Discovering the second book first - When We Wake/While We Run, by Karen Healey

I rather startled my colleagues today.

I came into the returns room, saw a book on the shelving trolley, pounced on it and began to bounce with excitement.

The book was "When We Wake" by Karen Healey.

The reason I was so excited was that while I was working on Saturday, I'd picked up "While We Run", and began to read it.  I got 30 or 40 pages in, well into the actual plot, when I looked on the back cover and realised that it was the second book of two.  I really wanted to keep reading that story.  It had grabbed me really hard, in a way that was noticeable because "The Dreams of the Chosen", a Brian Caswell that I'd been very excited about, just hadn't grabbed me.  But I also wanted to read the first story first.

So I went off to the library catalogue, and promptly misread it as saying there was a copy of the first book, "When We Wake", on the shelf at the library (it was at a different branch), put it on hold, and was very disappointed on Monday morning when I discovered that it wasn't on shelf at all.

But today it arrived.  And I am so excited.

I have already begun reading "When We Wake" in spare moments.  It's future/dystopia set in Australia (not unlike "The Dreams of the Chosen" and, in fact, the two Ambellin Kwaymullina books that I really want to read soon if not next.)  There's politics and action and science and I cannot wait to get into these two books properly.

Cross-post: (academic) Libraries and Access

The bulk of this is a cross-post from my Discernment blog - a bit of a rant about the UCA's theological library and the fact that I would have to pay to borrow.  As I say, it's a rant.  I may get around to some helpful, logical reasoning in a future post.

*****
I love libraries.  I'm a librarian at the moment (and some might say, by birth), so that's not surprising.

And I love the Dalton McCaughey library.  In my third year of uni, I spent a lot of time in the DML's predecessor library, in part because of the subjects I was doing, and in part because my room at St Hilda's College overlooked the library therefore I had continuous reminders of how gorgeous the rooms themselves were, and it was close when I wanted a change of scene.

The library has a fabulous collection.  There are a lot of books I'd love to read, and the access to journals, etc... but there's a couple little problems.

I live in the country.

I work full time, and am rarely in Melbourne when the DML is even open.

These two things wouldn't be such an issue, given that there are processes available

And the biggest issue?

These are the people who are allowed to borrow/have electronic access without a membership fee:

-  Students of the University of Divinity
-  Members of staff of the United Faculty of Theology
 -  Other lecturers and tutors of the United Faculty of Theology and visiting scholars recommended to the Library by the Principal of one of the three member Theological colleges

-  Members of the Society of Jesus and members of staff of bodies or institutions sponsored or supported by the Society who are recommended to Council by the Provincial

-  Ordained ministers of the Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania
-  Staff of the Centre for Theology and Ministry
-  Lay Pastors, Youth Workers, Community Ministers, Accredited Lay Preachers, Pastors (or equivalent, such as youth leader, pastoral visitor, worship leader or children and family worker currently in a recognised placement or appointment) in the UCA, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania
-  Candidates for Specified Ministries of the UCA, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania undertaking required studies (including candidates not at UFT or the University of Divinity)
-  Endorsed UCA members in ministry with children
-  The staff of Trinity College and members of Trinity College who are students of The University of Melbourne and/or Trinity College Theological School
-  Licensed clergy of the Anglican Province of Victoria
-  Faculty members of a Recognized Teaching Institution of the University of Divinity, including adjunct lecturers who are recommended by the Principal of their institution.
-  Faculty members of the Presbyterian Theological Hall.
-  The Master, Deans, Fellows, Directors of Studies, Resident Tutors and Librarians of Ormond and Queen's Colleges at The University of Melbourne
-  Student residents of Ormond and Queen's Colleges
-  Undergraduate and postgraduate students, and staff, of The University of Melbourne

That's a lot of people, yes.  But it's not lay people.  Regular old (and young) lay people who may well still want to educate themselves further on issues of theology. And for whom $250 per year plus postage may be rather expensive.

My mother - an accredited lay preacher - could have access, and in fact I will probably suggest it, as following the Metaxas, she wants to read decent books about Bonhoeffer, which I'm sure the DML has.

But I'm doing the PoD and I can't have access; because I live in the country I can't even go in and browse for a day or something like that.

I understand that there need to be restrictions (sort of - I mean, I understand the concept of a private/academic library), but for a church that keeps going on about how sad the state of lay education is, I find it problematic that I can't improve my own education through access to the theological library.  (Also, as an Old Hildarian - why is St Hilda's excluded from student membership?)

With the DML presumably needing to be reviewed in the near future, perhaps this is something that can be taken into consideration.  (Or, perfectly selfishly, just open up membership to PoD as well as accepted Candidates?)

Developing thoughts on libraries and citizenship

I dream of being able, one day, to apply for a Ramsay or a Reid scholarship from the State Library of
Victoria, and I think I've finally come up with a topic.  I've got until December this year to refine, it, too (if I want to apply for 2015).

I'd like to study how libraries in Australia and perhaps the US or UK (no harm in aiming high) deal with issues of security and the need to have security guards.

I mentioned when I first posted the Caitlin Moran quote that I felt it had some major implications for the library I'm at.  I'd really, really like this quote to be true of my library, but we're dealing with some major behavioural issues, and none of us have the requisite training to deal with the troublemakers as actual citizens (within their understanding of citizen, not the library manager's understanding, or the little old lady who wants the library quiet like it was in her day, or etc.

Yes, citizenship brings responsibilities, but I really don't think anyone has ever taught these kids, or modelled for them, the idea that swearing isn't considered polite in public places, or that they need to consider the wishes of others.  And we have neither the time, the skills, nor the authority to be the ones to teach them that (nor do we really want to).

So now we have a security guard.  And while I acknowledge that it's making things a little pleasanter for us, I hate it.  I hate the visual.  I hate what it's doing to a reputation for being welcoming that we have worked incredibly hard over the last four years to build.  And I hate that our reaction to these kids is just to throw them out.

So yeah.  I want to start thinking about whether going to some of the Melbourne libraries - Broadmeadows, Craigieburn, various other outer suburbs, perhaps some Western Sydney libraries - would give me some insights that could be used for us.  Long term project, obviously, but I think I'd have support from Management.

(Also, I really dislike the "customer/consumer" approach for libraries, and I do wonder if we'd do far better with a 'citizenship' approach.  More thoughts to be developed there.)

Because I really needed a new academicy task/goal.

On a cold, rainy island...

 

Quote from Caitlin Moran: image via Missoula Public Library

Boy does this quote bring up a lot to think about; the way that as staff we are forced to think about our users as consumers rather than citizens, just for starters.

I don't particularly love Caitlin Moran at all, but I do appreciate this quote - and I think it's an important one for keeping in mind as library staff. 

And because I hadn't linked it here earlier...

My Storify for Anita's day at the Wodonga Library...

Anita Heiss visits Wodonga

I may possibly have mentioned that Anita Heiss(!) came to our library at the end of November.  Getting her here as part of the National Year of Reading was one of my big ticket items of the past 18 months, and a couple of weeks ago, on a scorchingly hot day, she arrived.

And now, she's blogged about it!  She writes about five libraries she's visited recently - in alphabetical order.  So scroll down to the end for her lovely words about Wodonga Library.

Anita Heiss - I'm grateful for library love

And my Storify from the day...

MyBloPoMo: Tech Support to the World

It's NaNoWriMo time (follow link for information) but this year I just don't have the time to participate.  I have too many other things that I need to be concentrating on instead of working with entirely new idea, etc.

But, because my alternate plan will not cause problems (I hope) with those other tasks, I'll be trying to post to one of my blogs each day.  I might also keep an eye on the total wordcount, and see if I get anywhere near 50,000 for the month, but I won't be necessarily aiming for it.
 

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I followed the #internetlibrarian hashtag on Twitter last week: it was a conference happening in Monteray, California.  I found a lot of stuff from that conference interesting and other stuff from it really quite frustrating.  But the one that has resonated for me was a comment about librarians now being "tech support to the world".

It's true, we are - but I'm not convinced that (as another tweeter from the conference said) if we're not prepared to be tech support to the world we're in the wrong job.  And we're certainly not all *trained* to be tech support to the world, or even just to our users.  Nor do our sponsoring bodies necessarily understand or embrace the whole "TSttW" concept to the point of helping us be trained as such.

A few examples: 

• Of our staff we have one dedicated IT person, whose understanding of libraries is because he's had to gain it on the job, rather than because he loves what libraries do.  There are two more of us who I would consider relatively techy, but it's not even at hobbyist level: more just what you learn by being either internet-fannish for the last fifteen years (me) or being part of Gen Y (the other staff member).  Two of our staff are not techy at all.  I have learned to run new backroom resources (Wiki additions, switching from iGoogle to Symbaloo when iGoogle's demise was announced) by them because they are the lowest common denominator when it comes to understanding tech.  Until I learned to do this, I was getting frustrated by people not using the "perfectly good" Wiki I'd set up.  My point being - can we expect our staff to be tech support to the world when we can't even be tech support to ourselves?
• We have two playstations here in the library.  They are well used, but we do get kids come in to play on them that have never played before, and then they expect us to help them out.  Resultant problems: Most of us don't know how to play most of the games.  (For example, I have two of them at home, but on the Wii, I have no idea how the PS3 works.)  Playing the games isn't seen as actual "work" (we did have a go on a particularly quiet day between Christmas and New Year, but we don't open at that time of year anymore), and most of the staff have no real interest in learning.  (I don't particularly want to learn how to play the beat-em-up games or the car/dirt-bike racing games, for example.)  If we're "TSttW" we should be able to show the five year old how to navigate the Toy Story game, but... what employer will support the time out for a full staff to familiarise themselves with the ins and outs of seventeen PS3 games?
• As part of Seniors Celebration, we were all geared up to offer "Master Your Gadget" sessions, wherein participants would let us know what gadget they wanted to master, and we would find a volunteer to assist them.  Unfortunately, our prospective gadget masterers far outnumbered our volunteers, and they weren't always very good at telling us exactly what they wanted us to teach them.  Or at turning up when they'd been booked in.  All of which lead to us not necessarily having anyone on hand who knew anything about the object in question.  In that instance we tried to be TSttW but overreached ourselves.

I'm not saying it's not a good concept, and I'm certainly not saying it's impossible, but it is difficult, and I think more difficult than some of the blithe twitter comments during #internetlibrarian made it seem.

The reference collection - again

I'm back to working on weeding the reference collection, and I feel stymied.  There are so many books that just aren't the sort of thing anyone is going to borrow (most of them are so heavy you'd never get them home to start with) and I wonder about the sense in transferring them to the regular collection.  They've never been even looked at while in reference (one of the reasons we want to weed Ref down to the barest of bare minimums).

Other books on the Reference shelves just seem to duplicate what is in the rest of the collection, particularly in the gardening and general "about animals" areas.  We already have books on these topics - and we don't have the shelf space for more.

Does anyone use books of quotations anymore?  Or the Who's Who?  (I looked in it once but really only to see that Justice Michael Kirby's partner Johan really was listed.)  And do we really need a Latin-English dictionary in a public library?

I'm tempted to change up my entire way of working on this task.  Instead of looking at it as "weeding" the reference collection, I'm going to have a go at *building* what I think is a suitable reference collection, and then dealing with what's left. 

Maquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus
Melway, Sydway, Gregorys and VicRoads
A couple of basic health books...

I think that's my task for the next two hour shift...

The modern reference shelf

Today at work I began the super-dusty task of weeding our Reference collection.  In total our Reference takes up two bays and on a quick whip-around the staff today, none of us have used it to answer a library user's question more than about five times in the past two years.

In terms of providing a version of the library's non-fiction resources in miniature our Reference Collection does very well.  In terms of being user-focused, well-maintained, practical and/or an effective use of resources -- not so much.

My supervisors (both current and previous) and I have for some time now been planning to downsize Reference quite considerably.  Everything from 700 on can be assessed for being shifted to the regular collection, and there are other items that need to be discarded: for instance the 1999 "Computer and Internet Dictionary" that did not have a definition of "social media" and which noted that "use of Broadband-ISDN is not popular". 

We're also considering shifting the majority of any other reference material that we decide to retain as "not for loan" into the regular collection but prominantly marked as not for loan (in particular the large collection of car manuals, which I would really love to have with all the other car books).  After all, our patrons don't generally understand what the little R means on the spine label, if they even see it.  And it will also be a good reason to shift all the law books to 362 to live together, instead of having them in three different places. 

In my first library job I was very definitely trained in the concept of making cataloguing and layout decisions with the users in mind.  We knew that the high school students we were working with wouldn't be willing to go to two different shelves in order to find whatever information they were looking for.  In general we tend to assume that public library users aren't quite as impatient as teenagers, but I was struck by something I read in an article today while I was doing some research/literature review* for my upcoming Marketing assignment.  I can't (unfortunately) give a reference for this, but while I thought I'd saved a couple of articles to my Evernote it doesn't seem to have gone through.  Anyway, the concept was that library users - in particular public library users - really just want their answers and want them now: they don't want to learn how to use the catalogue (or other methods) to find the answers.

Which on the one hand is unfortunate and on the other, annoying.  It's unfortunate because I have a tendency to assume that users want to know *how* to find the answer more than the answer itself.  I started in information literacy and I'll continue in information literacy mentally for a while longer yet, I guess.  It's annoying because we'd be able to help so many more people, more quickly, if some people would learn to do their own reference work.

Anyway.  This post started off being about weeding the Reference collection.  It's veered rather off that topic, but I'll get back to where I started eventually.  Perhaps in another post?

And for this I need a Masters degree?

The library where I work (aka "my library", even though I don't own it) was recently the grateful recipient of a Living Libraries grant, which allowed us to make some neccessary refurbishments, renovations and improvements to the building.

A few weeks ago, the Minister for Local Government, plus entourage, came to officially open the new facilities, and thus for two weeks beforehand we were engaged in a great deal of lifting, moving, taking shelves apart, and putting shelves together again.

It was very physical work, and not at all demanding of the sort of skills that are part of the Masters degree in Information Studies than I'm currently working on, one subject at a time, while working full time.  I remember, in fact, when I began working in libraries - after a very office-based profession for the previous four years - noting that librarianship was very definitely NOT a sedentary occupation.  But I'm not sure that I ever really expected it to be quite as unrelentingly physical as all that hammering shelves together (and taking them apart), and shifting books around.  At the end of the day before the opening I went home, arms, legs and back all aching from the work I'd been doing.

I was struck by a line in the textbook I had to get for my marketing class this semester - which only just arrived today - to the idea of having a marketing 'unit' within the library consisting of representatives from the various areas of the library.  We don't have enough people for that sort of thing, and yet our staff are always being reminded by the other library branches within our regional library organisation that we are the only branch with more than a single staff member on duty at any one time.  It's one of the oddities: being bigger than everyone else you deal with, but smaller than all the example libraries talked about in the research.

When you look at what a library staff member does in an average day, I guess I can see why people don't tend to think that we necessarily need a degree.  I mean, who needs a degree to put shelves together, or to refill the paper towel dispenser, or to change the toilet paper from the wrong way around in the dispenser to the right way (something I seem to be doing every day at the moment)?  And so many days are like that in a public library.

I know I'll have the days when I feel like I'm using the skills of my degree (once I've finished it).  I know my degree is giving me skills that will serve me well in the future.  I already have days when I know that I'm using the skills I've been given, that I've developed in my four years so far in libraries.

But when I'm bashing at shelves with a mallet, or putting together display sets with a universal set of Allan keys, I don't think that I can be entirely blamed for asking the question: "And for this I need a Masters degree?"

IWD/The Stella Prize at Wodonga Library

Last night we had a fabulous time discussing the topic "Is women's writing different from men's" as part of ongoing discussions leading up to the establishment of the Stella Prize for women's writing in Australia.

The conversation was tweeted live by Karen Hempel, and can be viewed on Storify.

The fabulous Mrs Mac

We have a fabulous storytime program at our library. Mrs Mac worked in pre schools for close to twenty years before she came to the library, and seems to know pretty much everyone in our town.

Here's an example of her work:

 

A new book goes up every two weeks.  The vids are being used in one of the local Special Schools who don't have the money for a bus to get to story time themselves.  Mrs Mac gets hits from all over the world.

Mrs Mac had some fabulous news this morning...

Unaccompanied Minors

Seen this post at the Australian blog Mamamia.com?

A mother drops off her three children, aged 5, 8 and 10 at the public library for 20 minutes while she goes shopping.  She tells a friend, who remonstrates with her about leaving the children with the library staff who are not child carers, and who were not informed of the situation.  Said mother blogs about it on mamamia.com.  640-odd comments later, not a single person who identifies as a librarian wholeheartedly approves of the situation.  Many of those librarians point out liability issues, the realities of public library users (surely this isn't news?), and the fact that we've got policies about the age at which children are allowed to attend the library unaccompanied.

The OP, and Mia Freedman, publisher and proprietor of mamamia.com say things such as "it was only twenty minutes" and entirely ignore the comments of the library staff who have made their dislike of the situation pretty obvious.

Frustration ensues in your humble blogger.

Meanwhile, in the final few days of the school holidays, my own library has a sudden influx of underage minors not only spending from opening to closing (approximately nine hours) in the library, but these children spend what time they can wangle on the public computers (max 1 hour, but kids can and will play the change of staff on desk shift) on a "talk to strangers" website.

On Friday, when as far as I know every student, whether Victorian or New South Welsh should have been back at school, we had kids try to tell us that school didn't start until the "16th of February, miss!"

I don't entirely know what my frustration centres upon.  The lack of any actual library-related legislation in Victoria - unlike in NSW?  The fact that hundreds of commenters on a highly popular blogging site have decided that while teachers should be respected as professionals, librarians shouldn't?  The simple fact that for the past 20 months I've been dealing with the public at large, and that doing so is not the most edifying experience, even when it is a fundamentally educational experience?

I'm not entirely sure.

I suppose, in the end, what I want to say is this: please consider, before leaving any child unattended in a public library in Victoria, that it's really no different in legal terms, to leaving that child unattended in a public park.  If you wouldn't leave them there?  Don't leave them in a public library.