Email tag

Lots of lots of emailing today to schedule speakers for the Chinese library directors.  Sometimes I wonder if this kind of scheduling would be more efficient with just a phone call, but there is quite a bit of information to be sent out too.  I think opening the discussion with a phone call and following up with an email would probably be best, but then we’d just play phone tag in the same way we play email tag.  I don’t know — just something to be thinking about.

Schedules

We got our Chinese names in class today!

Work had a focus on scheduling.  Sent out my preliminary schedule for the summer, and also started a document for the Fall Associates Program schedule, which doesn’t have much on it yet.  Put the presentations for the IFLA-OCLC Fellows up at http://www.library.illinois.edu/mortenson/misc/IFLA-OCLC/

Chinese and Chinese

Today was the first day of my Chinese language class and it’s going to be awesome!  It means I’ll be working in the afternoons for the next three weeks.

Today was all about planning for the Chinese librarian visitors.  Emails to a few more speakers and a couple more confirmations have come in.

A work log blog

Phoenix - Aberdeen Bestiary

Okay, so this blog has been pretty much dead for two years now.  Like a phoenix from the ashes, I am reviving it now as a sort of “work diary” … something I’ve tried a couple other times with other formats (text files, emails to self) but now that I’m pretty much taking my laptop to work every day again I figure I can just keep WordPress open in a tab and jot some notes to self.

Most likely these will be very short posts at the end of my day, trying to sum up where I’m at and what kind of strings need to be followed for the next day.  Wouldn’t it be oh-so-nice if I could keep this up?  Yes. Yes it would.

Nooks and Crannies

Some people really enjoy the research part of a paper, while others live for the writing part.  I am definitely of the former, and my little joys of late have been the interesting discoveries of obscure library journals that weren’t published for very long but had great articles during their short lifespans.  Tonight’s example is Library Consortium Management: an international journal.  LCM only had 8 issues, from 1999 to 2000, but these few small issues are teaching me incredible things about library consortia!  For example, I’m reading an article about the stages of development for library networks – when they go from simply purchasing shared resources to being “incorporated” and the consortia becomes a body of its own outside of the individual libraries.  I automatically think of the Orbis-Cascade Alliance from my previous life.  The member libraries were from universities and colleges across the Pacific Northwest, but the consortia had its own little office and even staff to handle all the administrative aspects of making sure things went smoothly for the libraries.  This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to chart out in my paper.

Word of the day: Cooperations

I seem to have found at least one solution to my search term problem of yesterday — “library cooperations” or at least that was the catch phrase in the 80s.  I’m not sure if it’s really still used in the literature today, but I have the beginnings of a bread crumb trail now.  I discovered a couple shelves full of the stuff in the 021.64 area of the Library Science Library (ha! … sounds like something out of that new show Pushing Daisies, like the Darling Mermaid Darlings).

I’m a little worried that most of the material I’ve found so far is rather dated.  I only have a few things from the 90s and nothing from the Aughts.  Hmmm…

Libraries in plural

A group of librarians is called a “shush”… believe it or not… but what about a group of libraries? A shushtette?

My goal for this Independent Study as I laid it out in the proposal was to survey the literature regarding international library partnerships and/or “sister library” programs to see how the partnerships were measured in terms of success or benefit for the member libraries. I envisioned a beautiful, well-organized table of information about all the partnerships I could find, with fields describing the type of libraries involved (public, school, academic…), how long they had worked together, what they shared in the partnership, which countries were represented and so on.

I did not take into account the role that library associations might play in these partnerships. My initials searches through the databases have turned up articles about professional associations, libraries partnered with businesses, libraries and the digital divide, but very little about international library partnerships in the sense that I’m hoping to find. Lots of information about digital libraries and libraries getting networked in the technical, online way. Every once in awhile I’ll find “library network” describing a consortia – bingo! But these are few and far between.

Which leads me to wonder if I should adjust the scope of my topic… are today’s library consorita primarily digital partnerships? What are these library partnerships calling themselves? Hmph.

Renewal

The verb “to renew” has a few different meanings, especially for library folk.  Renewing a magazine subscription vs. renewing your library books.  Or perhaps a renewal can be likened to a renaissance … re-new vs. re-born.

However you interpret this word, I am going to “renew” this Librarienne blog by using it to track my progress through an Independent Study class for my library science degree.  As I am beginning this Independent Study very late in the semester, I have a lot of work to catch up on.  As this is a blog, I’ll be very frank about my observations.  For starters, using my university’s library is a depressing and demoralizing experience.  To truly describe the experience, I’ll have to create a Flickr slideshow that illustrates everything.  You really have to see it to believe it.  For the full effect, you have to be there… but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Next post: just what am I doing in this Independent Study?

Soul Mates

Librarians and Databases. They were meant for each other. With all the data swirling around libraries, you’d think that librarians would have databases mastered.

This is, sadly, not the case. I’ve worked in three different academic libraries and in various departments of each library. Everywhere I go, the departments are crying out for specific little databases to help their everyday jobs – scheduling students at the desk, matching faculty to publishers, maintaining subject guides, coordinating events, and on and on. This should be something every librarian knows how to do and there should be a straightforward program that they can use to do it. But in each department I’ve seen, this valuable tool is dumped on the IT folks, which isn’t fair to them, because they don’t know how the librarians are going to use it.

What about you, dear reader? Whether you work in a library, an office, a store… do you ever find yourself thinking, “if we just had all this information centralized, life would be so much better!”

A change is a-brewing

Almost one week since ALA’s annual conference ended and I’m just now catching up to some ALA-related posts that I’ve been meaning to put here.   Before I go on to more session-specific postings, however, I wanted to write about the most important element of ALA and, for that matter, any conference:  the people.

My primary mission at the conference was to meet my fellow library folk, talk to them, find out what was buzzing through L-y-wood, and this mission was fulfilled beyond my expectations.  The most exciting part was finding out how many people were feeling the same way I did – that something’s gotta change.

To all the fresh new library students, librarians, library staff out there who are asking themselves “is this all there is?” please allow me to introduce you to some restless natives, of all ages, who are ready to get the New Librarian Party started:

Karin Dalziel, librarian and artist, as well as the creator of lisstudents.ning.com where library students can get together and compare notes.  Just before the conference she had a great post about marketing in libraries, which hits at one of our biggest issues.

Cindi Trainor, techie librarian, blogger, mama, and model.  Cindi wrote about change in libraries and how we need to, you know … do it already!

Nathan Bomer talked me into the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. lecture, for which I am very grateful.  He’s also musing on the state of ALA and what we can do about it.

I met Michelle Boule at the OCLC Blogger’s Salon.  She did a great job on the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase, which has been lauded across the blogosphere several times over.

Forward thinkers like these can be found in droves at some great wiki spaces such as Improve ALA and Library Society of the World.   But if this desire for change is going to go anywhere, we need to get together and really start throwing some ideas around.  These wikis are great places to start and I’ll be keeping tabs on both of them.  Hopefully we can all have our own little New Librarian Party organized in time for Midwinter … whaddya say?