Okay, so I’m doing this today for yesterday and I have no memory for details, so this will be general.

• Before S arrived I made a new label for the serial that changed it’s name recently and made signs saying “magazines, journals and newspapers cannot be removed from the library” because we had a nursing student try to take some Wednesday. She complained that she couldn’t possibly have known that it wasn’t allowed because there are no signs. *sigh* So now there are signs.
• Also early in the a.m. I made a list of all the academic libraries in my state that are using “2.0″ technologies and/or social networking – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
• Once S was here I spent the morning in my office fumbling around in Photoshop to try to improve the quality of the images in the web tutorial. They are only poor quality in the first place because my first fumblings around in Photoshop made them that way. They may just have to stay this way for now. Bleh.
• After lunch (pulled pork sammies, yum) I spent the afternoon at the desk gathering information on nursing journals and possible electronic access to them and trying to put said information in a format that will make sense to the nursing faculty.
• I also processed some new books – all for the popular collection, yay!

I’m not a blogger. But since I have this blog I’m going to use it. I need a good way to keep track of what I do all day at work, and for the time being, this is going to be it.

• After getting everything up and running and the doors open, I spent the hour before S. came in finishing up the serials claim report and the list of titles available full-text in CINAHL that I didn’t finish yesterday. I also made 50 copies of the library card application to take to Student Affairs for orientation.
• Once S. arrived I delivered the applications and made a deposit with student accounts, then got to spend the morning in my office trying to get a grasp on nursing electronic journal packages and upcoming serials deletions while simultaneously responding to dozens of constantly incoming emails regarding those two subjects.
• I also spoke with a representative from PrinterOn, which I think we will not get, though I forwarded the information on to IT.
• My lunch break was interrupted due to printer problems.
• After lunch I had desk duty. I started to fill out the participation agreement for JSTOR, but need some information from IT, which I emailed them about. When I get a response I’ll finish that.
• At 3pm I spoke with a representative from OVID about possible full-text nursing journal packages, which I will need to follow up on in the upcoming week.
• After the phone call, I started clearing out my email inbox because earlier I couldn’t find an important email amidst all the junk.
• Interspersed, of course, I’ve given directions to a lot of students and checked out quite a few reserve items. Not much in the way of reference, though I did have one patron looking for information about the KKK.
• In the last half hour of the day I had two patrons ask for computer assistance and a professor unable to order books from the consortium because of an overdue book.

I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated with the ignorance of the students at my 2-year college. And please understand, I’m not specifically picking on my college, because I’ve been doing some research and find that as far back as 1998 Tagg, et al. were prefacing their article “The Decline of the Knowledge Factory” (The World & I, June 1998) with this: “At a time when high schools cannot persuasively claim to produce even literate graduates, we focus our hopes for the educated person on colleges and universities.” (emphasis mine). And yes, I know that this is not a properly formatted MLA citation, but who cares? I’ve given you all the information you need to find that article if you choose to do so.

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.

Projects I’m working on right now:

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.

Is the 21st century library really supposed to be quiet? In 2004 I had the opportunity to visit the Czech Republic on a two and a half week trip with the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science. I was particularly struck by one public library we visited that had been acoustically designed to allow people to converse without disturbing other library patrons. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember where this library was – Prague or Plisn or one of several other metropolitan areas we visited.

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.

OK, so maybe not really. But I do have a lot of ideas floating around up in the ol’ noggin these days. I alluded a couple of posts ago to my “next big project.” Our college uses WebCT, but our library has never really gotten in on it. So I was thinking about ways we could utilize it, since it’s already there and the students are already using it. It’ll be a big project, since at this point I know absolutely nothing about WebCT. But I’d like to see us do an online tutorial of library skills with a scored quiz at the end. Right now we do classes, some for extra credit and some at the request of the professor. But we don’t get nearly as many requests as we’d like because professors don’t want to give up an entire class session to bring their students to the library. But if we could start out with a general library skills tutorial and convince professors to make it a small required part of their class’s grade, then we could work from that starting point to create specialized tutorials for different subjects. We’d still offer in-person instruction, of course, but for those professors who don’t want to give us the time, this would be an alternative solution that would still get those students using the library.

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?

I am an electronic resources librarian. Most of the electronic resources at my college are provided by the state of South Carolina, through a program called PASCAL (Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries). The state recently cut funding for PASCAL by 90% for the 08-09 fiscal year. As a result, we’ve already lost access to 3 databases, will lost access to 4 or 5 more in January, and will then most likely lose another 14 in July of 2009 (and that’s just the ones that affect my college – there are more!).

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!

Well, it’s obviously going to take some time before I manage to start blogging with any kind of regularity. Between stress at home, deadlines and work, and interviewing for a second job to keep us afloat, it’s hard to find the time to sit down in front of the computer. Not to mention the fact that I seem to be spending an awful lot of time at the computer at work these days, so it’s the last thing I want to do when I get home. Pajamas, husband, couch, dogs, cocoa is about all I’m thinking at leaving time.

But I digress. This isn’t about home-me, it’s about library-me. Library-me is very pleased to have reached the end of the summer semesters. I’ve got our federated search kinks worked out (well, almost), over 200 MLA and APA citations created and ready to put online in our database list (ie, How do I cite a CQ Researcher report? Like this!), and an action plan for updating our website as soon as these other projects are behind me. And my colleague has started a library blog for us! Yay! We have all kinds of ideas on how to use it, from creating new book RSS feeds (why, oh, why can’t our ILS do this??) to posting pictures and book reviews from the staff. And of course news and announcements, which is ostensibly what it’s for. I also have a very exciting idea for my next big project. But I haven’t discussed it with my boss yet (or with anyone else for that matter), so I’ll keep you guessing till next time.

On walking into mpow this morning I was greeted by a printed document with a sticky note on it. The sticky note, in my evening librarian’s handwriting, said “this is what we’re up against.” The document was a print out of a, let’s call it inappropriate, shall we?, story that someone had been reading in the library the night before. Not just inappropriate, though. Illegal stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you glad you don’t have children to worry about. Ya know what I mean? So I call security to see if she put in an incident report, then I call and wake her up to get a more complete story. Turns out, no incident report, no real proof to tie it to any particular person. So what do we do next? I should point out that we are an academic library with no filtering, but a computer policy that says “no inappropriate content blah blah blah,” and that we are open to the public because we get state funding. Our other campuses don’t have quite as much problem with this stuff, but we are right smack dab in the middle of a residential community.

Same evening librarian has been having problems with someone I will call “creepy stalker guy”. She has notified security, and they escort her to her car every night, but he’s always back the next night and no one is trying to stop him from showing up. We’ve been asking for a panic button to be installed in the library for over a year (since long before I started working here), and keep getting the run around. We actually have a button, but it’s not hooked up to anything yet! Fat lot of good that does.

Our administration is unfortunately very lenient with non-students using campus facilities. How do I, a low-totem-pole member of one small department of the overall college (and situated on a peripheral campus), convince the higher-ups that this is a real safety issue? Does someone actually have to get injured before we can get taken seriously?

How exactly do you start a blog? Obviously no one is going to be out there reading this any time soon. But let’s assume that someday I have loyal readers. Those lovely people might want to know what made me decide to start blogging in the first place. So that’s what I’m going to do with this first post. Introduce and explain myself. So here goes…

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.