DIY Librarian

I have arrived safely back in Pennsylvania, where I no longer hear the slot machines yelling “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” 24 hours a day.

Jill Hurst-Wahl has already blogged about the summit for the SLA IT Division Blogging Section as well as at Digitization 101.

The summit had some good sessions, some sessions I didn’t care for, and a lot of opportunities to network. Networking at bigger conferences too often means walking around receptions clutching a wine glass, working up the occasional courage to introduce yourself to someone, only to find you have nothing to talk about. Not at the Leadership Summit.

I mentioned an issue my local chapter is facing to a colleague from my division, and was promptly introduced to someone from another chapter who was facing the same issue—and had solutions. I met other conference planners for Seattle. I talked to vendor representatives. I met SLA board members. I reconnected with my fellow division and chapter leaders. My only complaint is that the packed schedule doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for this kind of activity. (Well, I have other complaints, but mainly having to do with catering and wireless access and other mundane things.)

I don’t generally get bowled over by keynote speakers, but Chip Heath’s talk actually helped me with a request I received while I was in Reno (er, Sparks). The request is to communicate about a service my library offers to our faculty. Rather than craft my usual informative but uninventive message, I’m going to attempt to create a “sticky message”. Chip Heath quoted Frank Sinatra on New York: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” If I can get faculty to read an email message and remember the library when they need us, I’ll say I’ve made it.

The Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) provides yet another example that you can make an open source ILS in-house. The December issue of Library Journal includes a nice article about their Evergreen project.

In doing a little research about the project, I discovered a few new things I’ll be keeping my eye on:

• Open Libraries, a blog written by Library Journal technology editor Jay Datema.
• LibLime, a complany providing open source ILS solutions for libraries large and small. They distribute both GPLS’ Evergreen and Koha, an open source ILS developed in New Zealand.
• The first Google result for a search on evergreen pines is not about trees.

All this makes me think about revisiting my own library’s ILS. We don’t so much have an ILS as some cobbled-together Access databases, using ColdFusion for the Web interface. We also don’t use MARC. These open source developments make me think we might be able to do something better, though. We don’t have much of a budget, our collection is small, and we would probably need a highly customized ILS, but we do have excellent IT support.

The other day, one of our IT staff contacted me with an EndNote question. He told me a faculty member was having trouble importing references from “the CSA web site”.

I explained that the library provides access to several different databases through CSA, and that he needed to use the filter that matched both the database and the provider. So he looked through the filters list, and found the PsycINFO filters. Then he came back and wanted to know which one to use, and I told him to use the CSA one, trying once again to explain the relationship between CSA, EndNote, PsycINFO, and the library.

Now, all this confuses me a bit, and I’m a librarian who uses EndNote almost daily, so I can imagine how the IT person feels. And our faculty member, who is getting this explanation second-hand, is probably even more befuddled.

This kind of confusion is very common with library databases, but I think it extends to other online research as well. By the time they get to a university, most people understand the relationships between authors, publishers, and libraries when they use a book. These distinctions all get very blurry when we’re dealing with online resources.

Cheryl LaGuardia complains about this briefly in her December Library Journal column. I wonder if younger scholars will have an easier time with this, having grown up with online resources. The graduate students I work with seem to have a better understanding, but then they are also required to attend my workshop on bibliographic databases.

In honor of a balmy December 1 here in Pennsylvania, I headed over to the Orange County Library System’s Web site and made a DIY Librarian Halloween snowman. [link via The Shifted Librarian]

I was walking into my building yesterday morning at about 20 minutes til 8 when a student approached me: “Is it too early to ask you a question?”

She had a follow-up question about a resource I had helped her with the previous week. I was able to answer her question, and headed up to my office knowing that I had already helped someone. It’s these little moments that make it all worthwhile for me.

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.

Check out this video about The High Strung’s 50-library tour on Ypulse. See little kids dancing like maniacs! See them reading during a rock concert! Libraries rock! [via LISNews]

Last week I went to a blues concert at my local public library. It was in a beautiful community room in the new library building, and it was standing room only.

On ACRLog, Marc Meola points to a discussion of tags vs. subject headings at Thing-ology, Library Thing’s blog. The discussion is interesting, and not just because it seems to come to the same conclusion that I did (that both tags and subject headings are useful and interesting, and that an ideal system can make use of both). I find it interesting because it involves, as far as I can tell, both librarians and non-librarians. After all, we certainly don’t have a monopoly on classification (think of biology!) or on a love for books (first lesson in library school: when you go to an interview, the answer to “why do you want to work in a library?” is not “because I love books!”). We are trained specialists in the organization, preservation, and retrieval of information including books, and we can certainly learn from others with similar interests, including our patrons.

Following up on yesterday’s post about what to call library patrons: calling them customers might signal not only a shift in perceptions, but a downgrading of the actual service delivered. In “Minding the Retail Reference Gap” (Library Journal, May 15, 2006), Kaetrena Davis points out that libraries, unlike retail establishments, are interested not in profits but in helping people. The quick answer, or the answer that satisfies the patron, she says, might not be the best answer or the one that will benefit the patron the most in the long run.

I hesitate to make another comparison to the medical profession, but I read a lot of health care news at work, so I am citing what is familiar to me outside of library science. In “Role of patient satisfaction” (Physician’s News Digest, December 2003), Christopher Guadagnino presents opposing viewpoints on patient satisfaction surveys. Some view health care as a service industry and place high value on patient satisfaction measures for everything from staff training to HMO reimbursements. Others argue that patient satisfaction cannot be used as an overall measure of care quality because patients do not fully understand clinical procedures.

To make a comparison to another service-oriented profession, do course evaluations present a true measure of teaching effectiveness?

For libraries, I think customer satisfaction is important, but it should not be the only goal of library service. Of course we want our patrons to be satisfied with our services—but we want them to be truly satisfied, armed with information and connections that will help them, not just believing that they are satisfied. Calling them customers places too much importance on simplistic measures of satisfaction and not enough on whether libraries are truly providing quality services.

I recently joined a CSA program. Basically, I am a customer of the farm. I pay a subscription fee, and in return I get fresh produce every week. But I’ve noticed that the farmers call me a member, not a customer. The word choice changes my expectations about my experience at the farm, and helps me appreciate why joining a CSA is so different from shopping for vegetables at the supermarket—just as asking a question at a library reference desk is so different from buying a book at a bookstore. Calling me a member encourages me to volunteer at the farm, too. Customers do not generally volunteer, but patrons do, so libraries that rely on community support or volunteer labor should be especially reluctant to go too far down the retail path.