DIY Librarian

Happy Blog Day 2007! I’m celebrating by sharing five blogs that are a little outside the usual content at DIY Librarian.

OK, I’m bending the rules a little bit, because these blogs aren’t new to me, but hopefully some of them are new to you.

Tumaini Kids! is a blog written by kids at the Tumaini Children’s Center in Nyeri, Kenya. The kids are part of the Hope Runs project, started by two Stanford University students to provide an understanding of personal health, social entrepreneurship, and technology to orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through running. The kids write about running and other events in their lives—they are inspiring, hilarious, and will steal your heart.

Mazurland Blog is the product of one of my co-bloggers on my other blog, The Runaround, and his brothers. The content is very eclectic—just this week there have been posts about punctuation abuse, gun ownership, and learning to play the guitar. I don’t agree with everything, but that’s part of what gets me thinking and questioning my own beliefs.

The Comics Curmudgeon keeps me updated on the intense dramas unfolding in Mark Trail, Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, M.D., and the like. I can’t read this at work because people will wonder why I’m laughing out loud in my office. (“Oh! the latest issue of Population Development Review is just too funny!” wasn’t convincing anyone.)

I started reading Bad Librarianship because I thought it would be about libraries. While it is written by a librarian, it is about comics and pop culture. Well, and occasionally about librarians.

The Rambling Librarian is actually about libraries. I mention it because it may not be on everyone’s radar since it is from Singapore. It does ramble—the current post, as I type this, is about the custom of burning Hell Bank Notes—but many of my favorite blogs do. Right now Ivan Chew is in the midst of blogging about his trip to Durban, South Africa for the IFLA conference.

Carnival of the Infosciences #77 is up at librarian.net. Prepare to spend the day because it’s a big carnival, full of interesting and entertaining blog posts.

In 2 weeks, I will host Carnival #78 here at DIY Librarian. Let’s make it another big one! Submit blog posts (yours or someone else’s) to the next edition of the Carnival using the carnival submission form. You can also use the del.icio.us tag carninfo to submit your favorites. Make sure to use the notes field to state why you tagged it and sign your name so we know who shared it with us. Send submissions for COTI #78 by 6pm EST on Sunday, September 2.
Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

Photo: Cotton Carnival, Memphis, Tennessee, by Wolcott, Library of Congress [VIA PINGNEWS]

I was in Vermont last weekend to run a race, and happened to pass by the Joslin Memorial Library in Waitsfield. I didn’t get a chance to go inside, but it looked like a nice library. I did go in the pottery store across the street, and in an outdoor sports store. When we pulled up to our motel, the proprietor was sitting on the front porch with a can of beer and his dogs. I couldn’t sleep the first night, so I went out on the back deck and looked at the stars and listened to the bullfrogs. In the morning, we were greeted by a great blue heron. I really like where I live, but there is nothing quite like a small Vermont town.

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).

My previous place of work, a beautiful old Carnegie library which also houses a gymnasium and music hall, is hosting a Patti Smith concert!

I work with graduate students from all over the world, some of whom have not studied at an American university before, and I think one of their many challenges is getting used to our libraries. I decided to attend the Global Librarianship session at SLA to get a glimpse of how libraries work outside of North America.

None of the speakers talked specifically about university libraries, but their remarks about Africa were still useful to me, and all of their stories were very inspiring. I thought all three were great speakers on causes they were truly passionate about, and they demonstrated the great diversity within sub-Saharan Africa.

Melanie Sellars of Librarians Without Borders spoke about her work developing a library in Angola. Kevin Cullen of the Univeristy of Colorado spoke about his experience volunteering for Peace Corps in Botswana. Jane Kinney Meyers, who received the Dow Jones Leadership Award and a standing ovation at the opening general session, spoke about the Lubuto Library Project.

Constraining Public Libraries: The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services, reviewed in the April 15 Library Journal, cautions libraries about applying business models, fees for services, privatization, and outsourcing in light of GATS. While reviewer John Berry says that “some readers will find this book alarmist,” he concludes that the book “provides an increasingly rare and thoughtful discussion of certain aspects of library management, such as the tendency toward privatization, to which the profession should pay more attention.”

Outsourcing makes many people shudder. But can we really explain why it’s so bad?

In the latest Cites & Insights, Walt Crawford points to a post about measuring staff time at The Other Librarian. In the post, Ryan Deschamps argues that just measuring the staff time it would take to complete a project in-house is not relevant. The only relevant measure is the time the staff person would be away from other valuable projects. In other words:

If you’d be taking that staff person away from a really valuable project, then I’d say you are justified in outsourcing. If that staff is just twiddling his or her thumbs then you are losing lots.

Deschamps brings up other issues too, such as the knowledge gained by doing work in-house, and the usability and maintainability of the system.

So, outsourcing is not inherently bad, but I think in many cases libraries turn to outsourcing without evaluating the true costs and benefits.

Of course, some things are just better done locally. Pasadena Now has been making headlines by outsourcing coverage of local meetings to journalists in India. This might seem to make financial sense, but I think it makes very little common sense to me. (Then again, it might not make financial sense either. I’ve known a lot of local newspaper correspondents, and they weren’t always making any more than the Indian journalists mentioned in the article.)

It’s conference season again, and I’ll bet that most conferences will include a session where attendees can work on their elevator speeches.

I worked on mine at the SLA Leadership Summit in January, but it hasn’t gotten much use since our elevator’s been on the fritz. (It’s difficult to talk about much of anything when you’re climbing 6 flights of stairs.) I’ve decided that instead I will work on my plane speech.

After the last few conferences I’ve attended, I’ve sat next to a talker on the plane. The talker invariably asks lots of questions upon learning that I’ve been at a library conference.

Aren’t libraries obsolete? Isn’t everything on the internet? What do I think of Google? What do librarians talk about at library conferences?

This is a perfect opportunity to talk about why libraries are important, the good and the bad of Google, and dispel a few librarian myths (why yes, I do have a master’s in that). I have a captive and interested audience. I’ve just been at a conference talking about all of these issues.

After attending the APLIC-I conference this year, I sat next to a man who was curious about Google. Having just heard Siva Vaidhyanathan talk about the Google book scanning project, I was prepared to talk about the pros and cons.

If you sit next to me on the plane coming back from SLA, watch out! If you don’t want to know about libraries, you might want to bring a book, or break out the crossword from the in-flight magazine.

I haven’t been posting much about comics and libraries lately, in part because it seems almost commonplace these days. Libraries are embracing comics, and the comics industry is paying attention to libraries.

Why, just today Library Journal includes a report from the New York Comic Con that casually opens with “San Diego move over…” as if all librarians know that the San Diego Comic Con is the big comics convention.
In fact, comics have become so commonplace that the censors have taken to going after Newbery Award winners rather than comics. (There are references to this controversy all over the biblioblogosphere—for a little different take, see Neil Gaiman’s post. Personally, I think the censors should go straight to the source and advocate pants for dogs.)

I simply don’t have time to report all the comics and libraries stories out there, and since comics are way outside of my research library’s scope, I’m not the best person to report on them anyway.

However, I thought I’d report on a local event I attended. Penn State’s library hosted a panel discussion with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) and Phoebe Gloeckner (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) on graphic novels. This panel discussion was part of the Charles W. Mann, Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts series, no less, and the auditorium was standing room only. The discussion was accompanied by an exhibit on graphic novels using materials from the library’s collection. Very cool.