Category: librarians

on success

Posted on by jessamyn

I read Seth Godin’s books when I see them around. It was fun to see this little blurb by him on Library Garden discussing what makes him successful: “I do things where I actually think I’m right, as opposed to where I think succeeding will make me successful. When you think you’re right, it’s more fun and your passion shows through.”

When I was speaking in Australia in 2004 about the USA PATRIOT Act and CIPA and HIPAA, someone asked the question “How do you keep going? How do you face each day with all these difficult tasks ahead of you?” And my answer was then, as it is now, that I think I’m right. I don’t kid myself that other people also think I’m right, but I enjoy talking to them just the same. It’s easy to be relaxed about your approach when you feel it deep in your bones and aren’t just talking about what people want you to talk about to make rent or get a promotion. We’re all motivated by different things, naturally, and I’d hate the world if it were filled with 6 billion Jessamyns, but it’s fun and inspiring to interact with people who are passionate about their work.

library careers – two national organizations

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results

while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).

Open Access to Ranganathan

Posted on by jessamyn

I know, I know, I’m like a Ranganathan fangirl. “The library is a growing organism! blah blah blah” But this is Ranganathan news that is current! And cool! The Digital Library of Information Science & Technology Classics Project has gotten permission from the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science to provide open access to many of Ranganathan’s works. There is some preliminary material scanned from the Five Laws of Library Science available already.

Our Work and How We Do It

Posted on by jessamyn

Rural Library Director's jobs

I went to teach a class in Internet Safety at the Ainsworth Public Library in Williamstown. While I was there, the librarian showed me her chart of all the jobs she does. She sometimes has to go back and forth with her Board of Trustees because they think certain things are her job that aren’t, or they don’t want her to do certain things that really should be part of her job. This is her outline. Every separate color is a different set of responsibilities. You may have to blow it up sort of largeish to read it. This librarian works about 20 hours a week.