reference librarians must acquire as much subject knowledge - formal or informal - as possible. The ideal is for the academic reference librarian to be a scholar in his or her own right, a colleague of the faculty who takes an active interest in recent developments, academic research, and publication in the fields the library serves.

To this end, joint graduate programs such as those at Catholic University and my own at Simmons are perfect training for academia. The idea of becoming a scholar/librarian has always been for me a large part of the allure of library school, but I'm glad to read that perhaps for the very first time in my life I'm on the cutting edge of a trend and not a few steps behind it!

Armchairs: The Hidden Menace

2005-01-09T14:57:00.000-05:00

"May I speak to the person in charge here?"

I look up from my keyboard - it's one of our regulars, a scholar from the former Soviet Bloc with a tendency towards crankiness. This can't be good.

"That would be me."

"Good," she replies, her lips pursed in contained outrage. "I was just in the Periodicals Reading Room, where the library bought these big leather armchairs. Honestly, I don't know why there should be armchairs in a library!"

"Umm." I certainly didn't see that one coming.

"Well I was in there like I said, and there is this... couple... in the room with their jackets and coats all over the place and she was on top of the other one like it's their own living room or something."

"Huh."

"Can you go over there and tell them to cut it out?"

"Excuse me?"

"You're the person in charge, aren't you?"

"For the Circulation Desk. I don't have any authority over there."

"But can't you just tell them to behave themselves?"

"Isn't there someone at the desk over there?"

"Yes," she sniffs dismissively. "But he just laughed at me."

Now I'm laughing at her. I'm reasonably sure that however offensive a public display of affection, it's not against library policy to sit on someone's lap, and I'm sure as hell not going over there to play the role of vice squad like the character in Michael Griffith's Bibliophilia.

I mean, if they were making out or something, and there was some heavy petting involved, there might be grounds to go over and say something. Or at least sneak a peek. But in the hierarchy of library crimes, seat-sharing seems fairly tame. So it's hard not to laugh.

My Russian vigilante is not amused, however.

"Well, I think it's shameful. I'll go say something myself, if you won't."

"Have at it, lady," I think to myself.

She turns to go accost the young lovers, but leaves me with her parting shot:

"This is why they shouldn't have armchairs in the library!"

Have MLS, will travel?

2005-01-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

Posted yesterday to the Archives and Archivists' LISTSERV:

"I have a requirement for a Historian to deploy to IRAQ for ninety (90)
days, return to Fort Stewart and compile and present the information
acquired while in IRAQ. The contract will be for one year with an
option period.

This contractor employee will accompany and be embedded with the 3rd ID
on the battlefield, and be provided room and board with the units. This
individual must have immunizations, be able to pass a medical readiness
physical and also deployment training. They must be ready to deploy
sometime within the week of 17 Jan. They must also know how to operate
a video camera, voice recorder and laptop computer."

I wonder, though - does the 3rd ID provide a flak jacket, or is this a strictly BYOBA (Bring Your Own Body Armor) gig?

Salon out-funnies The Onion

2005-01-03T16:40:00.000-05:00

Man I almost freaked out when I first read this:

Just weeks after announcing ambitious plans to digitize millions of books from five major libraries, Google burns down its electronic Alexandria before even really starting it.

The problem isn't the anticipated copyright headaches. It's the readers -- or lack thereof.

"When news of our plans broke, we were flooded with e-mails from college students begging us to make more term papers available, not books," says a Google executive who asked not to be named. "The kids told us that they have plenty of access to books on paper that they don't read. What they really need is someone to do the reading, thinking and writing for them."

Convinced that absolutely no one wants to read most of the tomes they'd just begun digitizing, Google decides to divert the tens of millions designated for the book project into hiring underemployed Ph.D.'s to build up the world's biggest virtual term-paper library.

Way to keep us hypersensitive librarians on our toes!

Holy crap!

2005-01-03T11:20:00.000-05:00

The past semester at Simmons was a real meat-grinder, keeping me from blogging about the experience even. Well, fear not: The Library Ass has returned, if only to inform you that he is now 37.5% librarian (and 33% archivist), and pending the final grade in my Historical Methods seminar 16.7% historian as well.

That's significantly less Ass, all around!

Today I'm engaged in a little bit of cross-training, learning the ropes of the Phillips Reading Room, where our noncirculating materials are accessed by the Harvard community and outsiders deemed worthy enough of the honor of using Widener's collection (okay it's actually quite easy to get at our books, provided that you come with a letter from a librarian or professor attesting to the fact that what you're looking for is only available here!). Considering that the books here don't actually go anywhere, the PRR is a surprisingly complicated place nonetheless, owing mostly to the fact there are various states of noncirculation depending on the state of the material, its size or volume, and the identity and intentions of the person using it. This is all a far cry from Circulation, where our motto is: "Just tell me where to stamp."

I've also been reminded that white shirts do not mix well with old books, especially those in various stages of surrender to red rot. Less than three hours handling the materials here at the PRR and I might as well have picked a food-spattered dirty shirt out of the hamper this morning...

The gee-whiz factor

2004-10-23T14:59:00.000-04:00

We get all kinds here at the Circulation Desk, but sometimes you have to wonder about the average incoming student's basic library skills when you get questions like this one:

"Um, do you guys have a list of all the books you own?"

These are Harvard's best and brightest we're talking about here!

The best part is that the conversation didn't end there:

"Sir we have an online catalog right over--"

"No, I mean the interesting books. Don't you keep some kind of listing?"

"It depends on what you mean by 'interesting'- are you thinking about old books?"

"Sort of."

"Well then there's the Harry Elkins Widener collection, which is up the ramp and then the stairs. You can't miss it."

"Okay."

"Or did you mean rare books and manuscripts? Because those would be in Houghton."

"Oh. They wouldn't be here?"

"No, sir. I'm not so sure they're open today, either. Yeah, they closed at 1."

"So you don't have a list?"

"You could try Houghton's website. Or the online catalog."

"Hmm. Okay. They said there was a listing somewhere."

"Who did?"

"I'm not sure."

"All right, then."

At some point I was saved by the phone or a patron with a real question; I forget which. The important thing is that my clueless friend wandered away and never returned, although something tells me that he'll be back when I least expect him.

It's funny, because although the 'Reference Interview' seems like the most commonsensical thing in the world - especially when you're talking about it in the abstract - the real-life application of it can be absolutely deadly if your interviewee doesn't quite get how libraries work, in which case it's like trying to guess the color of Humphrey Bogart's tie by watching Casablanca over and over again.

"You mean grey?"

"No, it's a color!"

"Off-white then?"

(Patron stomps away in frustration)

Pop quiz, hotshot!

2004-09-26T18:51:00.000-04:00

"How many libraries does Harvard have?"

The short answer: we're not quite sure, but it's gotta be more than ninety.

The long answer can be found here.

Ready reference

2004-09-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

I ran into this one in the comments section of a political blog - FactCheck.org (Annenberg Political Fact Check):

"We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

"The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

"The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by an endowment from the Annenberg Foundation."

Great stuff - it's like the Snopes of politics!

Ha ha ha... not!

2004-09-18T14:45:00.000-04:00

"Is there any way I can make some copies from this book?"

"Of course, sir. You can add value to your I.D. at that station behind you."

"Ah. It doesn't take change?"

"No, sir. We do have coin-operated machines in the stacks, though."

"All I have is a ten dollar bill. Can you break that here?"

"Sorry. We don't make change anymore at the desk."

"I guess I'm out of luck, then."

"Sir, we have coin operated machines on the third floor of the stacks and B level."

"I suppose I could just rip out the pages I need."

"Umm. Sir? I wouldn't recommend that."

Jesus Christ - whatever happened to taking notes? Is there really no rational alternative to photocopying save the criminal mutilation of a library book? Even if the remark was made as a joke, it wasn't funny; unfortunately there is no shortage of people who come to this venerable institution and defile the collection by stealing books, hiding them from others, or excising from the texts the information they want either out of laziness or pure unadulterated malice. Suggesting that you'd go and do just that rather than take the Stacks elevator up or down two stories tells me that you are the kind of person who shouldn't be allowed into a library in the first place. I mean, what would happen if, tired of standing in line at Best Buy, you told the clerk that you suppose you could just walk out the door without purchasing that plasma screen T.V.? I'm sure they'd take it all in good humor there. Try it!

New look

2004-07-31T16:58:00.000-04:00

I had some time to tinker around with the layout here. Hope everyone likes. I lost the cool picture of the donkey, though, as the site that was selling it as a brass bookend must have sold out what with the Democratic National Convention (hadn't thought of that!).

No, fuck you!

2004-07-25T16:54:00.000-04:00

On a lark I decided to check and see whether Widener had a copy of English as a Second F*cking Language: America Swears By It! by Sterling Johnson, one of the three books my brother actually admits to having read in the course of getting two Bachelors and a Masters degree from Georgetown (the other two books are his psycholinguisitics textbook and the autobiography of Mr. T). Not only does Harvard have it, but it gives English as a Second Fucking Language as an alternate title, which got me to thinking - how many other books are there in the HOLLIS catalog, discounting accidental non-English works with the word "fuck" in the title? A title keyword search pulls up 42 hits, including the autobiography of rapper Ice-T - The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a Fuck? - and a short-lived 'zine from the 60's called Fuck You, the entire run of which is kept in the vault at Houghton Library.

Who knew? Title keyword searches of other swear words sure to follow, as I'm all out of homework to do until September...

(p.s., Looks like "shit" narrowly beats out "fuck," with 44 hits in HOLLIS; "asshole" gets only 3; and "motherfucker" turns up 2)

End-of-term goodies

2004-07-24T15:04:00.000-04:00

So much for the daily updates while I took my Reference class this summer, eh?

But have no fear! I have some new general reference links to share, fresh from doing my final written assignment:

1. How Stuff Works. Actually I think this one came from a coworker, and then I noticed the site got a mention on FARK the same day; nevertheless it's an excellent clearinghouse for that most vexing question of toddlerhood, "Why?" Don't think I'm not already boning up. My fifteen-month-old daughter is just on the threshhold of speech, and as a librarian-in-training I feel I'll have no choice but to answer every inquiry of hers to the best of my professional abilities!

2. Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places. Granted, the web component of this most excellent print survival guide is a little out-of-date, but the majority of its information is still extremely useful and absolutely fascinating. For example, take the tips on travelling to Chechnya -

Chechnya is currently a republic within Russia... but don't take any bets on how long. Depending on what's going on you need either a Russian visa or a Chechen bodyguard. (About ten is a safe number) Right now its only volunteers, stringers and live fast, die young, types (and DP of course) who enter rebel-held Chechnya. Reporters are allowed to work in the country only on trips organized by the Chechen Interior Ministry. If you hang with the Russians you won't get close to much. If you are in the south with the rebels you'll be too close. Take your pick.

And for those of you who decide that you can't live without such an essential reference at your desk, alongside your dogeared copy of the the New York Public Library Desk Reference, here's the Amazon link to the 5th and most recent (2003) edition of DP (I'd buy it for my reference collection in a heartbeat).

3. Oddens' Bookmarks. You may already be aware of this site, as it's chock full of links to maps, atlases, and gazeteers around the Internet, but if you haven't been there recently I urge you to visit the site again, as its just gone through a major redesign which makes it an order of magnitude less annoying (it's chief drawback before was its sheer clutter, which the webmasters have taken care of with a generous helping of simplicity and elegance).

4. There was supposed to be a number four, but I forgot it. Damn - it was a good one, too!

Of reference and rotten tomatoes

2004-07-02T11:51:00.000-04:00

An interesting conversation in my Reference and Information Systems class arose in response to one of our homework exercises in which we were asked to find a review to the VHS release of the 1927 movie "The Prairie King". Most of the students had been stymied by this one, save for the film geeks, who recommended a slew of online indices for films and film reviews that haven't quite made their way into the Reference librarian textbooks yet:

Internet Movie Database - the first of its kind, and definitely the most comprehensive. IMDB was recently acquired by Amazon, which should only further raise its profile, but the question remained for us: how authoritative is it? The consensus seemed to be that it is the most authoritative of the online film indices, but that isn't necessarily saying much.

Rotten Tomatoes - offering a clearinghouse of film reviews, from the national news networks to the local papers, Rotten Tomatoes is not only a movie database but a fairly comprehensive review index as well. The signature gimmick of the site is its overall rating metric, which samples a hundred different reviewers (the same for every movie) to determine whether or not the movie was a rotten tomato.

Metacritic - I wasn't aware of this site until one of my classmates swore by it, but it's supposed to take the Rotten Tomatoes concept and extend it not only to film, but video and DVD releases, music, and even video games. I'm not sure how comprehensive the site is compared to RT or the IMDB, but the concept is sound and the interface is slick, so I'll be sure to give it a try.

And you thought I didn't care anymore

2004-06-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

The Library Ass is alive and kicking, my friends. Now that I'm a student at Simmons College's Graduate School of Library and Information Science (or GSLIS - pronounced "GISS-liss", with a hard g, although I keep wanting to say "JISS-liss", which sounds vaguely dirty), I think I'll be posting more regularly here to share some tidbits from class with all of my fellow librarians-in-training out there. For instance, today I have a couple of links I stumbled upon while doing homework for my Reference and Information Systems class:

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia Online (in Russian) - If you're like me and you can't read Russian, you'll just have to settle for the English edition in print. Many academic libraries have the 31-volume translation of this 1970's-1980's reference tool available in their stacks, so by all means check it out. It's particularly useful for the histories of the various former Soviet Republics, for instance - much more so than you can normally find in Western sources. And it's also extremely useful for getting an overview of Soviet academia. One of the major problems with Russian scholarship is that precious little of it gets translated into English. Although the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is obviously a dated source, it at least can provide an introduction into the various academic disciplines from which an intrepid reference librarian can proceed in his or her search.

Googlemania! Wired Magazine on the Google phenomenon, its strengths and limitations, and its future. Many reference librarians consider Google to be the equivalent of library Kryptonite, as it promotes the belief that all knowledge is searchable from a single interface and freely available online, so who needs those stuffy librarians anymore anyway? It may come to that yet, but this article demonstrates how far away that day still is (and that's good news for me!).

Looking for Circ Desk blogs!

2004-05-02T19:13:00.000-04:00

Although the blogs of any librarians and/or library assistants are interesting in and of themselves, I thought I'd make it my business to seek out the blogs of other Circulation Desk workers, if such weblogs do in fact exist. Please feel free to drop me a line at oodja@comcast.net and I'll link you up here at The Library Ass! This evening I've found Laurabelle's Blog - I'm not quite sure if she's a Circ Desk worker or whether she's done some work from time to time with a Circulation Desk as part of her job, but so far that's the best I can find, and at any rate it's an excellent library blog (the author is also currently enrolled in a library science program).

I remember at the end of last semester

2004-05-02T18:53:00.000-04:00

when freshmen came stumbling into the library as if it were the Place Djemaa el-Fna in Marrakech and being astonished that a Harvard undergrad could get through an entire semester without visiting Widener once. Imagine my surprise then to witness the same phenomenon at the end of this term! How is it possible to get through an whole year of classes and not come to the library at all? I bow to Harvard sloth.

p.s. -

2004-05-02T18:48:00.000-04:00

I've been accepted to Simmons College's dual degree program in History and Archives Management. Classes start at the end of next month! The countdown to the end of my existence as a Library Ass has begun...

The Library Ass

The end!

Real Library Heroes, pt. 2

Real Library Heroes

ARGH!

Curiouser and curiouser

The beginning of the end (part two)?

The beginning of the end?

We also do bail bonds

Welcome to the East Coast

Why networked printers and integrated library systems are the tools of the Devil

Ever see a book with sunburn?

On the value of clutch hitters

Should I be proud?

GTD vs. TCB

What's another hat?

The question of questions

Holy crap

This explains everything

God is dead - what's *your* excuse?

Oh, please

Review: The Entitled

Meme me up , Scotty!

Why don't you Twitter?

Dispensing all kinds of reference

Mmmm, delicious feeds

The Library Ass gets a gig

Coolness

What it's all about

Can't stand losin'

Live by the Meeting Maker, die by the Meeting Maker

Darn it

What's so funny about alphabetical order?

So how was YOUR day?

Our new motto

Jersey goes Google

Chaos

Some new media business advice

Strange geographies

I'm just a barcodin' fool

Size matters

Do no harm

More treasures from the Depository

Feed me!

Why I prefer snow

The agony of "de feet"

So much for my master plan

Another cool bookplate

Behold my mighty book fort!

Or not

Shooting down the helicopter parent

Today is a good day to count tiny slips of paper

Satisfaction

Just when you think you've seen it all

Google and copyright: back to the future?

I don't need no stinkin' IT department*

Wow, that's lazy

One Year Later

Flying solo

It melts in your hands

Feeling my age

We don't judge you here

Interesting find

I'm fixin a hole where the rain gets in

Goodbye, but not farewell

Playing the heavy

Ass no more!

Do I dare to eat a peach?

Now with less ass!

Dead time

It's not just me

Negative feedback

You can't bring that in here!

Crunch time

Ready reference

Because you* demanded it

Why I should be a reference librarian

Another Circ Desk blog

Comments

Hurrah for technology

God is dead - what's your excuse?