shinylib

You know, my blonde friend…

I am feeling peevish today, sorry shiny readers. One of my biggest pet peeves with students is that they don’t bother to learn the names of things. Who is your instructor? I dunno, she’s got brown hair and works on Mondays. What book are you looking for? That business one with the spiral edge. WHICH class that I taught last week that you missed because you went to the beach with your baby daddy?

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…

Perspectives and learning experiences

This is totally what happens every time. I sit down with things to say. The phone rings. I spent 20 minutes explaining the process to search our OPAC for streaming videos. Why is it a note field that you have to search? It just is. What’s a note field? A field with notes. Not a field with oats, a field with notes. Then I forget what I was going to say.

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.

Issues with time and maybe a little freaking out.

Argh!

Sometimes you just need to begin a post with ‘argh’. It’s true. Why am I so bad at leaving work on time? I swear I had a better reason than I usually do–I was helping a student this time, but still. I am terrible at leaving work on time.

At my previous campus it was not such a big deal because we were a micro-sized staff and we spent a lot of time flexing around our individual inabilities to go the freak home. {A total aside, but can someone tell me what it’s called when you take a profane word and turn it into a wimpy word? I know there’s a specific term for it, forgotten many years ago. } Anyway, yes, it actually doesn’t matter what campus I am at and what flexing is possible. The point is that I need to have more distinct boxes around my time. End of story.

Speaking of time, I am having other issues as well. It’s just about 10pm and I haven’t packed for Philly yet. This is something of a problem since we leave after work tomorrow. You might be wondering why I’m leaving so early when this thing doesn’t get off the ground till Friday. Let’s just say Delta is extremely in the ? zone. That’s right, NO LOVE, Delta! So yes, we’ll be flying overnight and stopping at too many airports along the way. We don’t even get to Philly until Thursday sometime.

Friday I have an all day leadership thingy. {Thingy is a technical term, at least that’s what I keep trying to convince my students. Is it working? I dunno, I haven’t done any assessment. Heh.} Then my Midwinter calendar starts to look wicked scary; why do people insist on scheduling important meetings at the same time? I have to see umpteen committee members and attend many, many meetings–but the sick thing about me is that sometimes I really enjoy those activities. I don’t enjoy running or scrambling from one place to the next. Srsly.

I suppose I can’t procrastinate any longer or I won’t have clothes to wear in Philly. Not exactly the kind of impression I want to make as a so-called Emerging Leader, eh? This time I resolve to bring home less free crap. I sent 17 pounds of free books home from Annual last year. Have I read any of them? Pfft…

I am definitely human.

• My freakin’ wrists are killing me. No combination of anti-inflammatory, brace, and stretching has come close to fixing it. A smart person might take this as a sign to type less. Me? I have two handouts to create by Wednesday.
• I totally did not apply for ACRL Emersion 08. I really wanted to, and I sat down a few different times to write the application mini-essays. It just never happened. You know how it is. Really, I am going to give myself a break on this one. I am doing quite enough stuff as it is. There’s always next year or, praise jebus, the year aftah.
• I am really looking forward to winter break. This is one major plus for working in academic libraries. Or minus if you’re hoping to escape some visiting in-laws. Fortunately, I am not. I need some time off to not think about work. I love my job, but as I have mentioned before–I work a lot.
• Did I mention I have two handouts to create by Wednesday? This might seem like a minor thing, but I have to create them for CINAHL with Ebsco interface and for some heinous Sage publication (a database that looks like a website), both of which are extremely buggy right now. No one seems to know why. Ah the vagaries of databases. And I am actually creating these handouts for the 8am class the first Monday of winter term. It’s just weird.

Catching Up

Phew. The impending arrival of finals week gives me a minute to breathe and compose a post. Of course the knocking on my office door from frantic students looking to find me does hamper the writing somewhat.

I can’t believe that my first quarter as an academic librarian is coming to a close. I have been following the First Year Librarian posts over at ACRLog and am relieved to see that many of my experiences are very normal.

First, there is the ever-present inability to go the heck home at the end of my shift. It’s not as though I mean to stick around the library for umpteen extra hours–it’s just a really long walk from my office to the door and any number of things are likely to occur on the way. Some examples include printer jams, discussions of cafeteria-induced food poisoning, who threw away whose perfectly good milk, and the occasional friendly chat with that one lunatic faculty member who does that thing with the thing. Imagine that I am, right now, making shifty eyes at you.

This relates to item the second, gossip. Gossip exists in various forms in all libraries, in all departments. I am learning to try to steer clear of this as much as possible. It doesn’t help that everyone knows I am funny and I like to talk– I suppose I seem like the natural choice for sharing gossip. I’m not, it pretty much goes in one ear and clatters around in there until I stuff enough other crap in after to consume the space.

I am horrified and amused to realize that my research skills are totally rusty. I have gotten so good at dumbing down my inner research geek to help students (sure, that’s the internet button, just click on it and away we go!) that I actually stared at Library Lit & Inf Science in consternation a few minutes ago, trying to sort out how to begin finding articles that speak to any sort of research interest whatsoever.

I vaguely remember going through a similar phase after the completion of my BA. I just forgot how to develop my own research topics and go after them. I recall soliciting essay topics on LJ just to have something to write.

Needless to say I don’t have anything resembling the time to write let alone to do research most of the time so this is an exercise in futility… or at least in collecting PDF versions of articles that I will likely never find a chance to read.

Absent in this list, quite notably from my perspective, is any discussion of the future job scenario. Like I have said before, I just don’t have the time to worry about a future job–I have too much to do with the job I have right now. That said, I still worry, a lot…

Long time no blog

Hi. Long time no blog. I have been riding the post-graduation roller coaster: recover from visiting friends and family, have panic attacks induced by the unfamiliar feeling of doing nothing, realize that I have a “real” job that begins in a few weeks, freak out over the former realization, etc… All of this has resulted in what fellow yarn-addict and blogger MK refers to as “hibernate-and-twitch”. Glad to know I’m not alone in the need for solitude.

I feel particularly pleased with myself for coming up with a workaround to Six Apart’s stubborn refusal to allow me to embed my Vox blog in my website. [Ok, if I am being honest there is no website currently, but there could be...] Create a full post atom feed of my own posts, subscribe to it through Google Reader, share each individual entry (ugh, but currently I can’t figure out how to share an entire feed), and then use the GReader generated URL for my shared entries. It sounds excessively complicated but since I have my web life compartmentalized to the nth degree there’s nothing in the Reader account associated with The Shiny Librarian except that feed. You get the idea… at least it works. I am sure there are many other feed readers that could perform the same task as well or better, but I am loyal to Google (more on that in future posts… Helio anyone?) to a fault, most likely.

Speaking of Google, how much would I love to have the teahouse theme as my Vox theme? Quite a lot…

In terms of real news I can share that I have accepted a shot at a full time job. I know, what does that mean exactly? Basically it means that I am taking a full time interim position, knowing that it’s the only way I might prove myself as a teaching librarian in a short period of time–all in hopes of laying claim to the full time permanent position. If it doesn’t pan out I will keep the 10 hours a week already assigned me by this college. It’s an amazing opportunity, but I did have to leave my former position with a different college to accept it. Everyone there has been amazing, wishing me well in my new job. I do hope they know how conflicted I was– I’d hate for anyone to think I’d actually made a decision without agonizing over it. For instance I’ve been deliberating on eating some ice cream since I began writing this post. Signs are positive that ice cream is in my immediate future.

Of course as soon as I post this I go to check on my Google Reader workaround and find that this post, inexplicably, refuses to show up in my reader. I am sure that if I were not stubbornly attached to Google Reader (I don’t even like RSS feeds, if I am honest. I’m not a twopointopian, what can I say?) this would probably not be an issue–why else is that handy ‘share’ drop-down up there? More on this later…