Tales of a Librarian
Thoughts on librarianship and service.
Transition Points
Today (02/01) is the first day of the rest of my career. It is also the first day that my hiring manager no longer works here. It is the first day that the department is really mine. Read More
Checking In
Hello, fair readers!
I’m sorry that I’ve been MIA for so long. The holidays are only part of my excuse. The last 8+ weeks have been alternately horrible and promising for me and include a resurgence of depression, a poor performance evaluation, new purpose, new direction, and new situations. Read More
Why Did My Job Exist?: Decline of Consortial Monograph Circulation at University of Missouri St. Louis, 2011-2016
In the spring of 2016 I was enrolled in the University of Missouri’s School of Information Science & Learning Technology’s (SISLT) Online Education certificate program. I was only in the program for that one semester before taking a new job in a new state that made it financially impossible to continue with that certificate program since I was no longer getting the 75% employee discount on in-state tuition. One of the classes I was taking was called “Digital Humanities” (DH). This class introduced me to that field of study and had me thinking about switching enrollments into the DH certificate program they were just about to launch. That class required a final project and ultimately resulted in the largest and most professional product I ever created for SISLT, and this is after I’d graduated with their Master’s in Library Science degree in May 2015.
What follows is a version of that final project edited for this format. Read More
Access Services Conference
Thanks to having an employer who actually sees the value in investing in its employees I was able to attend the Access Services Conference for the first time, this year, in Atlanta. If you’re not aware, this is a smaller conference that is dedicated — not surprisingly — to the Access Services zone of academic libraries; an area of the field typically neglected at other conferences and occasionally maligned by other areas of the profession. This is everything from ready reference and circulation to emergency preparedness. Read More
Taking Stock at Five-ish Months
I’ve actually been pretty busy this last week-plus and haven’t been able to arrive at a coherent topic lately, so, instead I thought I’d reflect on my recent history and give what updates I can on my professional life. Read More
On Sexual Assault
Late last night on my personal Twitter I attempted to produce a thread about sexual assault. Because of the hour and my degree of consciousness, and due to my somewhat incompetent Twitter skills it all came out a bit of a jumbled mess. So, this morning after a full night’s sleep I thought I’d rewrite it here. It’s not the sort of thing I usually write about on this blog, but I thought this might be a better forum for my thoughts than social media. Here goes. Read More
Halloween at UNLV Libraries
For this week’s post I thought I’d share some images from our Halloween festivities. I’m lucky in that I work in a place that allows these kinds of shenanigans from time to time. It was a fun day and the staff and students looked great! Can’t wait to do it again next year. I certainly need to step up my Halloween game. Read More
Soft Power and Changing Workplace Culture
Updated: 2017-10-27, 10:17
I recently worked a Sunday evening shift for the first time, 1:00-9:00 PM. I didn’t stay until closing, but long enough to support my daytime and evening crew while the normal closer was on vacation. I’m glad I did, because I certainly saw some things I want to work on changing. I won’t go into details, because this isn’t the correct forum for that, but let’s just say I’m interested in running a tighter ship around here. Read More
Guybrarian
Edited, 2017-10-11, 08:10 PDT.
Recently, I was sitting alone at the reference desk, wearing a sweater, glasses, and sporting some quality facial hair. While sitting there I wondered, “Have I reached peak guybrarian?” I looked a bit like the dapper gentleman to the right, but less done up. Read More
Fair Warning…
…I don’t know if I’m going to able to post a “real” blog, this week, as I’m attending a conference. Last year, at this same conference, I was able to do a daily recap, but circumstances are different this time around and I’m not sure I’m going to have time.
Watch the Twitter feed and I’ll tweet it as much as I can.
In the meantime, be careful out there, and make it a good day.
The “P” Word
In the first year that I was in library school my early classes were frequently preoccupied with the question “Is librarianship a profession?” And the answer was, of course, “yes!” But the yes wasn’t a confident one as much as a desperate defense of the profession as such. In fact, the early classes were more successful in putting me on the Proud Professional Librarian path than they were at teaching me anything valuable or practical about doing the work of librarianship, being that I already been working in libraries for six-plus years. Indeed, it seems that librarianship has been preoccupied with this question for approximately 150 years. If you spend that much time wringing your hands about it, perhaps it’s not really true? Read More
Humanist Leadership
I’m new to being a boss. I’ve supervised student assistants for years, but this is the first job in which I’ve supervised “grown-ups.” Currently, I have five full-timers and two part-timers underneath me, not counting the small army of student workers they supervise. There are whole ranges in libraries that contain everything I don’t know about management and leadership. Everything I do know I learned from my own bosses through the years.* Mostly, what I learned was not to do. I have had a lot of bad managers; some of whom probably never should have been in a position of power. I learned good things from the few good ones I’ve had, too. Read More
