Unlike the Springfield Public Library or the Librarian Trading Cards, there isn’t currently a tool to do this, but this LISNews post encourages librarians, and anyone I guess, to make their own READ posters and add them to this group pool. A good fun project while you’re unpacking and dealing with conference re-entry.
my two posts from PLA yesterday
Today I went into the wilds of Filene’s Basement with my sister to get my boyfriend a suit, so no PLA for me, even though I heard that Jenny and Michael’s talk was excellent (and agree with Sarah and Suzi, what a nice bunch of people). My two posts from yesterday are linked here:
- The Joy of Censorship by Joe Raiola – I enjoyed this talk a lot though I wwas worried I’d have trouble transcribing parts of it to the PLA blog because of all the swearing, but the PLAblog admins were pretty nice about it all, including the image!
- Productive Aging – Are Public libraries Productive Partners? – it was really great to hear Mary Catherine Bateson issue a call to arms to take advantage of the boomers retiring and having lots of free time while they are still healthy and involved to get them to help their communities and help their country.
I tried pretty hard to go to sessions which wouldn’t be on the standard techie paths, and also tried to do write-ups quickly and efficiently. I liked getting to use the press room and I liked feeling that I was sharing some of my skills and abilities (quickly tossing up a well-linked and well written blog post for an event that someone else couldn’t go to) with other librarians. Sarah did a little PLA blogging, but also did write-ups of a few more sessions on her own website. I posted my final post on the PLABlog, even though I swore I was going to do a write-up on how terrible the bathrooms were
Elsewhere in the library conference world this weekend, Meredith lets us know that she didn’t suck in her talk in Computers in Libraries. Look at that talk about wikis, it does not suck.
two posts over at PLABlog
I went to two interesting sessions yesterday which I blogged about for PLA.
Creating a Digital Library on a Shoestring, Laurie Thompson and Sarah Houghton
Right of Center and Still Balanced – Susan Hill
I also went to a WebJunction event where I met some interesting regional librarians from Iowa, and a Library Journal awards dinner at the top of the Prudential celebrating the best small libraries where I met some new-to-Boston librarians from Missouri. It was a fun shindig made even better by the fact that the library who won last year, the Haines Borough Public Library is actually one that I’ve been to, way back when.
see you at PLA?
I’m at PLA for the next few days so updates will be over at the PLAblog, and you can follow along with the photostream at Flickr by looking at the pla2006 tag. You can’t sort by author so I suggest you read the whole thing if you’re interested in what a public library conference looks like. This is my first real post there. Early observations:
- Free wireless everywhere for everyone, and even a special wireless lounge with couches and outlets. Huh, that looked easy.
- The Hynes Convention Center is a really good place for a conference.
- The PLAblog is not just a neat project from the perspective of people who can’t go to the conference, it actually is a great network of folks who are sort of known to be the techie-types who are visible to help with all sorts of things.
- As always, I’m delighted to be staying with a person (my sister) and not in some wretched hotel. I have yet to stay in a hotel in the US that is at all better than my own room at home, or even most of the guestrooms I stay in. This may be one of those rural vs. urban things, but it sure is true.
- It’s really nice to get to just write-up things for the blog and not a) be in charge and b) be on my way to a governance meeting. Steven and Andrea are doing an amazing job.
- Brian Smith (also blogging for PLA) is as funny in person as he is on his site, just don’t call him the “laughing librarian”
…and about those techie librarians
As I was writing my post about losing your techie librarians last week, I did some thinking. My list was a little longer and I removed a few items that could have gone either way — that I saw as important as a techie librarian, but that I thought non-techies might say “See, that’s what’s wrong with those techie librarians….” Examples like “Make them submit all of their work to a non-techie committee that meets infrequently” can highlight this nuance. In my world, getting all of my techie decisions second guessed by non-techies can be frustrating and seemingly fruitless. To other staff, I’m sure that seeing me working away on a project that springs fully formed from my laptop is equally frustrating, possibly. I learned, at my last library job, how to ask for feedback on projects as I worked, to try to get people to feel like they were part of the process while at the same time not just saying “So, what do you guys think of the new website?” Getting responses on the new website design that indicated that I should change the colors, add more photographs or rework the layout when we were a few days away from launching it made me gnash my teeth thinking “But I’ve been working with you on this all along, for months…!” and yet their responses indicated that clearly I hadn’t been, not in a way that was genuine to them.
Or, maybe not. One of the hardest things about technology is trying to assess people’s relative skill levels when the information they give you about their own skill levels is all over the map. While we have long worked with best practices in many aspects of the library profession, many best practices in the technology realm either exist totally outside of most people’s consciousness, or the “tyranny of the expert” problem pops up where a library director assumes that because they are in charge, they can overrule best practices without a better follow-up option. The websites of our professional organizations and those sold to us by our ILS/OPAC vendors don’t help.
There is a blind spot in working with technology where people making the decisions have a tendency to assume that other technology users are like them. The ideas of usability, web standards, and accessibility as abstract concepts don’t matter as much as what’s for sale, what your tech team can build, and what your library director’s favorite color is. The patrons become a distant third consideration when techie and non-techie librarians battle for turf. Trying to bring up the patrons in a usability debate becomes a complicated mess because everyone knows one or two patrons that, as exceptions to the rules, complicate the approach and strategies employed by the bulk of the rest of the patrons. Especially in rural or poorer areas, users with very little access to technology understand it differently than people who have grown up with it, used it at work for decades, or who have a familiar working knowledge of it. Do you design a website for your digitally disadvantaged community (who pays your salary) or do you design the site that will help them understand it, and do you know the difference?
I’ve been enjoying teaching adult education tech classes more than I enjoyed being a techie in a non-techie library, but let’s be fair, the library probably runs more smoothly without me there also. No doubt, hiring and retention of skilled technology-savvy librarians is an important point and a good management concern. On the other hand, there is an oil and water aspect to the techie/librarian mix and the techie in a library can be seen as the new kid in a classroom where everyone else knows the rules and the local customs. The techie librarian often doesn’t look, work, or sometimes even talk like longer term tenured librarians. This we know. The same can be said for catalogers often, but since their jobs are understood and understood to be essential for the functioning of a library (and have been since day one) I find that their eccentricities and quirky non-patron-facing job function seem to be less problematic than some of the same oddballness of the techies.
Again, it’s just me saying blah blah blah about the work that I do and the things that I see but I know that as a techie, the longer I work outside of libraries but with librarians, the more I wonder how to fix this problem and the less I think I know how.