DIY Librarian

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Google has made its 2001 search index available. [via E-Tech]

In 2001, I started my current job, which resulted my my first real web presence, courtesy of a profile page in our staff directory. (I tried to see what my profile looked like in 2001, but it isn’t accessible via the Wayback Machine. We do have a long-standing web presence, dating back to the pre-Google era.) A 2001 search on my name doesn’t find me on the first page (though with a little more searching I was able to find a mention of me); searching now reveals several pages about or by me, as well as a lot of other Tara Murrays.

I was just starting to think about a blog in 2001. (DIY Librarian made its debut in 2003.) I was probably starting to search on DIY Librarian to see if it was taken yet.

While I was indulging my internet nostalgia, I came across a newsletter my center produced in 1999. It has a section about the library. What were we doing back then? Showing off our catalog. Discussing the pros and cons of distributing working papers online. Teaching an introduction to online literature searching.

What did I do today? Demo our catalog. Encourage people to submit working papers. Teach an introduction to literature searching.

The more things change…

In a letter published in the April 1 Library Journal, Stephanie Chase asks the magazine to provide more coverage of truly small libraries—not small like LJ’s Best Small Library in America, a county library with a yearly budget of over $400,000, but really small like those libraries where the budget is not even equal to a decent professional salary.

I work in a tiny academic library. With 3 full-time staff serving about 75 faculty and a somewhat larger number of graduate students, we are a good size for what we do, but we are a tiny flea compared to the behemoth University Libraries next door.

This always presents problems when I fill out a research survey (which I try to do whenever I am asked). If select “Library Director” as my job title (which it is) and “University” as my type of institution (which it is) it makes my job seem a lot bigger than it is. Yes, I do have my own budget and make purchasing decisions, but my budget is so small that some vendors won’t even return a phone call. “Department Manager”, while also appropriate, doesn’t usually make sense because I don’t report to another librarian.

I rely very heavily on the resources of the behemoth next door, so in some ways I am as much a library patron as a librarian. However, I also do a lot on my own, and this was, in part, the inspiration for DIY Librarian.

I relate to the stories of very small rural libraries Jessamyn West tells at librarian.net. These libraries are quirky. They have limited resources, but they know their communities very well. While my budget probably seems like a dream to these libraries, in the academic world I think it is probably around the same level. We have good computer support and quality equipment, and we can easily purchase books that are priced for academic libraries and run around $100-$200 each. But we can’t purchase online databases or journals because of the price and because of technological issues (our users don’t have a defined IP address range because they are scattered across campus).

The Richmond Marathon starts right in front of the Library of Virginia. Yes, take me anywhere, and I will find a library!

The Los Angeles Marathon finishes in front of the LA Public Library, or at least it did the year I was there and trying to visit the library.

I went back to my old school last week, and of course I went to the library. This is where I decided to become a librarian.

I found one of the librarians who was there when I was a student, and we chatted about the state of the profession, ALA, other Bard students who went on to become librarians, and the exciting things they’re doing with their archives.

The library looked great—full of students, even on a beautiful Friday afternoon. My old dorm was another story.

In addition to the house-buying, a couple other things are keeping me from blogging as much as I might like. One of them is a semester-long class on supervision I’m taking through my university human resources department.

Many librarians “fall” into supervisory roles and do not have formal training. (See, for example, Rachel Singer Gordon’s The Accidental Library Manager.) I only took the management courses in library school because they were required, but I do remember one professor telling us that almost all librarians are supervisors—if not of full-time staff, then of students or volunteers. That woke me up, because I had no intention of being a supervisor.

I’m glad I was forced to take the courses, because here I am, a department manager. Even so, I felt unprepared for my first supervisory job, and still feel like I have a lot to learn.

Staff are the majority of my budget. I’ve spent a lot of time honing my tech skills and learning my subject matter, but relatively little time on improving as a supervisor. I come away from the keynote speeches at leadership events feeling really empowered—but that feeling fades after the event. With a weekly class and homework assignments, I’m forced to apply the things I’m learning.

I’ll try to report on the things I learn that are especially relevant for librarians. My first discovery is that I have shifted from Introvert to Extrovert on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. What a long way from the kid who was so shy her teachers wondered if she could talk! I’m sure that my supervisory experience and leadership roles in professional associations played a part in this transormation.

One of the issues I hope to investigate during the course of the semester is how delegation is different in libraries than in other departments because of the separation between MLS and non-MLS staff.

I never set a very high standard for posting frequency on this blog, but I also did not intend to go over a month without posting.

It turns out that while you can decide to buy a house on a whim, carrying out the purchase and relocation does take a significant amount of work. So for the past two months, I’ve been doing fun things like applying for a mortgage, packing boxes, and getting to know every aisle of my local home improvement stores. In the end, it will all be worth it, and in the meantime I have at least unpacked my computer and gotten a high-speed internet connection.

I had been a dial-up holdout up until now. While everyone else I knew was simultaneously chatting on the phone, IMing their friends, downloading music, and shopping for discount airfares, I was making a cup of coffee while waiting for my email to load, hoping that no one was trying to call me.

It had its advantages. I didn’t spend much time at home in front of the computer. And I knew instantly when a web page I had designed was taking too long to load.

It also had its disadvantages, so I have finally taken the plunge into the land of high-speed. And wondering what took me so long!

Now that life is a little calmer and I am more connected, you can expect more frequent postings from DIY Librarian.

The current issue of the FreePint newsletter includes a piece on SLA 2006 attendees’ impressions of the conference. Among the impressions is an excerpt from an interview with yours truly.