Sarah the Librarian

I feel terrible that I, yet again, started but didn't finish a Library Day In the Life week. So I'm going to get back to the latest one and sum things up a little. Health issues were still affecting both my husband and me, so I did more reading while sitting in waiting rooms, mainly G. Kim Dority's Rethinking Information Work , plus catching up on some blogs. I really do want to be a public library person until they drag me kicking and screaming from the library, but I've done a variety of things with my library education and so there's no reason to not keep my options open while job hunting. Sometimes I forget just how many skills I have and if nothing else, it's like getting a little pep talk. I also checked out a couple webinars. Because it was Anti-Bullying Week, School Library Journal sponsored a Battling Bullying Webinar with popular children's author James Howe as the keynote. I was really surprised to hear about his fight against bullying on beh...

For the first time since this whole Library Day In the Life thing started, I am not employed by a library. In fact, I'm not employed at all. Thanks to a perfect storm of circumstances, I've found myself stranded in a new city with my husband and I both getting the short end of the health stick. Some other time it might be worth going into the long story behind that last sentence, but right now, suffice it to say that job hunting hasn't been able to be my main concern lately. It's been a few years since I've been actively looking for a job and while I'm excited to have more of that experience I lacked last time around, it doesn't mean that job hunting is any easier. The tech skills that I so carefully cultivated in library school have really faded while working in a position where those skills were less important than other day to day responsibilities. I'm searching in a much bigger market, which means more jobs to apply for, but also much stiffer compe...

This isn't exactly a book report, but my thoughts have been spurred by reading Seth Godin's The Dip . One thing that I remember hearing over and over again in library school was that libraries (especially public libraries) need to stop being everything to everyone if they want to continue succeeding. At the time I thought that was a pretty easy piece of advice to remember. Then I started working in a public library where we were horribly understaffed and underfunded, just like many others. While I was still trying to figure out my exact role in the organization I picked up projects haphazardly, partly so I could fill my day and partly in the hope that I could eventually I'd see enough pieces of the organization that I could finally make sense of the whole. The thing is, I don't think I'm alone in this approach to a new job and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the way many libraries approach serving their communities. One patron said we should offer ebooks, a...

Sorry it took so long to get the shortest day of the conference for me up here. Because of when my flight left, I only had time to go to the first session of the conference's last day, which was really worth it. The packed program was all about serving patrons in their 20s and 30s. Essentially the advice broke down in two ways: 1) make sure you're marketing your current adult programs in ways that don't scare off younger adults 2) find out what younger adults in your community are interested in and develop appropriate programming, even if that means hosting after hours events where alcohol is served. You may have to think outside the box a little bit in order to create events and that will attract patrons you aren't used to seeing in the library. This presentation reinforced a feeling I'd been having even before PLA. I thought it was unique to our community, but apparently not. Libraries are generally great at serving their youngest and oldest patrons, but teens a...

Day Three at PLA started with "Oh, I Should Have Said ... : aka Dealing With Difficult People" which was a really great program that used humor to deal with various "problem patron" situations, including when the "problem patron" is actually the library staff member. The presentation was scattered with skits demonstrating situations familiar to all of us who work public service desks. I think one key which they addressed is not taking the actions of angry people personally, and I think that's key for any customer service oriented job. People can be grumpy, and it's generally not your fault, so stop getting defensive and instead try to defuse the situation by really listening to what they have to say and finding an acceptable solution for both parties. Next up was "Top Five of the Top Five" which was blitz of genre fiction recommendations. The five genres represented were horror, fantasy, women's fiction, crime, and humor and, just to...

Day Two at PLA brought the beginning of regular sessions and my massive day of teen services. I started the day with "Reinventing Your Teen Department" which was a library that brought teens into their library by creating appropriate teen spaces in the library and focusing on gaming. While the general aim of their gaming program was similar to what we talked about in my preconference the day before, the way they went about achieving it was completely different. Instead of starting with the crowd pleasing Wii and branching out to other gaming systems as interest grew, they went straight for the teenage boys and set them loose on an Xbox. It was interesting, but a lot of the ideas they implemented aren't very applicable to my current situation. I got a few new ideas for resources, though. The second morning session was "Top Trends in Teen Services" which was one of those great potpourri sessions where they threw out tons of great ideas for all aspects of teen ...

Today was my first day at the Public Library Association conference, and I'm not sure how I'm going to do 2.5 more days and keep my head from exploding. There's just so much that's so relevant to my job, I can find something interesting everywhere I look. This morning I went to the Get Your Game On: Gaming in Libraries Preconference, and it was wonderful. I realized that I need to stop playing the role of wife of a gamer and own that I know a thing or two about video games, too, and what I don't know I can learn. Eli and Aaron spent the first half of the program talking about the benefits of gaming and why libraries should be doing gaming, which is something I'd always bought, but never been very good at articulating. Essentially it boils down to all the different types of literacies learned through video games and what are libraries for if not promoting literacy. It was also interesting they argued that the way libraries get the most value out of gaming is by...