Who cares about us Librarians?

There are so many people that thank us for taking the time to care and find answers to even difficult questions. Moments of serendipidity have been shared between the patron and the librarian when the detetective work elicits a result. I have read letters of thanks from parents and grandparents about their surprise and pleasure at how their little ones have been inspired by the stimulating and creative children's programs. I have received praise from many attendees to programs for adults that I have scheduled and coordinated. Then why is it the negative comments that seem to have such an effect??

I am so bothered about this one that I dug out my unused blog!!

I have been working hours and hours on a professional library organization trying to do everything possible to motivate others to be involved and speaking up for libraries and educating everyone around us how much more we are than just books. I have seen much positive feedback and appreciation of my efforts and yet now I feel like I have been smashed to bits.

Why do I have such dramatic reaction? Because the negative response I heard came from the Chair of our county's school district. The same county's school district where I attended school for and made honor roll for years and the same school district that I worked very very hard for nearly a decade before becoming a librarian still serving the educational needs of our county's children and now also adults.

In our passion to help more people learn about all the ways that the different libraries in our county serve the community, a committee came together to come up with an exciting event. The first thing that one must do is choose a date for an event. Little did we know that this could prove to be more problematic than initially imagined. Since all different types of legislators and representatives and dignitaries would be invited, we could not really work around the schedules of everyone. However, the chair of our school board said at a meeting last night when one of his colleagues suggested perhaps they could move their board meeting and all attend this event to show their support in how they believe that libraries are important in the lives of children supporting their education, that: community organizations need to learn that if they want School Board participation in educational events, "then don't schedule the events on Wednesdays when board holds its meetings."

Okay, so there. That's it. Nope, not really. When I told my fellow people about this, everyone said, we should say nothing at all when asked could we ask them to reconsider and let them know that they are not the only people invited and other people have meetings on different nights. Then I suggested, well, I could go over and do a special library advocacy workshop just for them. Not one person in "my team" has said anything at all: completely ignoring my comment. Perhaps the e-mail server messed up or something?? I thought offering to do a workshop is a wonderful way to show that I still care about including them regardless of the lack of tact in the comment and have the willingness to go the extra mile to reach out to others and make it easy for them so they don't have to go out of their way. Perhaps I care too much??

It has been a year

It has been a year since I last said anything here. See comments below why I figured this was an absolute waste of time. Well, I know people get offended if I just breathe but I can not let people like that control my life. I never intentionally want to offend anyone but always somehow manage to do so just by living and existing. I have to keep on telling myself that when people don't take the time out to find out that your heart is pure and your intentions are good and who jump to conclusions in a defensive manner: their opinion really do not count. There are plenty of people around me who care and know that I care and I will listen to them when they give me suggestions, guidance or correction. The reality is that mostly they just give me encouragement. Thank God for nice people!

It's already November

My favorite thing about selection lists is to read titles that make me chuckle out loud... Here's a few: "The Better to Eat You With..." it's about fear in the animal world. Very clever I have to say... Here's a topic I just wasn't expecting to see: "Raising Steaks". This one is what the title says. The subtitle clarifies:" The Life and Times of American Beef". It's kind of like the book, I think it was called Rembrandt's Nose or something. Really? Is anyone going to want to read it?? I mean mostly people would want to eat a steak, not read about it... Oh well, who knows, maybe it really is something. I don't think I will find out though...

OKAY, I keep reading the titles and now there is a book on Hamburger, Pancake, and Pizza with the subtitle of "A Global History". And I thought the beef book was bad...

Funny Titles

While doing selections for collection development, I always have a good laugh when I read certain titles. I always say I want to write the titles down that sound funny or creative. So, today my favorite funny sounding titles are in no particular order: Fat Free and Fatal, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (this one caught my eye due to my great buddy here at the reference desk), The Legs are the Last to Go (in which case I disagree with the author... I wish there was a foot store where you could exchange your bad feet for a set of good ones...), Dogology (I really wanted to order the book just because of this cute title), Ted, White & Blue (just sounds funny) as does The Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears and Anxieties (don't give that book to a hypochondriac), and Something on the Side. I generally love the food titled mystery series perhaps for the reason that I love food... Today I came across the most annoying subtitle: Hardworking man meets softhearted woman in this contemporary novel (I mean the entire inside cover??). I have to mention one of my all time favorite titles in creativity which is DomiKNITrix. What a clever title for a knitting book. I have also proposed a ban on titles that use boolean operators :-)

This is not the end because that would be too sad

I did not make too many brand new discoveries on this journey. There was not enough time to learn about how to use the new things I was not familiar with. The wiki sandbox was probably the most useful one tool I tried. I want to make a communication wiki if others in my department will like that idea. I also enjoyed doing the things that I was already somewhat familiar with. Oh yes and morphing into a panther was pretty cool :-)

There is so much to learn and I will continue to spend time on my own to learn more about these many tools that I was introduced to during this journey. If there is a similar program in the future, I would certainly volunteer to participate. I like programs that push me to learn new things.

I would definitely recommend more time for novices to web 2.0 and perhaps a buddy mentor system to help those who feel overwhelmed.

Overall, I enjoyed the program. I would like to continue my blog in case I find interesting things to share.

Overdrive

As I began teaching about learning styles to my own students, it became clear to me that I was never really an "auditory learner". I have always loved writing and prefer that as a way of communicating because I can see it. I am definitely more visual (which is one of the reasons I use different color fonts to see the different posts I have written more clearly). Hence, reading an actual book has always been appealing rather than checking out an audio book. Although when one of the libraries that I worked for discarded their collection of the most notable philosphers of American political heritage, I did snatch those up and listened to them in my car while driving to and from work.

I did go and explore Overdrive as requested. When it first came out, I went to through the tour and looked around in order to help customers reach these resources. Now for the first time I listened to a few excerpts. Although I had somewhat difficulty with not seeing anything related to the audio I was hearing, I was able to concentrate and "get interested" in the books I selected. I noticed that having the excerpt is a wonderful way to "hook" a potential customer into checking out the book. Although I love historical fiction, fantasy and different kinds of stories. I actually spend much more time reading and browsing non-fiction. I therefore looked at the titles from the genre section and chose "Self-Help" section. I believe that the most imortant thing about our life as humans is to figure out how we can improve ourselves in order to become better people to be around. I am very intersted in different topics in psychology and read about ways to cope with every day stress of parenting, marriage and life in general.

I did not download the programs on my computer at home but I might. Audiobooks are something that I will keep in mind and perhaps utilize in the future. However, currently I am concentrating on preparing a proposal for my online class, so further explorations in Overdrive will have to wait.

Podcasts

It is slightly cumbersome to explore Podcasts at work on computers where we do not have speakers. However, I did listen to a few children's stories from a library's website and thought it was a clever idea. I will have to let my little dude listen to a Podcast on a Peter Rabbit story and see if he can pay attention. Personally I found the NPR site helpful. Here is the link again http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php

I also added a feed from BookExpo America. It might be a useful one to follow about new and upcoming titles for collection development for the branch.