A couple more days in the life of a library student

Wednesday was relatively quiet.  Everything I needed to do, I could do in the Center and there were no meetings scheduled.  I started the morning with some troubleshooting on the Google Calendars we were setting up for the office.  I had already created a Google account for the office and set up the calendars under that account, then made it “shared” with my own Google account and everyone else in the office.  I filled in more of the events that we had already discussed and left many of them as “all day” with lots of question marks in the titles since we still have a lot of details to confirm.

I worked through lunch proofreading a grant proposal for more library training.  Usually, when I get something to proofread, I also pretty it up.  In this case, there were a lot of tables full of budget figures in the proposal so I added very small touches like lightly shading the header rows, giving a thicker border above the “Total” rows and things like that, making the tables a bit easier to read.

I spent the last couple hours converting more of our webpages to the content management system that the entire library is switching to.  The office I work in is just one small unit of many, many departments within the University Library, thus we get pulled into the big, overarching decisions with everyone else.

After I left the Center, I spent a couple hours working on LibGuides stuff.  I added my notes from Tuesday’s training session to my outline and searched for video tutorials that I could add to our training guides.

Thursday was full of experimentation, which is something I truly love… most of the time.  I synced Thunderbird with the office Google Calendars (via Lightning and Provider) and installed a couple extensions in order to get a customized print-out of the schedules we needed for the programs in the Fall.  It was quickly apparent that tweaking this work-around would require a little more time than I could give it right then, so I moved on to other projects.

One of our international librarians has spent the past year with us and she is leaving soon to go back to Pakistan.  I have learned *so* much from her and had such a wonderful time getting to know her.  She stopped by my desk and we had a good talk about file management practices… or the lack thereof.  We both bemoaned the messy, duplicated, frustrating nature of shared network drives.  Every place I’ve worked at for the past 10 years has had such a feature yet not a single one of them has used them well.  People still email drafts back and forth to each other, which are then saved on desktops or in personal folders of the network drive and pretty soon there are a dozen different versions of the same document.  We talked about the search limitations and clunky interface involved in trying to find the right file in the right folder.  Mused on the potential of tagging for file systems. But even information professionals don’t know what exactly to do with their information.  Alas.

In the afternoon I had a one-on-one LibGuide training session, which went really well.  We focussed on the “Books from the Catalog” box and created RSS feeds from UIUC’s New Titles page as well.  I realized I need to add a blurb to the handout about the difference between “copying” a box and “linking” a box.

Friday hit me with the revelation that the IFLA conference is only three weeks away!  We got the schedule for our GSLIS booth coverage at IFLA in Quebec — I’ll be one of the volunteers.  I’m also going as part of the Mortenson Center crew to present a poster there, which was one of the projects I worked on today.  The Center has a pretty clever approach to conference posters — they create slides in PowerPoint (like a lot of people do) BUT! they make several slides instead of one big slide.  They get these slides printed out as 11 x 17 laminated mini-posters, which lay in the bottom of a carry-on very conveniently and without the need to be rolled up.  At the conference, they arrange the mini-posters however they’ll fit with the poster board provided, sometimes they leave a couple slides off.  It’s all very flexible, easy to pack, easy to set up and take down.  So I’ve been formatting the slides for this year’s poster, adding images from our archive and getting it ready for our last proofing next week before it’s sent to the printers.

I also worked on an excel spreadsheet for our program participants; the spreadsheet will link to several mail merge documents in Word for things like name badges, contact lists, introductions for speakers and so on.  We’ve never done this before with this program.  In years past, the list of participants was simply repeated from one Word document to another, with various information added and left off and reformatted and so on.  In an effort to make our documents more centralized and efficient, we’re trying out the mail merge approach this year.  Hopefully it works smoothly.

The day ended with the beginning of another project – I started proofreading a publication that will be coming out this fall on international library leadership institutes, which sorta started here.  This publication is also the basis for our IFLA poster and – lucky me – it’s actually a very interesting read!

And now it’s Saturday.  I’m at home.  I’m going to have a couple chocolate chip cookies and work on home projects rather than work projects for a while.  

A (couple) day(s) in the life of a library student

I am a late-comer to the “Day in the Life of a Librarian” theme running through Librariana lately, and I’m not yet officially a librarian but a library student.  Nevertheless,  there were a few reasons I wanted to chime in:

1. For all the folks who don’t know why we go to school for this.
2. For all the folks in library school who have really boring library student jobs — have hope!
3. For all the folks interested in “library stuff” but not necessarily the idea of working in a “library”… have hope!

I have two of the best jobs a library student like me could ever want.  For starters, I work for an office (the Mortenson Center) that handles international library programs — helping librarians from all over the world learn from each other, increase their professional skills, and pass the knowledge along to their colleagues at home.  I cannot begin to tell you how much I love this job.  I never sit at a “service desk” or catalog items or do anything traditionally library-like, yet I’m working with librarians every day from all walks of life.   My other job is working with the university library’s LibGuides team – lots of training, pushing technology to see how much it can do, and idea recycling (search and share).

So… this week in my life:

Monday started at a storage unit.  The Mortenson Center hosts visiting librarians from other countries each year for a couple months to several months.  The librarians usually stay in campus residences, which means they need some basic house things while they’re here.  We keep a few things for them in an un-air-conditioned, dusty, crowded storage unit.  And Monday was one of the hottest, most humid days of the year.  Three of us worked in there for a few hours, mostly throwing away old, worn-out things.  I had to leave before my poor co-workers so I could finish up a training outline for a meeting that afternoon.

The training is for LibGuides, and we want to focus on demonstrating how LibGuides allows for a more dynamic, interactive apporach to the tired old static subject guide.  To that end, I’ve been collecting good examples from other institutions.

The rest of the day was spent in a frenzy of preparation for several meetings on Tuesday.

Tuesday was a frenzy.  I started out early at the Center finishing some demonstration pieces for a presentation on Web 2.0 tools for the office.  Then I dashed off to give the LibGuides training.  I love training librarians!  They ask wonderful questions, they think about things from lots of amazing angles, and they’re friendly to boot.  I came away from the session with several notes for things to add to the next session.  Sometimes giving a training session like that reminds me of Eddie Izzard’s stand-up comedy — the way he pretends to write notes to himself about jokes that don’t work.  Each training session shows me what needs to be fine-tuned for the next one.  I really do write notes to myself.

I went straight from that to a scheduling meeting for this Fall’s international librarian program.  We’re going to have a BIG group this year and with travel costs going up, we’re trying to make every penny stretch.  Details, details, details!  Truly well-organized events are all about the details, as my bosses say.  Five of us sit around a table for two hours with calendars and lists spread out in front of us, like a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  We have to line up everything just right — the speakers, the room reservations, the catering, the transportation, the hand outs, the paperwork, the fees, and so on.  Fortunately, we have an incredible little family of staff in the office and everyone attacks their part of the puzzle with gusto.  Probably a big reason I love my job is the fact that I work with wonderful people.

Once the scheduling stuff was done, I gave a very brief overview of some online tools we could use for productivity in the office.  I focused on free tools that would allow for plenty of collaboration and – of course – Google products were the stars of the show.  I did a quick look at Google Reader’s “share” tools and showed how we could have a folder just for all the search alerts on our office name — from Blog Search, News, and the Web.  From there I brought up Google Docs and had an example of a presentation we’d been working on already uploaded.  I also went through Gmail’s filters and labels, but had to rush through it so I don’t know if that was actually helpful at all.  The presentation ended with Google Calendar, which is the most intriguing and controversial tool for our office.  On one hand, half the staff have to use Oracle because the rest of the library uses Oracle.  On the other hand, we will eventually want our visitors to be able to access events on the calendar and they will not have Oracle accounts, nor do the temporary staff in the office (such as a student like me).  Another benefit of Google Calendar is the “Discuss” function, which would allow us to leave comments on a particular event as the various elements are confirmed (room, meals, speaker).  This would give us a mini-history on the event that all of us could see and keep track of.

The conclustion was to start using Google Calendar for the program events.  The staff using Oracle will continue using Oracle for their own meetings and individual schedules, but will check on the Google Calendar to see how the program events are shaping up.

Wednesday and Thursday to follow.

To see some other interesting library people do their thing (in addition to the wiki) check out:

Jenica: http://rogersurbanek.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/a-day-in-the-life/

Lauren:  http://laurenpressley.com/library/?p=559

Karin: http://www.nirak.net/2008/07/14/day-in-the-live-post-1/

That sums it up

I was looking for a good dose of humor this morning, so I turned right away to Piled Higher and Deeper.  I found two comics that really express everything I could want to say about…

1. Life

and 2. Politics

Glad that’s over with

My first year of graduate school is over!!  Gaah!  As you can see from the activity on this blog, I haven’t really had any time to myself for a few weeks now.  So as is my style, a few bullets:

- I’ve sort of reconciled myself with the whole idea of my dad going to Iraq.  We’ve talked quite a bit more on the phone in the last couple weeks than we usually do in two months.  We’ve reached the deal-with-this-through-humor stage, and I’m teasing him about getting Prince Harry’s autograph while he’s over there.  I think what helped the most was looking ahead to his homecoming in August and we’re already planning on a nice little family reunion, so we all have something to look forward to.  Something as simple as a goal or a plan can be wonderful therapy.

- I haven’t read blogs or RSS feeds in almost a month, so my apologies to all my friends who posted earth-shattering news on their blogs and haven’t heard from me.  This weekend = catch up.

- With classes over, I’ve done two things this week that I never thought I would do …

- First, I have wholeheartedly listened to and enjoyed some country music.  My lovely girlfriend checked out the video “Shut up and sing” about the Dixie Chicks, which was a great film, and afterward we listened to “Not ready to make nice” in various YouTube editions from the video to the Grammys.  It was such a perfect song for the whole situation with my dad — and so fitting in light of where the song came from.  Mind you, I’m not angry at my dad at all. I’m still worried sick about him.  As I said in the last post, I’m dumbfounded that our government has let all this happen.  But anyways…

- Second, I signed up on Facebook.  Two reasons went into this – for starters, I’m taking a class in the Fall on Social Networks, specfically the online kind (as opposed to the theory) so I figured I should know something more than just blogs and Flickr.  Secondly, I’ve met some great people in a class this term who use Facebook a lot, so much so that it comes up in conversation regularly.  Some of these people are graduating and it appears that Facebook will be the best way of keeping in touch.  Why was I resisting?  Well, I used to work with a couple people who were giving MySpace a try, and it seemed like the whole idea was a great big meat-market-singles-bar type thing.  And the bar was primarily inhabited by teenagers, to boot.  So I wasn’t interested.  Facebook, at least, seems a little better organized and, I don’t know, grown-up maybe.  We’ll see.

- It’s summer!  Such glorious long sunlight hours!  I’m trying to enjoy it as much as I can now, because I know I’ll be miserable in about a month when the heavy, heat-laden, humid air returns and suffocates us all.  Hopefully this year won’t be so bad since we’re not coming straight from Oregon.

- I have lots of thoughts about library-related matters, but that will have to be a separate post.  Although this term was crazy busy, it was also extremely rich in information and ideas. More to come. For now, I leave you with a cheeky fun music video that I lifted from Unexpected Librarian:

Eyes bigger than my calendar

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning in grad school is time management … or, better put, how the absence of time management can really mess up every aspect of your life.  Smiles.

Maybe every student has a semester that they didn’t do quite right … I think this is mine.  I tried to pack in too many classes and too many jobs and here I am, barely half way through the semester, feeling like I’ve already run the marathon only to find this is just the turn-around point.

But just like a marathon (from what marathon-runners have told me), there’s a strange kind of high in there somewhere, too.  Less than two months ago I was in Prague at a library conference.  Today a whole gaggle of us are going to East St. Louis to survey community centers in low-income neighborhoods for computer labs.  How cool is that?   A few days ago I went to a lecture called “Visions of Time” given by a Princeton chronologist who, as if in irony, used faded black and white photocopied transparencies on a projector for his presentation.  I realized that was the first projector I’ve seen in use for, oh, six years at least.  It was like watching someone type on a typewriter.  It put things in perspective for me during this crazy term of back-to-back scheduling.  As fun as it’s been, next year I’m only taking 12 credits a term, tops.

Hopefully you’ll see some photos here soon of this weekend’s trip.  Updates to come.

meta-me

I’ve mentioned my interests in metafiction and metadata. Today I get to spend eight hours learning about a metalanguage. I think I’m in love. I’ve been waiting/looking for a link between my information science pursuits and my linguistic passions; what do I find but the idea of languages describing languages. Yes, I realize that sounds redundant, but it’s not what you might think. A metalanguage is the very thing that brings out meaning from any text – imagine a novel, even a short 200-pager, without any descriptors like “chapter x” or “introduction” – imagine all 200 pages running together without any indication of where the text starts and the forwards end. Better yet, imagine reading a play without any indication of scene breaks, acts, or any information but the dialogue itself. Strip away all the stage directions and you would have an example of content without structure, or – a language without its metalanguage. (Note: I’m the first to admit that I’m new to this stuff, so if anyone has a better example or a correction, please fire away in the comments.)

What’s it all about?

I’ve run across two very different approaches/perspectives/interpretations of the Web 2.0 trends in the last few weeks.  First, there was the famous text animation video from Kansas State U, which has already been blogged to death, receiving its fair share of praise and criticism.

Then I somehow did a time warp to the past – say, six months ago – while researching Web 2.0’s effect on information users and their privacy (or lack thereof).   On a new-to-me search engine, I ran across Dani B.’s blog, specifically her post from July 2006.

Now, both of these examples are fairly optimistic about Web 2.0, but it seems to me that the applications of that optimism are worlds apart.  I’d have to admit that I would toss my chips in with Dani on those rare moments when I leave cynicism aside.  I really appreciated her specific, all-too-real connection.  What good is all this information if we don’t use it to communicate with each other?   Is Dani’s example an isolated incident?  Sure.  But it speaks to a potential that the video above only skirts around.  Dani’s post is also the first time I’ve heard Web 2.0 associated with something visceral, corporeal, and possibly fatal.

Conference Last Day

We have our last sessions today and I’ll be flying home tomorrow.  It’s been so wonderful to see all the different topics addressed by all these different countries, and yet we have such strong similarities in how we all look at libraries.  I mentioned in an earlier post that the librarian stereotype was the subject of a few different presentations – and they were the same image … spinster in glasses with a bun.  Other popular topics here:  social software or social websites, competitive intelligence, and library curriculum.  That last one has been especially interesting because Europe is in the midst of looking to standardize university degrees across the EU, which is proving to be quite a challenge.  Should it be 1, 2, or 3 years?  What are the core issues?  Do students have to have a library background before the master’s? 

And then there’s the fact that the whole conference, posters, proceedings and all, was entirely in English.  I understand the need for a lingua franca, but at the same time I feel rather strongly about providing as much information as multilingually as possible.  Especially here… we must have at least a dozen languages respresented at this conference, yet we’re all muddling through in English.  Maybe I just see it as an opportunity for Americans to continue being lazy in their language skills.  Those who know me already know I think that tendency will bite us in the but one day.   But anyway… I’m going in search of a lovely Czech baguette before heading back into conference sessions.  :-p

Conference Day Two

Things are chaos all around, missing speakers, missing room (?), and people waiting.  And yet it all moves on in spite of itself.  It’s just a flurry of activity overall with excited, nervous people running to and fro.  Of course, I want to see three different speakers scheduled all at the same time.

And given the blessed wireless here on campus I just uploaded *real* photos to Flickr so check out the slideshow. 

A la Conference

A la Conference

Originally uploaded by Librarienne.
We are here in the City Hall at the opening ceremony. Many countries and universities represented. One of the speakers said that Chinese is set to outpace English on the internet in a matter of years. And one of the people I cited for my paper is in the poster session!

Most of the presenters and conference-goers are young library students, and I’m surprised to see how many of them will be discussing the librarian stereotype. I saw at least four speakers or posters on this subject in the program. But then I wonder… has it always been that way?

Here we go a-conferencing

The conference – the reason I am here – begins today.  It is roughly 7 am here in the City of Spires, and midnight in old Illinois.  Registration is at Noon and I am torn between the National Library tour at 9am vs. just exploring the city on my own some more before things get into full swing.  Academic conferences should not be held in beautiful, historical cities.  It gives the attending academics too much conflict.  Our schedule goes straight through to the evening tonight and tomorrow night, so there might not be very many more landmarks featured on this humble blog till Wednesday, when I will have the afternoon to wander.  But I will try to post about the conference itself.  On Tuesday the UIUC crew will present at various times, and then there will be a big social after all the official stuff.  Does anyone know if we can bring wine home on a flight… maybe in our checked luggage, at least… sorry, cannot get the question mark to work on this keyboard.  Cheers.

Deadlines, or Happy Holidays

I’ve been a fan of the band Magnetic Fields ever since I heard their “i” album.  This week I’ve been listening to the “69 Love Songs” set for the first time, a very appropriate choice for this time of the year… semester deadlines, application deadlines, holiday gifting and carding deadlines.  The ironies and contradictions of this season are so perfect with Stephin Merritt’s morbid sense of humor.  Stephin Merritt’s irony is so perfect with just about everything, actually.  Surely, everyone in academia is familiar with the absurdities required by all the university bureaucratic red tape and can sympathize with songs that have such great titles and lyrics as:

“I’m like a chicken with its head cut off”

“I’m crazy about you, but not that crazy”

“What if the show didn’t go on
What if we all got jobs and went to bed before dawn…”

Distractions

… originally posted at The Reading Chair…
I went to a Dissertation Writing Workshop a couple weeks ago. I’m not writing a dissertation, I don’t know when I will, where I’ll write it, or even what discipline I’ll be writing it for. But I knew from the workshop’s description that it would not really be about the content of writing per se but about the process – which can be applied to anything. Also, I wanted to meet people who were writing their dissertations and find out what they were talking about, worried about, stressed about, happy about.

The workshop satisfied all of those expectations. It left me with plenty to think about in terms of my own writing habits. I was reminded of it again this morning while listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition – there was an interview with Frieda Lee Mock who just made the documentary about Tony Kushner, Wrestling with Angels. There’s a clip in the trailer of Kushner talking with high school students, one of them asks him if ever gets bored with writing. He answers, no, he doesn’t get bored, but he does hate writing: “my hand hurts, my back hurts, I get a headache…” and yet there he is in the next clip “The Playwright”, bent over a notebook scribbling his next play/screenplay across pages and pages. A crazy-lookin’ mug on one side and an artist’s roll filled with pens on the other. Writing, writing, writing.

And I thought to myself, Tony Kushner must follow all those guidelines that workshop guy told us about… he must keep a writing schedule, must have that desk set aside solely for writing, must ignore all phone calls, emails, etc. while he’s in his writing hours. That must be how he does it. (But, of course, I haven’t seen the movie. I have no idea how he does it.)

Then I start to examine my writing habits… again. You see, I keep re-examining them, because I haven’t really developed any, so every week I have a different writing place/time/method. I need some writing habits – good ones – I’m sure that would help. This weekend I was going to try the “reward yourself” tactic. After getting a few hours of work done, I would reward myself with a walk down to a great little organic cafe downtown where I would still be productive, technically, because I would be bringing articles with me to read there.

But is that really wise? It would take me over half an hour to walk there, so over an hour round trip. Then there’d be the time to get settled, get a drink, get focused. Wouldn’t it be better if I just stayed here in the office at home where my stuff is already set up and ready to go, I just have to do the focusing part?

And that’s the hard part. I tell myself that home is where the distractions are – the cookbooks to browse through for dinner, the photos to organize, the CDs to burn, the papers to file, blah, blah. I tell myself that getting away from home and home’s distractions will make everything better, make writing easier. My inner gagged-and-bound common sense tells me that distractions can be found anywhere when you’re looking for them. And yes, I’ve been looking for them. I’m not happy with my seminar paper’s topic anymore, but we’re halfway through the semester so I don’t feel like I can change it. And I think the biggest reason I’m unhappy with it is simply that I don’t know how to structure the paper, otherwise it would be fine. There isn’t really a literature review of previous studies for this topic, and I’m so used to using that kind of thing as the opening foundation that I don’t know where to start without it. I’m such a Westerner. Get creative, Scholar, jeesh. Just write a paper already.

Update:  Shortly after writing this post, I was sidetracked again with  yet another project that wasn’t really necessary but seemed like a really good idea at the time (see “inner gagged-and-bound common sense” from above).  So I printed off the articles I needed, left the goshdarn computer at home and went for a lovely, absolutely lovely, walk downtown.  Results: articles read, can’t use ‘em for the paper.  But the walk was well worth it.

Pick a topic

Imagine, if you will, that this blog post is an eloquent exploration of any of the following topics… because that’s exactly what this blog post would be if I had the time and concentration to write about all the thoughts that have been buzzing through my head over the last few weeks:

- the library obsession with patron confidentiality when patrons are giving away their personal information-seeking info to everyone under the sun… in fact, they apparently want  to be tracked and pegged so that information-providers can make more recommendations, match them with more networks, and predict their next Christmast list.  Is patron confidentiality old hat?

- wanting very much to have my own personal information-seeking info completely removed from the eyes and hands of all companies everywhere. Especially after seeing this show and having the MC tell us all where we stand in the socioeconomic scheme of things according to the credit cards we used to buy tickets.

- looking at all the “calls for participation” coming from 2007 conferences and wondering which ones to choose, what to present if I do, how many to aim for, and how do people get accepted to all these conferenes anyway?

- realizing this week (in a very “duh” way, not a lightbulb way) that despite my hope of researching emerging languages on the internet, it is actually impossible – that’s right, I said impossible – for any website to be free of English.  It’s in the CODE!   All the code!  English!  cellpadding, stylesheet, metaname, font family… that’s all in the code of just about any webpage you see and it’s all in English.  I feel dumb for not thinking about it before and I feel like a jerk for being an English speaker.  I’d rather have a comfortable distance from the gorilla language taking over everything.  Be fluent, yes, but at least think in something else.  Ugh.  It’s disgusting.  English is so corrosive.

- Thinking about classes for next semester and into next year.  There’s a fellowship I could apply for that would cover a big chunk of tuition if I’m learning one of the 20 “minor” languages listed in the application.  Some of my favorites in the list are Arabic, Korean, Hindi, and Portuguese.  Arabic and Portuguese are also considered two of the fastest growing languages online, but I can’t find a true reliable source on that.  Korean, on the other hand, is also growing strong in the technology sector.  But what I really like about most of these languages is that they would require learning a whole new writing system.  If you need to be humbled, pick up a book in a language you can’t read – as in, can’t even make out letters – and experience the feeling of illiteracy again.  So many of us take our reading skills for granted.  Learning a new language is a great way to get a culture shock when you can’t go anywhere.  But I still need to choose one.
- CSS.  I’m building web pages at both of my jobs.   I tried to simply convert pieces of the old web pages (in really bad HTML) over to cleaned-up pages with a style sheet.  To anyone out there considering this route… don’t do that to yourself.  It’s too frustrating and time-consuming.  I think you’re better off just starting from scratch.  Nevertheless, this experience is also like learning a new language.  I’m brand new to CSS, picking it up off of web sites and random snippets from O’Reilly books.  I like it… but without full creative license, experimenting with it can be a real pain.

-  last but not least … we’ve been talking about metadata standards in one of my library classes – MARC, FRBR, Dublin Core, you name it.  And the ideal behind so many library initiatives like Library of Congress and OCLC – one-stop cataloging.  A book gets cataloged once, perfectly, and then all other libraries can just copy that record.  But I don’t really see libraries doing that.  Have you looked in OCLC?  Seen how many multiple copies there can be for the same item?  I think libraries should leave the cataloging of the popular big-publisher-house items to Amazon and focus on all the grey literature out there.  Millions and millions of pieces of info that aren’t recorded anywhere.  Small non-profit newsletters, independent books, limited-circulation journals from developing countries, reports from NGOs… that’s where our attention should be.  All those things that fall through the cracks.  People don’t need our help finding Harry Potter.  Anybody can find Harry Potter.  They need our help finding that one CD produced by that struggling artist who plays the saxophone in a subway.  Or the sculptor whose only commissions have been tucked away in the lobbies of high-rise office buildings and only the employees see them.   In this age, we have to be a different kind of guardian.  Where are the mavericks?

A Client by any other name would be a Patron

Freewrite
28 September 2006

What do we call those people in the libraries? No, not the employees, those *other* people.  The people who wander in voluntarily just to find stuff, read stuff, or nap on the overstuffed chairs.  What do we call them?  I stumbled upon just such a discussion in the archives of the jESSE library education listserv for the sake of a class assignment.  The thread was called “Customers” and – as you might imagine – many people took issue with calling their people-in-the-libraries “customers” or even “clients”… for some reason, no one argued against “patron” really, but one fellow did bring up the old tradition of calling them “readers” which I found absolutely endearing, however, that was immediately squashed by someone pointing out that people do much more than read in libraries (depends on how you define “read” I say).

All in all, one thing has become very clear to me – not only from this listserv discussion, but also from discussions in classes.  The issue is not about what we call the people-in-the-libraries, it’s really about what we call ourselvses.  We’re trying to express far too many variables with “librarian” and that’s what keeps getting us into trouble.  On the listserv, some people were offended that others were offended by “customer” because, in fact, their libraries were commercial and charged for their services.  Therefore, they had customers.  Others worked in medical libraries and had seperate issues of their own with using the term “patient” for their … um… visitors.

In my classes, our discussions completely change depending on the student – are we talking about a school context? a public library context? an academic context?  And the expectations of each “librarian” are completely different.  An academic librarian should have at least two Masters degrees.  A school librarian should have teaching certification.  A law librarian should have a JD.  And then that brings us into library science curriculum.  Did you know – in some countries, library science is treated as a vocational degree?  Are we trying to lump vocational and professional work together here in the States?  Supposedly (I said “supposedly!”) one of the first library schools here was a school of “Library Economy” and thus, women were the students because it was far more “economical” to hire them than men.  This was a school for training the library clerks – the true librarians were still academic men who were paid better.

So… I’m having a lot of issues with this whole profession right now.  I. Myself. Personally. Really like the whole librarian idea.  Especially in today’s world of info technology and social software and possibility, possibility, possibility.  History, however, makes me question the … validity? scholarship? clout? of this field.  How can we -new library students – take ourselves seriously if no one else does? Even in classes and in the literature I detect… I detect a constant subliminal apology.  It really drives me crazy.  In fact, it almost makes me not want to be associated with this field, but I’m young enough apparently to be optimistic.  I see a lot of cool, smart, savvy people in my classes – my fellow students.  I see very capable people teaching some of these classes.  Surely, with a population like this, library science can’t stay marginalized forever, right?

I guess my biggest complaint about library science classes so far is just how dated they feel.  The role models they’re giving me are all dead and gone.  Who are the movers and shakers recently??  They should be in this material now, related to everything else we’re reading.  Why haven’t any of my classes even mentioned Web 2.0 or Library 2.0??  Hello – buzzwords!

Perhaps I’m being too impatient.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  But I just wanted to voice these concerns now, so that I can look back in six months and ask myself, “Well, Self, do you feel better now? “  In the meantime I am still amused and delighted with discussions about “clients” vs. “customers” vs. “patrons” and I still love books and I still think information rules the world.