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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Taking on someone else’s job (or, Hey look, I’m in charge of the Digital Humanities Associates now.)

Published by Iris on Monday, August 31st, 2015

As of today, I find myself in charge of the Digital Humanities Associates on our campus, seven exceptional student workers who partner with faculty on digital humanities projects while they also help build the digital humanities conversation, community, and infrastructure on our campus. It’s a temporary assignment until we hire a new librarian, but it’s a weighty one for me. There are so many hopes and expectations riding on this program, so many practical and political, technical and interpersonal aspects. So much room for excitement, engagement, and success. So much potential for failure.

Dutch Boy and Dike
“The Hero of Haarlem” from Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, by Mary Mapes Dodge (1865)

My good friend and outstanding colleague Heather Tompkins built the program from scratch (not alone, of course, but centrally important), and now she’s moved on to work her magic at St. Kate’s. Walking up to work this morning, everything felt slightly unreal, slightly fractured, as I realized that there’s a Heather-ish hole in our library now, and that I’m supposed to be able to patch one portion of that hole – keep the dike from bursting – while doing some semblance of justice to Heather’s vision for the DHAs and the digital liberal arts at Carleton.

Taking over from someone who has built a program from scratch is a daunting thing. You’d think that with a young program, now entering its fourth academic year, it’d be easier to pick up and move forward. There’s less history to learn, for one thing. But with less history comes fewer people who know that history who can support you as you find your way, more things that lived solely in one person’s memory, fewer stable pieces of infrastructure to cling to.

So today I’m going to pour over the documentation and notes that Heather left for me and the notes I took while she told me about her work, and I’m going to begin the process of wrapping my head around this new project.

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Leveling Up on Chat Reference

Published by Iris on Thursday, June 11th, 2015

Our library recently joined AskMN, the Minnesota cooperative of OCLC’s global QuestionPoint service. On the one hand, this is extremely exciting. We get to donate a few hours per week to the “global queue,” answering questions that people at other academic institutions ask but whose own librarians are either busy or gone for the day. In return, we get 24/7 chat reference service for our patrons provided by the cooperative. Pretty sweet deal!

On the other hand, the experience of providing chat reference services to people I can’t see at institutions I don’t know has been a nerve-wracking and humbling one for me so far. The institutions in the cooperative leave us a cheat sheet of sorts, so we know their link resolver information, their loan rules, etc, so we’re not totally flying blind, but some schools provide more information than others, and some schools have very few resources available in the first place. So every time I hear that “ding” that tells me there’s a new patron waiting in the queue my heart races a little bit, my hands get a bit sweaty, and I’m thrown right back to my very first days staffing reference desks where every approaching patron was simultaneously a thrill and a terror. Will I be able to figure this out with the patron? Will they lose all respect for me if I take a wrong step along the way? The chances of failure seem so very high. Each success is its own day-making victory. And no matter how many successes I have in a week, they all seem to get categorized in my brain as the exception to the rule that I’ll probably fail the next person.

I’ve tried various strategies during my shifts. “I’ll pick up questions that I pretty much know I’ll be able to answer without trouble” didn’t last long. There aren’t many of those, and I don’t want to be a bad colleague and leave everyone else to answer all the questions while I sit on the side being scared. Also, if you take too much time to read and think about the answer before picking up the question, another librarian will swoop in and get it. Or rather, they’ll pick up the ones you wish you could have picked up while the super convoluted questions sit there and sit there, taunting you, explaining your guilt and fear to you in minute detail.

“I’ll pick up any question, without even looking to see what the question is first” also didn’t last long. Basically, I couldn’t make myself do it more than a couple of times because frankly, I’m not a terrific data librarian and that happened to be the subject of one of the first questions I got under this new resolution. Luckily “refer to patron’s institution” exists in QuestionPoint!

Today as I took what I know about databases in general and how they interact with EndNote and slowly, slowly walked a patron in Connecticut through importing references from a database I don’t have and can’t see into an EndNote installation I also can’t see (we did it! Victory!), I realized three things:

  1. The bedrock basics of reference work is the same — even though I feel more like I’m working alone than I do when I’m at our physical reference desk, and therefore more pressure to get the question answered thoroughly all in one shot, I’m actually still conducting the same pattern of work: “Let me get you started, at least, and then set you up with an expert afterwards if needed.” I need to remember that.
  2. Just like in face-to-face reference, a lot of customer service has to do with being good natured and generally cheerful, even if you have NO idea what’s going on (and it turns out that the patron has been secretly clicking on something you didn’t realize he would click on, especially since you said to click on something else, and THAT’S why he keeps saying he doesn’t see what you’re seeing). I always say my job is about 90% bluff (“SURE I can help you find that thing I’ve never heard of…”). The same is true online. I need to remember that.
  3. I really love face-to-face reference in a library I know well. But I can do it other ways too. I need to remember that.
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Emergency Planning For Safe Learning Environments – ACRL 2015 – Links and Handouts

Published by Iris on Monday, April 20th, 2015

As I mentioned before, my coworker Kristin and I presented a workshop at ACRL 2015 on emergency planning for libraries. The idea was that there are all kinds of things that libraries or individual groups within libraries can do to be more prepared for disruptive circumstances, many of them are even very simple.

The workshop proved to be an action-packed 3 hours featuring a cast of wonderful participants. I learned a lot, and I hope they each came away with something useful. If you want to see our materials, we shared all of our handouts here http://bit.ly/1E7Sl7L including example copies of an emergency plan and a set of scenarios to use if you’d like to conduct a lively and informative exercise with your colleagues.

Happy planning!

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Heading to ACRL to Give an Unexpected Workshop

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 19th, 2015

So, you know me. I think a lot about information literacy, instruction, sometimes technology, sometimes copyright… So I’m not presenting a workshop on any of those things at ACRL. Nope, I’m presenting with one of my colleagues (the wonderful Kristin Partlo) on the topic of emergency planning.

“But tornadoes and active shooter incidents in libraries have so little to do with library instruction,” you say. And not too long ago I would have totally agreed with you. But it turns out that there’s just a whole ton of overlap between customer service, instruction, and emergency planning.

The workshop still has some openings (as of the moment I pushed publish), if you want you can still join us in what I promise will not be a terrifying presentation about all the ways you can die unexpectedly. Really, I swear. It’s actually going to be pretty action packed and cheerful and extremely practical even if you’re not The Person In Charge of Emergencies at your library. So join us!

Here’s the official blurb:

Emergency Planning for Safe Learning Environments: Simple, Sustainable Solutions for Complex Times

Our libraries are high-traffic, public spaces that are vulnerable to many kinds of threats, but planning for emergencies does not have to be onerous or unpleasant or done only by administrators. Come design a practical plan to initiate and carry out workplace safety discussions at your library, identify stakeholders in your community, and implement simple but effective measures to guard your own safety and that of your user community.

 

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