My Head is Exploding!

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?

South Carolina library funding

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!

Stress and Staying Sane

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.

Frustration

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?

My blog manifesto

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.