The Librarian's Lounge

What's your library cutting? and other odds and ends

I saw this article posted over at Library Stuff about British libraries having lost 13 million books over the past 6 years. It ties the loss to budget cuts and the credit crunch that's affecting everyone across the world. This brought to mind two things. One is that my area libraries have been featured in local newspaper articles about their budget losses and how that's going to affect staffing and building hours, but I have yet to see any that explicitly list what materials and databases are being cut. In times like this when more people are using the library than average, you'd think patrons would be interested in knowing exactly how they are losing access to information. It seems like this would be a good time to rouse patron interest and call on them, not just librarians, to contact their local lawmakers about these losses. The other thing this article brought to my mind was a trend in some of the libraries in my area away from library collections that have depth in terms of lots of books on all kinds of things and towards what's often called a "browsing" collection. If your local library looks more like a bookstore than it used to with lots of pretty books on popular topics instead of a meaty often ratty-looking collection full of more items than anyone would ever want to read, it's probably a victim of this trend. The idea is to "give the customer what they want" and the bottom line is to increase circulation statistics. Why? Because people who control library budgets often want hard numbers to justify the funds that go to the public library, and how many times a book is checked out per year is one way to get such numbers. So that often means books that do not get checked out, no matter how much they are used by the community within the building or in ways that aren't measured, are likely to lose their place in the collection to make way for another copy of the latest bestseller. In summary, I'd advise anyone who is worried about the state of their local library collection to dig deeper - are budget cuts really the reason there aren't as many books on the shelf or has there been a change in philosophy about what should be on the shelf at all?

I found this article about how long various email sites keep inactive accounts a good one to take note of. This happened to me when I switched from a Yahoo account to a gmail account as my primary a few years ago. After not visiting my Yahoo account for a few months, I went back and found everything had been deleted. It was not fun.

The last few weekends have been an adventure in trying to put together Ikea furniture, which I've been assured time and again is the simplest thing ever. Their product instructions don't even contain words - who needs words when you have cartoon drawings, right? Ever since I saw this, I've been re-living it again and again:

It's funny because it's true. I'm in the process of trying to find out why I've been given the wrong 4 metal brackets for my new dining room table twice now. Even their customer service department couldn't look up details on how far apart the holes on the brackets were supposed to be - those details were not available to the woman I spoke with. Which is why I still have brackets that are for holes spaced 4 inches apart instead of 2.5 inches apart, like the holes that were pre-drilled into my table top. Oh well, at least the chairs were easy to put together. And I suppose I should take some comfort in knowing that the guy who sold us his Malm bed didn't understand the directions either - we found that out while trying to re-assemble it. 

This story about an iPhone application that allows people to browse for the best bookstore price is interesting.

I love reading about all the latest uses and tools that come up for Twitter. Here's one for twittering your books with LibraryThing. And my other new favorite Twitter site: Retweetradar. It uses a tag cloud to show you what people have been tweeting about during the past day.

I guess that's all for now. There's much out there I want to be blogging about, but time is just getting away from me. I was listening to a podcast the other day - I think it was TWiT - and the hosts were discussing how blogs seem to be falling away as more people are moving to microblogging tools like Twitter and aggregators like FriendFeed. This is starting to be my personal experience as well.

Today's musings

We, in the librarian business, are often told that we must be "change agents." I consider myself to be an early adopter and someone who does reasonably well with change. But I don't believe in change for the sake of change. And I don't think people who are selective about the changes they support are "afraid" of change or "against" change. Everything changes all the time, in both positive and negative ways. As librarians, it is imperative that we reassess things once in a while and evaluate what kind of change has taken place, particularly if we are the ones instigating it. We have to be able to learn from our mistakes and we can't do that if we deny that we've made any.

I meant to come home and catch up on some reading, but instead find myself at my laptop once again.

I ordered a couple copies of a book for my discussion group online, using Better World Books for the first time. They arrived together today and one of them is really moldy from water damage. I really hope this is an anomaly for this business, because I'd like to see them succeed. I think it's great that they help libraries make a little more money and donate books that probably would have wound up in a landfill to support literacy around the world. But I hope the quality of what people are receiving from them is generally in better condition than what I received today, for health reasons. I emailed them immediately and am awaiting their response. Moldy books are definitely not patron-friendly.

I saw this article the other day about Dell trying to change its reputation to being more customer service oriented.  What I found most interesting was the part about having 42 employees who troll the web daily to find out how Dell is being spoken about online. Yet they never found the post I wrote nearly a year ago about my bad experience with their customer service department. When I bought my Dell laptop, I wasn't really aware of the problems consumers had been having with them. I basically chose Dell over all my other options because I could still get a laptop made with a matte screen this way. Recently, I met someone who put me in contact (sort of a 6 degrees of separation situation) with a service rep at Dell, who is now trying to help me solve my computer problems. In addition to the corrupted files, I also have a power cord that refuses to stay plugged in. I haven't tried to contact the company directly since my first bad experience because I quite frankly didn't know where to turn. I am curious to see how this will all play out. I think Dell is smart to have people looking after the company's online image. Someone in their company obviously understands how word of mouth extends through the social web and what the consequences of repeated bad service can lead to - reporting by the consumer.

Here's a radio program from the BBC with a reporter going to speak to some local Phoenicians to find out if they will be voting for McCain.

I watched Michael Moore's new film, Slacker Uprising, the other night. I was lucky enough to have seen him while he was filming this 4 years ago. I particularly appreciated the closing message of the film - that the young people of America really did make a huge difference in the election in the swing states in which Moore spoke. It gives me hope for the upcoming election and I hope lots of people see it.

Shushing cards and critical minds

It's funny that the brainchild behind these courtesy cards isn't a librarian. Librarians have this archetypal bad rap for being shush-ers. Yet the public generally thinks of the archetypal library as being a quiet place where one can study and read. Hmmm. We seem to be in one of those you-can't-please-everyone situations with this. When we tell people not to use their cell phones and to keep their voices down, we librarians are labeled unhip and unfriendly. But when we allow for noise, we get complaints from patrons about the cell phone use, the noise level, and the lack of quiet places for studying. This is not just an age-related phenomena and has nothing to do with not wanting to adopt new practices in my experience. It's just the way it is. What's a librarian to do?

I was speaking with one of my colleagues the other day about the importance of having a critical mind and how having one can often be misinterpreted as general negativity by others in the workplace. There's a huge difference between the two. A critical mind evaluates a given situation, looking at all angles, in an attempt to find workable solutions. Negativity, on the other hand, is purposeless - it is an end in itself. It's the difference between stating a fact such as, "Our current situation is keeping us from reaching our goals in this way" and "Our current situation sucks!" A critical mind  is a questioning mind, whereas a negative mind is a closed mind that has already reached its own damning conclusions. It is imperative to understand the difference between these two concepts if an organization wishes to have good relations between administrators and staff. Administrators need to appreciate the critical thinkers on their staff and view them as problem-solvers, not trouble-makers.  Dismissing them is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot - you lose the respect and buy-in of those who most want to see the organization succeed by writing them off as naysayers.

Here are some patterns to be aware of when evaluating your thoughts, as discussed in the above article:

• "It's true because I believe it."
• "It's true because we believe it."
• "It's true because I want to believe it."
• "It's true because I have always believed it."
• "It's true because it's in my vested interest to believe it."

The authors go on to present this list of questions we can ask ourselves:

• Is my thinking clear?
• Is my thinking accurate?
• Is my thinking as precise as it needs to be?
• Is my thinking relevant to the issue?
• Is my thinking dealing with the complexities of this issue or problem?
• Is my thinking too narrow or one-sided?
• Is my thinking logical?
• Is my thinking focused on what's most significant?

Critical thinking is a skill that librarians are often called upon to teach to our patrons. We're regarded as experts when it comes to evaluating information with our critical mind. Doesn't it just make sense that we should all be actively engaging with each other in our day-to-day operations with this skill set?

Questions on QuestionPoint

I've had two interactions with two different local libraries over the past year using their chat reference. It turned out that both were subscribers to QuestionPoint, meaning that their libraries' chat librarians didn't actually work in the area, but were librarians who worked for this service answering questions for libraries other than their own so that their own libraries could also provide large amounts of chat reference to their own patrons with little investment of local staff time. Sounds good in theory, right?

The first time I used the service, I wanted to know what my particular local library had in the way of travel videos. The librarian, from California, could not answer this question and had to email the branch's librarians to get me an answer. Strike one. Today, I asked a directional type question of my local community college library, something that easily could have been answered by someone who knew the campus. The librarian, this time from Arkansas, could not answer the question and had to refer me to the local librarian. Strike two.

And what did my system's own research into the types of questions asked in our call center reveal? That most of the questions asked were very local in nature and required a local librarian, specifically someone who was employed by our system and therefore had access to proprietary databases and customer information, to answer them.

So why the push to use QuestionPoint? Is it because so many libraries, like my own, already use it for email reference, so administrators think it's a no-brainer to extend services this way? Is there some kind of great discount involved that makes it look like a great deal? Is it because libraries want to appear to be offering cutting edge services, even if those services are substandard when compared to what they could be offering in-house if budget and staffing issues were handled differently? The average patron probably won't catch on to the last part, so maybe it's all about what looks "good" to the public.

The Web's Ultimate Reference Desk

One of my favorite feeds to keep up with in my Google Reader is Ask Metafilter, a list in which people as the kinds of questions often asked of a librarian at a reference desk. But what is it about this particular resource that makes it so well used? Most libraries would kill to have the kind of usage this website gets. Why would someone use Ask Metafilter over their own local library?

Metafilter itself has been around longer than its Ask counterpart and has functioned as a sort of free-for-all source of interesting bits of news and things found on the web. It's like a sophisticated version of Fark - well, most of the time. Maybe it's because this site started out as a resource for all kinds of information that it naturally came to be a resource for asking for all kinds of information.  I know there are several librarians that answer questions on Ask Metafilter. The fact that there are information professionals that respond seriously to the questions, even if they are not the only ones answering questions, gives the site credibility, in my opinion, and may be why it's such a popular resource. It could also be argued that it's easier to access than a library, because you don't have to share identifying information in order to ask a question or receive an answer.

If you're involved in any sort of virtual reference, it'd be worth a few moments to check out Ask Metafilter and consider how libraries across the board could evoke such an enthusiastic response from a virtual patron population. Obviously, there are lots of questions being asked out there that we can be of service to answer - but how do we and can we bring those questioners to us?

Dial-a-Story

This article set of an interesting chain of events. 

When I was a kid, my library system used to have a dialup storytime. Every 24 hours (except weekends), a new story would be read and recorded on the line by one of the youth librarians. I loved the storyline. I remember I'd call it several times a day, especially in the morning because I'd call so early that the librarians hadn't even had a chance to record a new one yet. I can see myself sitting on my sister's bed listening to the storyline instead of watching tv. I remember listening to it even while my mom was vacuuming - now that's dedication! I called it so often that it was the only other number besides my best friend's and my own that I knew by heart. Having that connection to the library as a child gave me a good feeling about the library and made it a place I wanted to go to all the time. Often, the storyline was my only connection to the library - we lived pretty far north from what was then on the main branch.

So one day, shortly after reading this article, I was working at the youth services desk at the main branch with one of my colleagues. We were both engrossed in our computers, but were chatting too. All of a sudden, as I was listening to her voice, something clicked. I asked her how long she'd been working for the system and if she had ever read stories on the old dialup storytime line. She looked shocked and said, "How do you know that?" I said, "I remember your voice!" Considering that this was about 25 years ago, it was a surprising recollection for me, but altogether genuine. She was so excited to hear this and we fell into a conversation about the service and why we stopped offering it years ago (it seems to be fear of copyright violation that keeps us from offering it now.)

For me, it was a definitely a moment of reflection about the things that made me love books as a child and what led up to me becoming a librarian. On top of that, I'm a librarian in the system in which I grew up. There's something that feels very special about that. And then to find out that one of my colleagues was actually a person who shaped my earliest feelings about the library through her work as a children's librarian - wow, I don't know how to explain how much that touched me. I hope that someday I, too, will have such a lasting positive impact on someone's life through my service as a librarian.

Librarianship is a Calling

You might want to compare this new documentary clip with the one below. I can't wait to see this.

Have you a real love of books and learning?

I stumbled upon this gem of a film while searching for the new librarian movie coming soon:

The Reference Desk Debate

Here's an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about whether libraries still need reference desks. My feelings are mixed about this issue. Whereas I do think outreach through technologies like email, instant messaging, MySpace and so on are important for connecting to our users, the customer service side of me is still wondering what happens to the user who walks into a library looking for help and cannot find a librarian, let alone a desk? I do think roaming is a good idea, but I hesitate to banish the desk altogether. If nothing else, the physical presence of a desk is a reference point for patrons - they know where to go if they need to find assistance. I keep envisioning a library without a desk, the librarian engrossed in a reference interview in the stacks, and a few irritated patrons wandering around, unable to find any help. I guess I'd have to see it in action to really understand how people adapt to the situation.