Guardienne of the Tomes

Several conversations both online and in person) with fellow librarians has me thinking about how very hard we work to make sure our services are not impacted by the significant budget cuts we've experienced over the past few years. And I find myself aggravated to the point of a blog post. If you haven't already, you need to mosey on over and read the "Netflix in Libraries and Hypocrisy post by Meredith Farkas. In a nutshell, due to inability to buy media they need, libraries are using Netflix as a media ILL service. Which its terms of service explicitly prohibit. And yea, so libraries, Bastions of Fair Use and Copyright Banshees, are distributing content they neither own nor have the rights to, in a very teenager-like "Well, I haven't gotten in trouble yet" attitude. Because heck, if libraries can't afford it, our users still need it, and we promise to get it to them. Even if it goes against our professional ethics. Because our users need it. And so the...

The Cloud is puffy and waiting for us...but the ladder to get there is a bit more rickety than expected. Our go-live date of August 20th proved a bit ambitious. While certain parts of the WMS system are up and running, there are important connections and functionality that we are still working with OCLC to get just right before we can jump ship from our current ILS. If you're keeping track of us, you'll have read Jason Griffey's "Are We Live?" post from August 30. From there, we were hoping for a mid-September date, now we'll be pushed back a bit beyond that. Circ is not ready yet to go live - while the check-in and check-out functionality is up and running, there are a few more things that make circ-side "go," and some of those things (like our billing practices and reports) have to be approved by folks like our auditors. The OCLC folks are shucking their buns to get us what we need, and we're currently having cross-departmental meetings declar...

Burning any book whatsoever goes against the very core of my personal and professional values. I joked once in college about having a grand end-of-semester barbecuing of our econometrics textbook, and couldn't bring myself to actually participate. I don't even joke about it anymore, mostly because I don't find it funny. If you've been anywhere near FriendFeed (or the rest of the internet) lately, you'll have heard about the "International Burn a Koran Day" planned by U.S. pastor Terry Jones for September 11, 2010. If you're anything like any of the folks who have commented on the story, you're probably offended, appalled, or ashamed. To me, it's a despicable practice, to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of a few. I am concerned, though, that the sentiment that "Christians the world over would be in danger over the Koran-burning stunt" paints Islam as a bloodthirsty religion. With Interpol, the U.S. Government, and even P...

Lately, there's been a lot of discussion (and bitching) about the promised graying/retirement within the library profession that was supposed to open up endless job opportunities for new librarians. The LITA-L email list, a recent American Libraries article , and a post by Peter Brantley calling for an overthrow by the young'uns have all been pretty popular topics of late. January 15, 2004, Rachel Singer Gordon published a piece in Library Journal titled "NextGen: Get Over the "Graying" Profession Hype" . I say again: this was 2004. It would appear no one took the advice, given that today - despite very obvious evidence to the contrary, American Libraries just printed an ill-advised article on recruiting undergrads to the profession , citing the graying of the profession as a reason for folks to sign up for library work. Jessamyn West, in her recent post "show us the numbers re: new librarian jobs" , calls for more than the ever-present empty a...

I spent five weeks seriously ill this summer before having my gallbladder out on August 6th. In my attempt to contribute to the library's preparation for fall (as well as our pending WMS rollout), and given my disgust with daytime tv, I only missed one full week of work, despite the doc telling me to stay home for two. My attitude was, "I can move. It's not like I do a lot of heavy lifting at work. And it's not as though there's not a ton to do." Turns out, you should listen to your doctor. (No, really. He's the one with the knife, after all.) I am very lucky. While I was seriously down and out, my colleagues and friends went grocery shopping for me, offered to walk my rambunctious basset hound, and checked in on me regularly via phone, email, and visits with chicken soup. With continued complications, whereas I expected frustration and annoyance, all I've received is support and the expectation that I go home when I need to so I can rest and heal. Thi...

With Google's recent announcement that they are integrating gmail with GoogleVoice and that you can call (for free!) from gmail, I had three thoughts: 1. Uh oh, Skype. Youze in trouble. 2. I wonder when we'll start requiring folks to have their online handles as part of their legal names. 3. I wonder if Mom would get upset if I legally changed my name to Colleen Susan Warmaiden Harris. Now, it's not terribly difficult to change your legal name - in some states, it's as little as a form, a short audience with a judge, and a small fee. There's the trouble of changing your license and all of your other legal documents, of course, but it's not more of a hassle than women who change their names when they marry have to go through. I'm sure people have done it already, and their legal names are now Jondamuur Dread, or some such thing. But I do wonder if this is going to become so ingrained as a part of our identity that it becomes folded in as part of our official...

The strapped economy has every sector tightening belts, but the more I hear reports of what is being done at the K-12 level of education across the country, the more I am concerned. Concerned not only about the immediate impact for those children in K-12, but also about what repercussions we'll see in higher education as a result of those K-12 changes. Georgia's State Board of Education has dropped mandatory class size limits at least for this year, per the Augusta Chronicle . Class sizes of up to 40 are expected. (Note that various studies, including this one by Finn & Achilles in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , finds that smaller class sizes are, unsurprisingly, related to higher academic achievement. In Tennessee, many schools do not have the infrastructure to properly handle increases in enrollment. According to one Chattanooga Times Free Press article : "Lunch starts even earlier at East Hamilton School — about 9:45 a.m. The school added about 350 n...

Innovative Interfaces (known in LibraryLand as III) and SkyRiver are suing OCLC under anti-trust laws. You can read the full complaint here , and I recommend you do so. It's not an awfully long read, but it certainly is enlightening. K.G. Schneider addressed it so well, you should read her blog post about the situation, which gets right to the heart of what makes this complaint stink. At the risk of being a Ranty McRantypants, I would like to note that if you read the suit, III & SkyRiver are complaining that OCLC's innovation hurts them. Which is fascinating, since librarians have been *begging* III and other traditional ILS vendors to innovate - and making recommendations on how they could do so to fit our changing workflows and services - for decades. Now that they've found themselves behind the curve they want free access to what librarians & OCLC have built over decades. Full disclosure: if you've read my blog, you know that my library's a development...

In an interesting (and long-awaited) move by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (unaffectionately known as T-HEC), Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that "state universities and colleges will no longer be rewarded for just getting students in the door and will be forced to improve student outcomes if they want state support". In effect, what this means to me is that front-loading the university with unsuspecting and ill-prepared students to meet enrollment goals (and, by extension, funding goals), will hopefully no longer be common practice. The law will likely produce some serious challenges, but it also offers a number of benefits compared to the current system. First, another quote from the Chattanooga Times Free Press article on how the funding model impacts UTC: "Twenty-five percent of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s future funding will be linked to the number of bachelor degrees produced. Another 10 percent will be tied to both the six-year...

Library Journal has picked up UTC's early adoption of the OCLC WMS. (As a fun aside, they also linked to both my & griffey's initial posts on the topic, which made me smile.) We are going like gangbusters, with our ILS administrator running on popcorn and donuts as she does dark-hoodoo data munging, Griffey managing various aspects of this enormous project, various smaller area-driven implementation teams handling their business/planning and reporting out both to the larger implementation team and the library at large, cleaning data, and more. I've been able to get my hands - or, more accurately, brain - into some areas I've never fiddled with before. Circ and lending policy matrices for the wireframe; not only which patron records we actually want to move over, but which *parts* of the records, and trying to standardize freeform notes; dealing with home locations, shelving locations, temp locations, and more; trying to reduce the number of patron-types we have; t...

Oh, yes. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's library is implementing the OCLC Webscale Management System, and if all goes according to plan, we will have it up and running in 30 days. You read that right. My library team is implementing a full-scale, whole-hog library system migration to a heretofore unknown system. We’re making The Big Jump. We’re going to live in the cloud (it’s okay, we promise to write). We are divorcing the traditional ILS, taking the kids, and striking out on our own. We are stepping into the future. And we’re doing it in a grand total of... thirty days. Our Library has been batting around an ILS migration for years. We looked at the various vendors and decided that while our current workflows would likely conform just fine to another traditional ILS, it wouldn’t really be changing anything. We’d just get something similar that actually, most of the time, hopefully, would work, and with (again, hopefully) better response to service calls. There wer...

Taking hysterical advantage of Old Spice's invitation for twitter queries (capitalizing on their recent hit commercial ), Andy Woodworth jumped on the internet meme, rallied the Library Twitterati, and asked the Old Spice guy to say something about libraries. And don'tcha know...he did. And it is The Big Awesome. It is impossible for me to see that video without laughing. Andy himself posts about the reaction to the video, about how it got tossed around the internet like a giant beach ball by librarians, library fans, amused writers, and any number of other folks. It was fun to watch. It was fun to be included - it reminded me a lot of how we used to be able to send our names into the Romper Room show, and at the end, the lady would look into her magic mirror and names some kids she could see. It was always exciting to sit and hope she might say my name. This worked the same way - Old Spice certainly couldn't catch the tons of requests they received, but the fact that t...

Today I came home later than usual from work with my brain whirring with ideas, making notes about things to remember to send out to my department and to ask the Keepers of the Data. I absentmindedly microwaved and ate a quick dinner that tasted like a tired gym sock because I was busy churning at a Google doc of things to jump on tomorrow, or Friday, or next week, depending on the project. I did NOT: stressbarf, bake and eat a stresscake, search for new jobs, or generally feel ill about my place in the world. I DID: get excited about my work, get focused on my users, think about the impact of upcoming work on my staff, think about connecting services in new ways, and become excited that I have smart, dedicated colleagues to share this experience with. And tonight while discussing work with a close friend and fellow librarian, I had a striking moment of this is why I do what I do . Because I love it. Because I am *good* at it. Because given the right mix of colleagues, resources, and c...

It is a hell of a thing to get to work with people who love their jobs, truly believe in the mission of their organization, and strive to exemplify service. If you're very, very lucky, know your Ranganathan and read your Arlene Taylor diligently, and do your weeding with one eye on your collection development policy like a good librarian, some of these those people live in your IT department. Sometimes we don't know how lucky we are until things break. I am very, very lucky. It is even more of a hell of a thing to work with people (*cough* Griffey *cough*) who face technological failure (oh, server migration and client update, ye bitches!) with grace, communicating issues and plans for fixes for an essential library service. Add to this that whatever failures are occurring are not within his power to control or fix. And he *still* hasn't kicked or smacked me for occasionally giving him the Query Eyebrow in an attempt to ask what's going on without nagging. So yes, tod...

The Entertainment Software Rating Board likely received hundreds, if not thousands of emails regarding the recent talk of Blizzard implementing Real ID , and the discovery that friends of friends could see your real identity whether you had approved them or not (among other concerns). As a former WoW geek (with aspirations of returning), I saw both sides of this argument - how a good implementation could reduce trolling, but also how it could compromise folks who strongly prefer (and in some cases, need) to keep their online and IRL identities separate. I added my voice to the chorus with an email to the ESRB cautioning them to take a good look at the proposed implementation to ensure fairness and that important parts of privacy were maintained while increasing transparency to improve gameplay and forums. The ESRB sent me a nice canned response, which I (correctly) assumed was due to the volume of contact they had about this one issue. Unfortunately, the privacy watchdog...forgot to us...

My parents were married for 26 years. That entire time, if you opened our medicine cabinet, you'd find two tubes of toothpaste. My dad was an Aquafresh or die man, and Mom was a Colgate consumer. Never the twain shall meet, and over 3 decades of knowing each other, and two and a half of living together, neither would compromise on their preferred brand of toothpaste. It seems bizarre, but as I get older I notice this about myself, as well. I use one brand of toothpaste (to be fair, I tried one or two others, particularly as a broke college student, but wasn't happy.) Until last week, I've used one brand of soap for the past thirteen years. When I think about it, other than with family, I haven't had a significant relationship with a HUMAN that lasted so long. The only reason I swapped soap was because my last visit with my mother, I noticed she was traveling with a new brand, and I had forgotten to pack my own. And so, in a random hotel shower, I used her soap. And fell...

May was a light reading month, given the move and starting the new job. I'm planning to get back on the wagon for June. I've got a number of creative nonfiction books (both CNF and how-to-write CNF), there are some poetry collections I want to read, and I really need to start chipping away at my copy of Shahnameh, which has lain idle on my nightstand. In any case, Books read in May 2010: Marked by Elisabeth McNaughton Brazen Temptress by Elizabeth Boyle Ransom by Julie Garwood Sunrise in a Garden of Love and Evil by Barbara Monajem Don of the Dead by Casey Daniels Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult Untamed by Elizabeth Lowell Sweet Ruin: poems by Tony Hoagland

While discussing the recent Friendfeed thread on LIS schools and student placement with my good pal, former bosslady and library management mentor Mary Chimato, some interesting things came up that I really think are worth sharing. I hope this post is particularly helpful for new grads or current (or newly matriculating) library students. My intent is not to discourage new librarians - I openly advocate for folks to join the profession. It is a career I love, and I think many would find it fulfilling. But I advise them to come in knowing what the hardships may be. The big thing, when it comes to hiring. The big thing, when it comes to looking how resumes and CVs are structured with relation to the job requirements. The big thing you need to walk into LIS school thinking about: How do you know you really want to work in libraries? Using the library as a patron - much as we all appreciate that you do so - is very, very different from actually working in a library. Unless you have done ...

There is a really fantastic discussion going on right now about LIS programs, asking about whether schools should still be churning out graduates in a depressed economy with few available jobs. Definitely go read the (still-growing) thread. The MLS is not useless - it imparts skills and knowledge that I have found a necessary foundation for my career in librarianship. This is not a discussion of what the degree is "worth," and I don't appreciate the arguments made that it is worthless. Questions in the thread cover questions such as whether huge programs (see SJSU) are problematic, whether programs bear the responsibility for curbing enrollments in a reflection of markets, and whether a SLIS is easier to cut than other program because it doesn't generate grant money or rich alumni. I suppose where I'd like to come in on the discussion is the fact that other graduate programs are naturally limited in growth. They advertise themselves based on student/faculty ratio...

Seeing some discussions of air-conditioning (and those poor souls lacking it) on Friendfeed lately have me thinking about the progression from "luxury" items & services to "necessaries." I grew up without air conditioning. The humid, hot summers of Long Island for a fat kid were miserable without A/C. I always considered it the height of luxury when I visited someone's house (or, ahem, the freezer section of the grocery) and they had the magical cooling machine. My father, who worked outside in all weather in all seasons, suggested I drink a great big glass of suck-it-up-atine. Instead, I lived in the pool or held my face to the cool floor tile in the basement. When I got to college, there was an airconditioning control in each dorm room. I called Housing and asked if we got charged extra tuition if we used it. (They were very kind and did not laugh at me. At least, not while I was still on the phone.) By the time my roommate arrived, I had grown accustomed ...