As you know, the library sure as hell doesn’t stop going when I’m not at work. The emails don’t stop coming, the thinking never ends, and the dreaming big for fall goes on all summer. To some extent it feels like I might as well be a 12 month librarian, I’m doing 12 months of thinking about it all.

There are also project management aspects that are frustrating. I agreed in spring term to undertake certain ongoing projects and responsibilities. I can’t really make them all happen in 4 hours a week, so other people have to forge ahead with them. This is good and I love working with a team who makes stuff happen. On the other hand, it was going to be my project and I wanted to be the creative force behind it. I’ll still be the coordinating force, but you know that’s a bit different.

It’s just the way summer rolls, but it takes some getting used to.

Basically this is a more official sounding way to keep doing what I already do: bombard my colleagues with “helpful” emails about tech things happening in the library world. I’m the one you can count on to say, “Hi. Can we have LibraryThing tags in the catalog?” and other such insanity. It’s something of a liaison role to the web and Millennium teams, which is fine because I spent quite a bit of time communing with those folks anyway.

My hope is that being in this intermediary role will allow the reference team to think really big about what they want out of our web presence. I hope for the various tech teams to be able to do really well what they already do really well: design, implement, deal with our inane nagging, and other such things. The bonus here is that each department should be able to go on speaking in nuanced and jargony language without having to translate for the benefit of the other. I already speak geek and librarian (well, on good days anyway, on less shiny days I just mumble incoherently).

Mostly, as I told my colleagues, I’m just making it up as I go along.

I teach students that this is akin to calling information and asking for the digits of your friend, you know, she has blonde hair and she lives on the Eastside. Do they really expect that the operator would think that was enough information to locate their friend and connect them to her?

I’m not so concerned about the students I teach, I think they get it, at least judging by the laughs. It’s the students who just breeze by for 30 seconds, deal with a student worker who is happy to oblige their incomplete request, and waltz out again. There’s no room in that interaction for the pushy librarian to start insisting they learn what a call number is. Or a course number. Something specific.

Although I sometimes felt like it was a real barrier to access, I do understand why other libraries I have worked for have flat out refused to aid any student who couldn’t be bothered to learn a call number. “No, we don’t have a course reserve called ‘that one math book’. Please see the reference librarian to learn how to request materials.” Of course that’s fairly pedantic, I think anyone would be right in pointing out the flaws in that method.

But some days, some days you really just want to do it anyway…

Allinee,

Thank you so much! You are phenomenal! I learned so much from your presentation. I have a new attitude towards a library now.

WOW—Thanx!

[StudentName and email address]

Yay! Librarians love praise.

The discussion on the faculty list has been variously wounded, combative, and most of all passive aggressive. I believe that whenever you reply to a person by using their language in quotes throughout the email you are really just attempting to bait them into some kind of conversation. Some kind of “conversation” indeed.

So although I really try like hell to avoid these interactions, I felt compelled to send a message to the list. Here’s hoping I don’t get flamed to death. I just feel strongly that a) I don’t want to receive these damn emails every day, b) this is totally not the point of the faculty list, and c) the “conversation” has already gone to crap.

I agree that there is a conversation to be had here but I would respectfully ask that the conversation take place off of this listserv. This asynchronous email environment is one in which there is great potential for misunderstanding one another without the benefit of both vocal and non-verbal expression.

If we are a community then let us come together as a community:  honestly and with good intention. Strive to use language that is transparent– not to bait one another into responding. We have to embrace the notion that we may feel and experience these complex constructs very differently. We should allow language to open us to one another and to ourselves, not to close each other off.

In the words of John Dewey, “There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication…. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.”

Out of respect for my colleagues I won’t be sharing any of the other emails on this topic. I can say that while I was writing this an e-mail came through that in response a face to face discussion has been scheduled for next week in the TLC. That’s all I really wanted.

I changed campuses for Spring and am now at a campus I refer to as “The Farm”. The farm is replete with all the signs of springs—baby things being born or hatched, the poop baby things leave behind (such as from all those gosling upon my new car), scantily clad students making out (don’t they know it’s still 49 degrees out?)—and I am enjoying a great many. My colleagues here at the farm maintain this is because I have the “good view”—meaning the side of the office with a window.

Despite the pastoral vista there are some downsides to working at the farm. There aren’t enough librarians working here! Sometimes I have to work these shifts that are less-than-ideal…srsly. I’ve spent a small bit of time trying to figure out whether I am a) spoiled by my other campus b) just whiny and should investigate how much worse it could be c) in a good position to recommend changes or d) better off ignoring it until I return to “my” campus in the Fall.

In addition to being stymied by scheduling, I am also stymied by our multi-use desk setup at this campus. At my other campuses we have clearly defined reference and circulation desks that are nowhere near one another—and this is a good thing. I feel that at any campus with a sizable student body having multi-use desks just creates an environment in which you can do nothing but offer terrible customer services. I spent a good part of my desk time sending people to the station right next to me. A student summed it up best the other day when he looked at me and said, “Really? You really just made me stand in line to go stand in line again?” Have you seen any footage of Parking Wars, where people spend hours in multiple lines, attempting to retrieve their vehicles? It’s like that only with manky headphones and battered chemistry course reserves.

The other issue with mixed use desks is that I catch people attempting to do my job a lot. I feel fairly intimidated by the circ workers here—largely because we don’t know one another. At another campus if I found someone unintentionally roaming into the reference aspect of question answering I would just give them a friendly reminder that they can pawn those folks off on me. They would likely grin and respond that more work for me is less work for them. Here I suspect such an approach would be taken poorly, which I take to mean I need to give further thought to this issue. My ultimate concern, of course, is that students often ask questions that mask a further information need. At any rate, I did speak with a colleague here about my perceptions of the issue and I feel as though in general librarians at this campus are more comfortable with more loosely-defined question answering roles. That’s fine, I’m not here to rock their boat, just to help paddle it along so we’re not going in circles.

It’s times like these that allow you to take stock of your colleagues (and yourself). There’s a rough patch in the shiny world right now, nothing dire, but it will pass. Thinking that tunneling into some work would help with both the physical and the emotional aches, I went to work only to discover myself useless after only five minutes. It was all staring blankly and exhaustion.

My lovely coworkers were able to support me by making the necessary call for a sub on my behalf and to send me home because I clearly should be sleeping right now. They respected that our awesome working relationship is probably not going to benefit from any deep probing into what is going on in my life, but recognized that I just needed some personal time and a long nap.

Having had working relationships in the past where one or multiple parties continually blurred the lines regarding appropriate personal sharing at work, I can only say over and over how much I appreciate my coworkers. I am going to attempt to power down this smoothie and get on to the aforementioned nap. I just wanted to take a moment to recognize the many types of support you can get from your colleagues, if you’re lucky. Today it was just what I needed.

I think that the interview, for my part, was a success. I managed to stay grounded in my own language and not become a mouthpiece for library rhetoric, which is something I think about often. I couldn’t possibly begin to recount what exactly we talked about, so instead I’ll give you my writeup on how I was hoping the interview would proceed. This is all writing I did last night so that I could focus on the kind of information they wanted and not show up today and totally waffle.

I did completely forget to talk about accreditation– I wish I had remembered to bring that up but hey, I can’t remember everything. I really wanted to give them the authentic shinylib, which means I wasn’t reading my notes from a paper.

The other thing I wish I’d remembered to say was that a student came to the reference desk this morning. He shared with me that earlier he’d been outside having a smoke and pondering the future of his assignment–he was apparently chatting with another smoker as well, and that other person told him to go see a reference librarian because, “They are the best search engine we’ve got.”  How awesome is that?!

—-

How did you end up at PCC? Tell us a little about your background.

It’s not a very interesting story. I got my BA in Community Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. I like to call it a degree in commie do-gooder studies. I spent several years focusing on advocacy for homeless teenagers there, but overall I was pretty unsatisfied. For completely unrelated reasons I moved to Portland in 2004 and about six months later I decided to apply to library schools. I think you’ll find that a lot of people become librarians as a second career and I am definitely in that group. I had no lifelong aspirations to be a librarian although I have definitely been a lifelong user of libraries.

While working on my master’s in library science I worked for another community college library doing reference work and working at the circulation desk. Ultimately I wanted to teach in addition to doing reference work and I feel really fortunate that I was able to come to PCC to do that teaching. I’m not going anywhere—so hopefully I’ll get a chance to work with some of you again.

How are students using the library?

Students use the library in a variety of ways, it’s pretty similar to the wide variety of reasons that students come to a community college. Some students come to work on learning English, others to learn how to weld the family tractor. Some students come to the library because they recognize it as a place they are comfortable being studious and others come because it’s a place of commune—they meet their friends and classmates there, whether in person or by using the computer.

How would you like to see them using it? What resources are they unaware of?

Honestly it’s not important how I would like to see students using the library. It’s their resource and I hope they use it in the way that makes the most sense to them. Sure there are some basic concepts and rules I need to enforce—don’t eatyour snacky foods in the library, for instance—but overall, I’m just happy to see them in the library. It’s really not my business whether they come in to check their MySpace account, find a book, or take a nap in the quiet study room.

I think that there are a lot of resources that students aren’t aware of. Many students are unfamiliar with a lot of our electronic resources and some of them are really cool—we recently purchased a product called BuildingGreen Suite, focusing on sustainable building and the resources to support that industry. I pointed this out to a student on Tuesday who had been really frustrated with the results he was finding in an “all purpose” database and he nearly came out of his skin he was so excited. The resources an individual is aware of are generally related to what she or he finds most interesting. It’s natural to seek out resources that excite you, often to the oversight of other really useful items.

What is a “faculty” librarian?

I love this question! In some ways it’s a meaningless term. People address me in any number of ways, and I’ll respond to most of them. Some of my favorites include hey lady, Ms. Librarian, and when people remember my name, Allie. In other ways the term is very important—it implies a certain amount of responsibility and obligation. I assume that you have expectations of the faculty you interact with on a daily basis, your instructors, but I don’t know whether you know you should have those same expectations of me.

The reason I use the term is because I’m new to PCC and since I am just getting to know people here I want them to know that I take my job seriously. I take great care to prepare for the classes I teach and I try to bring that much to the table for a library user who encounters me at the reference desk, even if I am adapting to their individual needs on the fly. I put a lot of thought into how I go about my job—so I think it’s not unreasonable to ask folks to understand that what I do is not so different from what the classroom instructors do, we are all faculty and our job is to support PCC’S mission. The heart of PCC’s mission is to provide quality education to the students.

Does the faculty fully utilize library resources?

Well, what does fully utilize mean? Does anyone fully utilize library resources? Just as with my student patrons, I hope my faculty patrons use the library in whatever way is most meaningful to them. Sometimes instructors reach out to the librarians for support in finding resources, doing research, and that sort of thing and sometimes we get the awesome honor of helping them develop assignments. I absolutely love when an instructor solicits my input on an assignment—sometimes a different perspective can be really beneficial. I have totally benefited from my interactions with the classroom faculty; I get great feedback on my teaching as well as the handouts and websites I create for each class.

What is the historical role of libraries? Are they changing?

Historically libraries have always been extremely important. I read on the DaVinci Institute website that libraries played a critical role in the preservation of the remaining works of Leonardo DaVinci. For a long time people needed libraries to be large buildings full of items, like a storehouse of information. Information exists in greater quantity than ever before, but so much less of it happens on a printed page than before.

If we are reading less and if print as a medium is dying, what is the future of libraries? What are their justifications for existence?

The future of libraries really depends on the user. Our job, my job, is to adapt to you, to enable you to make sense of the library’s resources. The help page for a particular database won’t rewrite itself because you’re a visual learner or present analogies to help you understand the difference between East and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, I can do those things.

There’s a misconception that my job is about knowing lots of facts, figures, and other cool stuff like that—and while to some extent it’s true that I am a storehouse of random information—my real merit, at least I hope my patrons feel this way, is in my ability to adapt. This should be true of any librarian. My goal is to empower you to use all of the tools available to you. It may sound pretty hokey, but it’s true.

Does PCC Sylvania really need a library? Is it a dinosaur? Or is it adapting and evolving? If so, how? Could it be smaller? Or should it be larger?

Well, in really simple terms, PCC has to have a library, staffed by qualified professional librarians. Without this, PCC doesn’t pass accreditation. There are also some dozen-or-more programs that have specific library requirements for those programs to pass accreditation as well. Nursing and Dental Hygiene are examples of the types of programs with such requirements.

Putting aside those reasons, I would really like to ask these questions of the students. I think PCC needs a library and I know that we all work really hard to adapt. The tricky part about adaptation involves knowing when to respond to a changing trend and when to dismiss it as a fad. For example, there was a big library fad for a while there to create library blogs. The perception was that students were living increasingly online lives and therefore would respond to a library blog. The reality was more like: most students don’t care to read about the library on a blog.

We don’t think of it in terms of individual campus libraries. The library is a system—that’s why you don’t have to drive to Rock Creek to check out a book that’s housed there. It’s just one library spread across multiple locations and we try to make the walls as invisible as possible. Sure it takes a day to get that book from Rock Creek to you at Sylvania, but that’s really pretty reasonable.

Larger and smaller are relative to space. The library will grow to fit the collection and the numbers of students who need to come in to interact with that collection, as long as there is a physical collection to house. But the library is so much more than books and magazines and students in chairs.

PCC has increasing numbers of distance learning students who never come to the library and it is our challenge to adapt to meet their needs as well as those of the students attending physical classes. This is where you’re going to see some exciting things from the library in the coming years, I think. We already provide e-mail reference and telephone service and participate in L-net, which provides 24 hour chat reference. We also have tons of resources on our website—tutorials, research help pages, handouts for databases— a lot of stuff.

I just got an e-mail the other day telling me that you can now read the entire APA style guide in PDF format, just by searching in our online catalog. How crazy is that? I love it. That happened in response to what students need; how students perceive the catalog and what its function should be.

How much does our Sylvania library spend on books? Is there a trend in spending? How much does it spend on computers and related materials?

Systemwide we currently spend about $135,000 on items such as books, videos, DVDs—that kind of stuff—and something like $165,000 on subscription resources like databases, print journals, and streaming videos. The trend in spending definitely shows a shift from print resources, especially for the reference collection, to electronic resources. Aside from the reference collection, I’m still convinced that people like to read with books in their hands.

Another trend, nationwide, is toward joining library consortia or bargaining groups. We belong to a consortium and that allows us to use the Summit catalog to search for materials in something like 35 colleges and universities in the Pacific

Northwest. Membership has its costs, and I’m honestly not well informed about them, but the benefits outweigh them whatever they are. We take this into consideration when we purchase items for our collection. If there are a number of local schools with the resource and we don’t need it on campus to support a particular curricular need we can put our money to better use and rest assured that we can still get it in 3 business days.

How do you decide what books, periodicals and other materials to buy and what to get rid of?

The library has a collection development policy. It’s a pretty lengthy document and you can find it on our website, but the short version is that we buy resources that support the curriculum. This is true of community colleges in general, so you’ll find our collections tend to have a shorter shelf life than other types of libraries. Nursing students have no real use for outdated materials and in the nursing literature outdated can mean anything from 2-5 years.

In libraryspeak, getting rid of stuff is called weeding, and we decide what to weed based on circulation or use statistics (are people using it) but we also rely on the experience of librarians and other library staff to speak for resources that they know have merit. Anecdotes and stories can be as important as statistics, depending on the resource. For example, I buy for the Microelectronics Technology collection and if there was a question about whether to keep an item in the MT collection, I would probably be involved in the decision at some level.

What is the annual budget for the PCC Sylvania library? Where does the money go? Staff? Materials ,etc.?

I honestly have no idea. Something that I love about being faculty and not management is that I don’t have to know this information. I know that we have a dedicated, professional, and ethical administration and I leave those budgetary matters to them. I’m not sure if the budget is a public document, but you are always welcome to stop in the library and ask.

Envision what our library will look like ten years from now.

I think that I can spend a lot of time envisioning the future, but it’s all for naught. The future of the library is ultimately in your hands, the students. If you feel that print is a dying medium and that we need to take a hard shift toward electronic resources, you need to be the voice for that. If you still find that print is relevant and you want to support that physical aspect of the library’s collection you need to speak up. We shift based on your needs, which are directly tied to the core needs of the curriculum at PCC. Those course offerings are based on what the students need. So it’s a big cycle, but in some capacity the student is always driving that process.

I thought she undertook this process because no one thought I would actually make the cut in a formal hiring process–not because I’m not shiny, but because on paper I don’t have the requisite years of yadda yadda. It has since been explained to me that this was probably not the case. Apparently the national faculty search process here takes months on end and it sounds as though it was assumed that I would be long gone by the time that all panned out. I have no real idea of the “truth” here and I suspect it’s a situation with many truths.

My truth is that this is an amazing opportunity for me and I feel incredibly lucky and ready to start formally settling in at the college. Realistically, I began settling in at this college on my first day and it would have broken my heart to leave. I feel so tremendously well supported at this institution–something I know to be a real blessing in this first-year librarian rat race we have goin’ down in the metro region.

While I am beyond ecstatic to have the job, I worry that some people will question my qualifications or appropriateness for the position. Some coworkers have told me, in short, that anyone not on board should get the finger. I haven’t quite got the chutzpa to adopt this ideology, but I am getting there.

My appointment comes under a diversity initiative set in motion by the current district president. As my boss has explained to me repeatedly, the color of my skin is not the diversity she is trying to bring to the library, but rather my diversity of perspective and practice–all of that nexgen librarian gobbledygook I like to talk about. I talked to a colleague today about what she thinks the reactions will be and she really helped me to put things into perspective.

There will be some raised eyebrows, but they are not raised at anyone’s choice in me as a permanent faculty librarian, but rather because the first hiring my boss has done for this college didn’t include any faculty input. So, people may be puzzled by the process, but not by the choice. I can accept this. We have a work party coming up and hopefully this will be a good chance for us all to crack a beer and get comfortable with it…

I think some of my nerves stem from a sense of doubt in my own abilities, but as a really amazing coworker told me today:
ANYONE who works with you, I would say anyone who even meets you will know that you are a talented librarian and we are friggin` lucky to have you!

I am trying really hard to adopt his confidence in my abilities and move forward with grace and poise. This is a joke because those who know me know I am completely devoid of grace or poise… nevertheless, I’m going to try.

I am really blessed to have a boss who lets me shriek into her ear on the phone: OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!

Please join me in congratulating Allie. I made this appointment after a lot of consideration and after a lot of close observation of Allie’s work. I am delighted to be able to add to the library’s diversity through this process and also feel that Allie brings added diversity to the library system as a next-generation librarian. I know that these positions are highly sought after and I did not make this decision lightly. I am honored that Allie has accepted the offer. Many of you know Allie already – her enthusiasm is difficult to miss.

People tend to look at me really strangely when I say that my favorite assigned collection area is microelectronics technology. It really isn’t in keeping with my personal interests and if I’m honest I don’t understand much of the information. Nevertheless I find it interesting and a good challenge.

I am trying to become more literate in the area but there are some difficulties:

• it’s not a real subject area; because it’s really more of a vocational designation than an academic one it is sometimes difficult to know when I’m in micro and when I’m in electrical engineering.
  • For all intents and purposes it doesn’t matter, but I’d like to know.
• There doesn’t seem to be a lot of introductory information available for free. I don’t have time to take one of the MT courses, but maybe if I get to stick around here I’ll see about auditing a few specific days.
  • I found some information on the ASEE website geared toward k-12 educators (it’s sad, but sometimes I find better information in k-12 than in undergraduate resources) but the site doesn’t actually tell you anything. There just seem to be a lot of flashy graphics and a plea to read some blog or newsletter. Hrm…
• I did find this somewhat promising website that claimed it would give me a popular introduction to microelectronics but, sadly, the presentation was not in English.
• It is much easier to build my collection than it is to weed it.
  • My total lack of microelectronics literacy makes it difficult for me to know if all of these references books from the eighties and early nineties are outdated.
  • Perhaps micro is like math… sometimes the handbooks can hang around for 60 years, it’s not like the math is going to change.