If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you may recall that I have sort of a love-hate relationship with what we here in the library like to call “Reader’s Advisory.” Don’t panic — I’m not going to rehash that whole thing!
Yet I had the coolest Reader’s Advisory experience here at the public library the other day, and now I’m dying to know if other librarians have experienced this, too. I’m going to call it “Librarian’s Advisory.” Here’s what happened: Continue reading
Wow, last night at the library I got my first reference question about… sex! I’ll give you a quick breakdown of the “reference interview”:
Patron: “Do you have any books about the human body?”
Me: “What aspect of the human body are you interested in? ”
Patron: Blank stare, shuffles awkwardly.
Me: “Are you looking for something like a general medical text?”
Patron: “… Yes.”
So, we head over to the 613s, and as we’re walking, the patron says: “Actually, I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the other librarians, but I’m looking for books on sex.” Wow, ok! Continue reading
I’m so stoked to have this new job in the Circulation department of my new public library! It’s a very different experience from my position in Adult and Teen Services at my last library, which dealt mostly with library programming, education, and community outreach. This very different kind of library work is an eye opener, and I think it will make me a more well-rounded librarian when all is said and done. For starters: I never really realized before how physical library work can be! I’m not going to lie — I’m a pretty athletic lady. Yet my quads are literally ON FIRE after 5 1/2 hours of squatting to shelve books on the bottom shelf! Also, repetitive alphabet recall can be surprisingly stressful on the brain. There’s also a lot to learn about the politics of the sorting room. But I think my favorite part about working in circulation is the amout of face-to-face interaction I get to have with our library patrons at the check-out desk.
Sure, library work will always be about education and community building in my heart. But for now it’s also about getting materials where they need to be so that patrons can find what the heck they’re looking for, which might be a little bit more tedious, but is just as important. And even when it feels tedious, it somehow still manages to feel less tedious than my well-paid cubicle job from a few years back. I sure do ❤ my public library!
Whoa! So April came and went, and I now have my MLIS degree, live in a new state, work at a new public library, and Aaron and I are in mega high-gear getting ready to move to our new (bigger) place and planning our September wedding. Lupa the cat is handling this all surprisingly well!
This weekend we had the amazing opportunity to visit the Chicago Public Library (it was literally right around the corner from our friend’s loft where we were staying). Aaron is sweet and humors my desire to visit libraries (instead of, you know, other more exciting tourist attractions) when we travel to major metropolitan areas. It was tons of fun actually seeing CPL’s famed YouMedia space, IRL (I’m just a dork like that who really <3s teen library spaces).
It feels pretty awesome to come out of my final-days-of-grad-school stupor, although I’m sure I will miss it too. Starting B Sides was an amazing experience, and I’m stoked to see what the new editors will do with it next year! Coming soon… expect more (frequent) “Reader’s Advisory” posts (aka “things i like that maybe you’ll like too”), tales from my new public library job, and perhaps even a few academic-ish pieces from my final frothy-mouthed semester.
It’s good to be back!
I’ve already written about why I don’t like Readers’ Advisory here on this blog. Yet I was still pleased to get a lot out of Jody Wurl and Michele McGraw’s presentation — “Readers’ Advisory 2.0” — at last week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College.
Wurl and McGraw kicked off by asking “why should Readers’ Advisors care about Web 2.0 anyway — what does the Internet have to do with books?” Trick question! On the Internet, Librarians can go where the readers are and connect with them there. The Hennepin County Library system, where both Wurl and McGraw work, has developed an online presence called Bookspace (powered by Adobe’s ColdFusion software) where Librarians can do just that — and for popular titles, the conversation often starts before the book comes out, from the moment it’s been cataloged. Here are some of the other tools they like:
Twitter can help library users draw the connection between pop culture, current events and library services. This is what Rudy Leon argued last week during her presentation — “One Tweet at a Time: Developing Critical Thinking, Library Connections & Information Skills with Twitter” — at the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College. (Her presentation slides are available here.)
Leon is a Learning Commons Librarian at the Undergraduate Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Earlier this decade, UIUC conducted a study in which they learned that: Freshmen are totally smart! And they will circumvent the system in order to work around whatever they can’t figure out at the Library. At the time, the Undergraduate Library (UGL) system was extremely decentralized, and Leon and her colleagues were trying to figure out how they could revitalize their services and help students. Fortunately for Leon, her predecessors had already embedded a Twitter feed for @askundergrad into the front page of the UGL Website, and she was able to repurpose this feed in order to centralize information about the Library in a highly visible location.
It was lunchtime, I was hungry, and Michael Porter from WebJunction was projecting graphic photos of his bloody hand.
Spock may be half Vulcan and half Human, but he definitely knows what’s up with the Library Computer Access Retrieval System (LCARS) and the Personal Access Display Device (PADD). This was the crux of Michael Porter’s keynote talk — “Libraries, Technology, Evolution, Change and Success” — at last week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College. Porter, aka LibraryMan, argued that although librarians love serving our communities, we often do a terrible job with electronic content distribution! He urged us to glean a little inspiration from Star Trek and to actively develop digital strategies for electronic content access.
Last week I had the privilege to attend and present at the 4th Annual Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, on March 17-18! Check out write-ups of the following sessions right here on Librarian in a Banana Suit:
Totally psyched to have my Twitter Cheat Sheet ready to go for next week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College! So psyched, in fact, that I’m making it available to you, right here, right now. (Just click here for the pdf.)
@username = reply / mention
“@bananasuit Nice bananasuit!”
d username = direct (private) tweet
“d bananasuit Want to meet up and go bananasuit shopping?”
RT @username = retweet what someone else said
“RT @bananasuit 5% of Americans now own bananasuits”
#keyword = hashtag
“I think I’m ready to take the plunge and get a #bananasuit”
Rachel Smalter Hall 