As you know from my long-ass-list-of-junk-I’m-working-on-right-now post, we’re trying to get our chat reference program off the ground at PCC Library. This means we’re knee-deep in conversation about how to staff this thing.

I spent months trying to get folks to have a conversation about these things only to be told “yeah yeah sounds good” about my proposed ideas. Sure we can staff chat from the reference desk, it’s just like another phone line, right?

Now that some “practice” (I use the term loosely, very loosely) has actually happened, the librarians are deciding that maybe staffing chat from reference is too hard for them. I don’t think that’s true at all; they’re just scared. I’m really struggling with my boundaries as the web specialist. There’s a real temptation to say, “You know what? That lady who signs the paychecks seems to think I have some expertise in this area. That’s why she made me the web dork librarian. Just do it my way.” Yeah, that will totally make me friends in my library. Only not.

I sent an email to the librarians asking them to have a little faith in me, in the proposed pilot service, in themselves, and to give it the ole college try for Summer and Fall. I made promises to review transaction data and anecdotal responses at the end of Fall and reevaluate the staffing situation then. Data, data, data I kept saying. Why? Because it’s wicked easier to get the boss to sign-off on proposed staffing changes (or, eee, possibly dig up a few more hours for us from somewhere) with numbers in hand. We served X students, Y per cent of whom waited more than 60 seconds for a response. Based on on X and Y we should really try Z for Winter and Spring.

I even had some comments from various managers who saw my email and said that it was a very well-written email that made a lot of sense. So why did I get back what boils down to a “hellz no” from one of our librarians?

I get that things felt scary during practice (when you didn’t even have real patrons yet) but I also know that some of the librarians didn’t actually practice. Of their own admission, whenever a triage situation arose, they just dumped their pretend chat patron. “Oh, someone’s here, gotta go.” Well, that’s not stretching your skills and abilities at all, now is it? You can’t get better at typing “just a minute please, I have someone on the phone. If you need to go make sure to leave your email and I will follow up with you there,” if you’re not actually doing that.

So I’m super frustrated. The counter-proposal from the librarians is to staff reference from shifts in their offices. Remember this is a community college, not some fancy-pants university library. We don’t have the luxury of office hours and pretty much all of our time not spent teaching and manning the desk is spent in meetings or prepping for eleventy-nine other things. So this alleged time in the office doesn’t even exist. To propose that non-existent office time should be used to staff chat is not especially feasible.

There’s also the issue of inequity between campuses. Everyone is stretched thin and doing more with less. For some reason (dates back to before I was here) our librarians really get off on finger-pointing and insisting that things were better before one campus stole the other campus’ part-time librarian hours. At the campus I work for, we’re generally pretty sure that we’re getting the shaft in this battle, but we’re over it. There’s a perception that we have more hours of librarian allotted to us, so we must have it easier. We also see more students, open reference an hour earlier, and often teach WAY more classes…but hey, whatevs.

So I have a lot of fears that this magical librarian-in-an-office solution will really turn into “why don’t you guys do it, you have more librarians”. Which will then boil down to, “Hey Allie can do it all the time. She types more quickly and is better at that stuff.” And I am willing to sell my time. Hour for hour, desk time for chat time—but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

I have a lot more I could say on this, but I’m just getting myself irate while at reference. Egad, I can answer questions, the phone, chat, AND write blog posts at the same time. Maybe I am a freaking genius.

</vitriol>

If you work in an academic library, you know that late spring/summer is project season. PCC Library is totally no different, except many of the projects involve me (read: I’m in charge of) this year.

1. Chat reference.
   • PCC Library is finally getting it on virtual style. Our chat reference services will go live the first day of summer term.
   • We’re using Libraryh3lp to power this beast.
   • For some reason I said I’d be the one to do the coding for this. I have been endlessly mangling a copy of the Ask a Librarian page, but I’m getting it there.
   • I also have been powering the training program for the librarians.
     • + all of the documentation
     • + practices and procedures statements
     • + other junk I keep forgetting to plan in advance
2. Subject guides 2.0ish
   • We’re making the jump to using the Library A La Carte system this year. It’s an open source CMSy thing for our subject guides.
     • this involves much development and training: for me, for other librarians, for web team
     • props to my web team for the intense server work, I claim no responsibility for any of that magic
     • endless migration of content. props to my librarians for sucking it up and migrating their own content!
3. Manuscript
   • I’m finally trying to publish that thing. Yeah, that thing.
   • What up with the confusion, Chicago?
   • I’m trying really hard not to stick this on the back burner again. Is it sad that I have relatively little tolerance for anything non-APA?
4. I should really work on publishing that other thing. Which means I need to write it first. Heh.
5. Did you see my post about the CFP for ACRL NMDG @ALA Annual? Putting together an entirely new type of conference program takes some work. Not tons of work yet, but there’s work.
   • Props go to Merinda Hensley and Linda Hofschire for much work here
6. Speaking.
   • At OLA 2009
     • Librarians Can Help Me With That? Getting the Word Out About Your Reference and Instruction Services
   • At Oregon Virtual Reference Summit
     • Face-to-Space: Creating Buy-in for New Virtual Reference Mediums (check for video here, should be up soonish)
7. School is still in session. These are quarters, not semesters, buddy. No intersession here just yet. (That always makes me think of intercision, like do I just cut away the students? And would that make them demons or dæmons?)

And wait, there’s more. But I really don’t have time to talk about it right now. Those were the 8 minutes I had to spare. (:

I’ll leave you with a bonus… I’m just obsessed with this song at the moment.

I received a pretty crappy letter from my employer over spring break. It was a we-might-lay-you-off-but-we’re-stalling-on-deciding-p.s.-have-a-rockin-vakay type of letter. Obviously I am not amused.

I hope you are all weathering these stormy economic seas okay out there in library land.

Meanwhile, I’m presenting at the Oregon Library Association annual conference this Friday (#OLA2009).  I am going footloose and slidefree. Feels a bit strange to be untethered, but I think it might rock—or I might just suck out loud.

Having said that, this email I saw recently on STS-l makes me feel a lot better about my shortcomings. At least I’m not being asked to answer questions of this caliber:

I cannot find *which* heme is formed from ferrous protoporphyrin IX. I think it’s Heme B, but cannot find out definitively. 2.) I need to know how and where best to search for DSC (differential scanning calorimetry) results for HSA (human serum albumin), A.) alone, B.) bound with three different drugs, and C.) simultaneously bound with the three different drugs AND that (or any) heme. The drugs are i.) ibuprofen, ii.) warfarin, and iii.) diazepam. All would most likely be buffered for control (buffer) comparison, and the heme may be bound to CO (or something else, like O2 or CO2). Any papers I have yet found only show one data curve and don’t address reproducibility, so I’m specifically looking for that aspect of the data. I have some ability with the Boolean terms, but the more complex strings get tangled. Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you!

Well, I do have a little time, so let me say a few things. Midwinter meeting is boring. If no one has come out and told you that yet, let me be the first. It’s expensive and boring and unless you’re on some committee I really wouldn’t bother. At least not for the time being. Because I am on a committee I can tell you that the people at ALA are well aware of our feelings about Midwinter. I think if more of us express ourselves and push for innovation things might change. Either Midwinter will become even less important, relevant, and mandatory or it will open up a space for (more) meaningful dialogue amongst colleagues who seldom get together en masse (for a smaller price, one hopes).

Speaking of meaningful dialogue, I was at several discussion groups at Midwinter. One of them shines in my memory as a glowing example of everything right about discussion groups (more like that and Midwinter might start earning some redemption)—so kudos to Merinda Hensley, Wendy Holliday, and any other ACRL Instruction Section Folks involved in the Pedagogy & Social Technologies (essentially Teaching 2.0) discussion.

2 of the discussions I attended weren’t so special for me. CJCLS Hot Topics is always a good discussion for me, but this time I got an irritating phone call and had to bail to deal with some stuff. Boo. The other discussion I dropped in on after taking care of my phone call really bummed me out. Without getting into funky detail, let’s say that I think the facilitators had a very rigid understanding of the proposed discussion topic and in an attempt to corral people into discussing exactly what they wanted (some survey results) they belittled and restrained the participants.

I could go into greater detail because one of the people made me very cranky, but that really isn’t the point. My point is that the best conversations are organic. Throw a topic out there and see where your participants go with it. That’s how everyone gets to learn something. I hope I remember this when I take over as convener for the ACRL New Members discussion group—this year we discussed the pros and cons of tenure and the various tenure granting institutions. I always love ACRL NMDG, but maybe that’s because I’m a new academic librarian. Relevance is tasty.

Anyway. Today I taught for four hours, had ninety minutes worth of meetings, failed to eat any food whatsoever, drank three cups of tea and a diet Dr. Pepper, and um…some other stuff I can’t recall.

Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s pretty much how it goes most days. I’ll try to come up with a more interesting way to frame that next time.

I prepped for a reading class tonight and when I went to teach the class I was told, “But that’s not their assignment!” It was however the assignment the instructor had sent me…twice.

So, I pretty much had to make it up on the fly. Banned books and censorship…not so difficult, but still.

Every so often I’d find words related to the original prep I’d done tumbling out of my mouth. I was able to wrap it all in, but the occasional blurb on Thoreau and Civil Disobedience would just come out unbidden.

Regardless, the instructor just came down and said how wonderful she thought the session was. I did not really concur.

I hope I can help him too. It turns out he’s lost two reserve items. Hrm, I’m already wondering why this guy is at the refdesk. He’s irate and doing the usual song and dance about how this item can be replaced for $30 from Amazon. The library wants over $100. You and I know that the missing items are more than the cost of the cheapest irrelevant edition. He doesn’t know this and really, there’s no reason he should (until now).

Ultimately I can’t do anything for this guy. I don’t have a Millennium login, I can’t even look at what his record says.  I have to walk over to Circ and ask why they sent him to me. They said to calm him down. I’m not the professional calmer downer, I’m the reference and instruction librarian. A book on calming down? I’m all over it.

Apparently I managed to calm the guy down anyway…but I had to take some abuse in the doing. He asked me, not unfairly, if these departments even communicate when he’s not forcing us to do so.

I tried to explain to him that we do different things and that I’m happy to help, but I don’t do what they do all day. So I have to ask for more detail than they might normally ask him. I tried to explain it as going to the DMV and asking them why the bus was late.

He suggested that was an inaccurate comparison because they are different agencies who should not be expected to work together. I agreed with him but suggested that for some people, it’s all about transportation and the distinctions are somewhat irrelevant. He conceded the point and I wondered why I’d even mentioned it. I didn’t wonder because the comparison started to breakdown, but because it implied that he’d done something wrong. And he hadn’t. He didn’t send himself over to me for the runaround, Circ did.

And ultimately? We needed to call the Acquisitions and Technical Services manager, this is his bag. Surprisingly, the Acq manager said that the student had nothing but positive things to say about both Circ and Reference. I have no idea why that would be. I felt the communication breakdown was ludicrous and totally avoidable.

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…

I have known for a very long time that I need one of those voice recorder whatsits. I need to just speak into the mic for a few seconds so I can have some clue later of what I was going to say… it was about perspectives and learning experiences. That’s all I got, and that’s only because I’d already typed it into the title field, heh.

Note: the caller did not ask actually ask me about a field of oats.