Primarily, I want this blog to be a chronicle of my attempt at a career shift. I currently work in a public service position in a library, but in the last five years I’ve become more and more interested in digital libraries, digital preservation issues, metadata, and the semantic web. With no money to go back to school, I’m left floundering in the sea we know as “too much information.” I don’t really know where to begin my new self-education, but I’m determined to figure it out. I’ve found a few syllabi, RSS’ed some blogs, and ordered a couple of introductory textbooks via interlibrary loan. I’m also trying to figure out which professional organizations would be most useful for someone who with little concrete knowledge and limited funds, but with lots of enthusiasm, so if anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

From time to time I’ll probably blog about what’s going on in my current public service existence as well. And as I update and get a hold on my e-life, I’ll blog about that too. I’m excited about this! Maybe someday I’ll have readers who will be excited for me too!

Students come to me with sample papers given to them by their professors. Presumably, the professors are giving these out so that the students will read them and understand what a good, quality paper looks like. See how are the arguments formulated? See how the author supports his thesis? See that the author, in fact, has a thesis? No, they don’t see this. They see that their margins are supposed to be 1″ and that they are somehow expected to put their name and page numbers at the top of each page, and that their professor has required them to cite two sources, so they are going to write their papers and then throw in a couple of quotes for good measure.

What if instead of focusing on the minute differences between APA and MLA citation styles, why don’t we teach our students how to think? How to argue effectively? How to communicate their ideas effectively and convincingly to others? Is this too much to ask? Because that is what they will need when they go out into the world of grown-ups. No one is going to care if they italicized or underlined a title, but people will care whether or not they can get their point across. That’s what we need to be teaching them.

1. Trying to make Workflows spit out spine labels for about 100 new law books. Unfortunately this involves many phone calls to our consortium leader in another part of the state, many miscalculated label reports, and much headache-y cursing on my part. Under my breath, of course! Project for one day? Oh no. No no no no. Going on two weeks now. Someone shoot me.
2. Preparing for a meeting with my boss and coworker on Thursday in which we will discuss starting with LibGuides and trying again to make something of WebCT.
3. Lots of changes to make to our Webfeat page. Good thing I’m making this list right now or I would have forgotten about this one completely!
4. Serials. Always serials.

I suppose really four things is not bad. Of course that’s just the big things. It’s the little things that get in the way. I spend five hours a day on live chat reference, which means that from 8-10 and 2-5 I’m stuck at the circulation desk. (This is especially difficult from 8-9 and from 2-4 when I’m also the only person working. “What? You’re standing in front of me and want help finding reference materials for your paper? But that would mean leaving the computer. What if someone asks a chat reference question?! You’re on your own, dude.”) Then there’s walking to the other building to get change/make a deposit/get the day’s mail. Checking in the serials every day. Constant circulation work, computers being down, general information questions, and even a spattering of reference. I have three paper calendars and an Outlook calendar and I still can’t organize my day to get productive. Maybe by next week’s post I’ll have it all figured out. Until then, I’m gonna go have a cuppa tea.

Ever since that trip I’ve been invisioning my ideal library space as a place where students (I work in an academic setting, but I suppose public library patrons could be considered students of a sort too) choose to go, not just to use the computers or complete an assignment, but to learn and communicate and share. I would place one library staff desk right in the middle of the room to serve as circulation, reference, computer assistance and general information. Staff would all have computers with high-speed internet where they would be logged into services for chat, blogging, micro-blogging, etc., and they would have Bluetooth phones so they could answer questions on the go. Patrons, in turn, would have conversational seating areas, white boards with markers, and anything else they might need to facilitate group work. Books would not be separated into so many different areas (in my library we have separate sections for “popular books” and “multicultural books” as well as a reference section, a health reference section, and a ready reference section.

“Study rooms” would be used by individuals wishing to study in a quiet setting rather than by groups who we’ve pushed out of the common area for being too loud.

Alas, I’m just a low person on the ol’ totem pole. Maybe someday I’ll get to design a library from the ground up and make it into what I want. In the meantime I’ll keep sushing people…but only when my boss is around to complain if I don’t.

Of course, I haven’t even proposed this to my boss yet. I’ve still got those citations waiting to be put online, website changes to make (when all involved staff have a free moment to work on it), and any number of other little projects to get out of the way. So this may have to wait until a few things are settled and out of the way first. Still, I’m pretty excited about it.

Next post…what if the library was the place to go?

What this means for me: I spent two months this summer creating MLA and APA citation examples for each type of resource found in each of the 60 databases to which we subscribed, with the idea of posting them as html pages on our webpage next to the links to each database. We’re talking some 250-odd citations. Mostly down the drain. I also create tutorials and brochures explaining how to use these databases. As it happens, all the ones I’ve actually finished at this point are on databases we’re losing. Go figure. We just got JournalFinder set up with links to every journal, magazine, and newspaper that was available through all of those 60 databases. We’ll have to start that over again now too. And we just made decisions about what print subscriptions to cut, based on what we had in those databases. Crap.

What this means for my students: Many, if not most, of the resources with which they are familiar are going away. They will have thousands fewer full-text journals in which to do research. Some programs, such as Nursing, will be hit especially hard, with cuts to several subject-specific databases from PASCAL. Students will have to wait twice as long to get books from other libraries in the state through a wonderful program called PASCAL Delivers, which as been cut along with the electronic databases, which will make it more difficult for them to utilize the full gamut of resources available to them for research papers, or for their own personal enlightenment.

It’s my challenge now to figure out how to make this better for my students. Beyond writing to my state representatives and complaining, what can I do? I’ll be exploring some ideas over the next few blog posts.

Find out more at the PASCAL website!

I became a librarian almost exactly three years ago, May 2005. But until a few months ago I wasn’t really sure I had made the right decision. Here I was, 30 years old, and despite an advanced career-track degree, I still didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I should explain – I’ve always been indecisive. About nearly everything, but especially everything important. I changed my major at least 6 times (undeclared to music to business to music to English to music to English). Then I got out of school and said, “what the heck am I going to do with this English degree?! I’d been working at Space Camp during the summers, so I just took a semi-permanent position there and hovered between college and grown-up-land for a couple of years. They were great years, don’t get me wrong. It’s a really fun place to work and it helped me save the money for a month in Europe. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. But after awhile it was time to move on and grow up. So I spent about a year driving my parents crazy with my indecision about what to study in graduate school and then, inexplicably, ended up at the University of Texas iSchool. Maybe not completely inexplicably, my uncle was a librarian and then opened a used book store and there were always books in my house, and usually in my hands. But I honestly can’t remember how I ultimately came to the decision.

But making that decision didn’t stop the indecision, because then I changed my focus from rare books to archives to children’s and teen services. Fast forward three years and I am finally completely happy and at peace with my decision to become a librarian. Why? Because about three months ago I became the Electronic Resources Librarian for a 2-year college in South Carolina – a far cry from rare books, but it just seems to fit.

So that’s my professional history (minus a slew of jobs between grad school and the present). Now, and I’ll try to keep this part short and sweet, I’ll explain what brought me to blogging.

I’ve been reading library blogs for about two and a half years now. But before my recent epiphany (see above), I really didn’t put much thought into what I was reading. Now, though, when I read Information Wants to Be Free, or The Shifted Librarian, or Attempting Elegance (or any of the other dozen or so blogs I read), I find myself wanting to join in the discussions, wanting to start my own discussions, wishing I knew Meredith and Jenny and Jenica and that they knew me, not because I want to be “known” but because they are cool people who share the same ideology as me. So that is why I started this blog. To become a part of the community. Because I can only do so much by myself, but as a group, we could change the world.