Where will I be Working in Twenty Years?

I think it is like the title of the slide show suggested. The all nighter at the library turns the library into an extension of the dorm room. They study they sleep, they talk with friends, they surf the web, they play games and they do other things best not mentioned. I think this concept good or bad, useful or not, may be an important one. I have just not quite wrapped my mind around why it is yet. I think it is bound up in the academic commons idea, but I think now more than ever that there is an even wider disconnect between our thoughts and ideas as a profession about the library, and information, than I earlier suspected and mentioned in one of our Friday meetings.

I worry that we are not able to think radically enough or far enough outside of the box (and the library is a big brick box, our offices our smaller sheetrock boxes, our books and journals paper boxes and our computer monitors electrified boxes) to breach this gap. If we do I fear that the programs and solutions would so far beyond the pale that the faculty and administration and many of us would not be able to accept them. We need to search the journals, the web, the blogs and list-servs and compile the ideas that are really out there, especially in RIS. We need to be careful with all our vendors and their products. Careful that the features the vendors sell us are driven by our program and not have our program driven by their features. I have been thinking a lot about our RIS home page all week and the more I think about it the more unsure I become about what it and we should be.

Another observation; almost every student, and I mean 95 -99 % are wired to something. A laptop, MP3 player, cell phone, something. I know that we know this and see it every day, but as you may have noticed in some of the pictures it is a little more pronounced these last few nights. We need to be there as well. That is where they are at. This special deal that was recently announced by ITS on cell phones with Cingular, could an arrangement be made to have the info desk preloaded into those phones? It could be called InfoDesk, SFA Library or The Library or whatever, but what if we were already there? What if before every class, we had everyone get out their phone and enter the info desk number? I know that some do already but what if we all did, IL, SI, everyone. What if we had every student worker do this the day they were hired? What if we suggested that when they heard someone with a question that needed answered that they dial the number and hand over their phone? That is viral marketing. How many student workers do we have and how much of the student population do they interact with when they are not working? What do the numbers become when we add all our classes? This is what makes fortunes on the web now. Not big add accounts but people telling other people how great something is or inviting their friends (Facebook, MySpace, Gmail) to participate. I’m afraid we may just be taking old paradigms, giving them new euphemisms and then sticking it on the web or in the classroom and thinking we are making progress. I haven’t seen a suggested professional reading list of journals for librarians. I’m sure there are some. I wonder though if they include Wired, The Register, Salon, SearchEngineWatch, or the continual stream of reports from the Pew Charitable Trust. Our efforts should be research guided. I’m not sure that our profession’s literature is serving us well in this area right now. I may be wrong and feel free to tell me if I am. I think that maybe the research at: The Pew Charitable Trust Society and the Internet http://www.pewtrusts.com/ideas/index.cfm?issue=10 may serve us better and may be the place we should be looking to first.

I could be way off. There are a lot of people a lot smarter than me thinking about this, but when I attend conferences I hear us (librarians) talking about ourselves a lot. When I read and look in other places I hear no one talking about us. The discussion of the Google digitization project is discussed one way by librarians and in a totally different way by everyone else. I know I am paranoid about this. I think it is because I spent eight years working with the web (at SFA which would make anyone paranoid), and have been using the Internet at least 11 years since the old UNIX command line days. When I came to this library there were three people who had worked in the SFA library longer than I had been alive. That is a career path that I don’t believe will be open for you Cassandra, or me, or for many others. I don’t see the library twenty years from now. Very few if any science fiction writers see us twenty years from now. Should we really be working to improve “library services”? Or is that the equivalent of the Soviets patching up the Mir station year after year to keep it going? Mir is at the bottom of the pacific now.

For today, tomorrow, next year and the next when there is a question to be asked I will answer it, a book to be found I will find it, and a class to be taught I will teach it. But, in the back of my mind I sense that something is wrong, the Library Profession is somehow on the wrong track, and that someway the needed change of course or transformation must occur from the bottom up, one librarian at a time, a grass roots effort, or maybe just a lot of rats abandoning a sinking ship. Many here are at a point in their careers that none of this matters, others of us are not. I wish I had the answers or at least knew how to begin looking for them. This feeling of watching a train wreck and not being able to help stop it is the worst part of it all.

I hope we can find the answers, and for the most part SFA library has been a place where we have been allowed to look for them and to try new things out.

On that happy note, I will go see if there is anyone in the library.

R Philip Reynolds

Librarian

Day Three

Or night three, at this point does it really matter. The natives are restless tonight I cold tell things were edgier when I walked in. It’s more crowded and louder on every floor. The worst being the lobby then the 4^th, 3^rd. and lastly the 2^nd . in front of the elevators especially. Maybe we could move the first row of chairs and tables from around the front bank of elevators? People are more belligerent. It is hard asking one table to be quite when there are 5 or 6 other noisy tables within site. I have to go to each one separately and they usually have a sullen attitude about the ones I haven’t talked to yet. I need a bull horn so I can tell entire sections to shut the xxx (no wait, inside words, outside words) to please keep their voices down. I still have not seen an unreasonable amount of trash considering that the building is completely full. I have pictures but I can’t find my USB cable to connect my memory card drive. No vandalism and no I am not going to check up on people in the bathrooms! The guys will get the wrong idea and the women nowadays are dangerous. They all have tattoos, piercings, pepper spray, or they can just kick my butt. Linda isn’t here to protect me. If someone knows an area to watch let me know. I chased a couple of guys out of a stairwell I saw them go into that I knew led nowhere, but no real trouble just a lot of chatting. I think the stress and the caffeine are building up and it may get worse tomorrow. I may have to look for some library camouflage or wear a ball cap and go under cover as a student. Things could start to get a bit dicey. I’ll have to watch my 6’s. Only a few more klicks to go tonight and I can hit the sack.

This is Ref Base One signing off.

Semper Scholaris Librorum

At first the ALA (American Library Association) was very subtle

The library association didn't jump out and grab me. They didn't even try to lure me with the more glamorous and sexy library jobs like circulation or Inter Library Loan. No they started real subtly with Cataloging then Collection Development. It wasn't an obvious frontal assault but more of an effort to create the right atmosphere to indoctrinate or inculcate these ideas into my young still forming mind. First it was round pegs go into round holes. Then it was "do your shoes match?" "how about your socks?" It was even in the first lessons in Sunday school class. "God created the Heaven and the Earth and He said let there be light." What's the first thing he did after that? He started cataloging everything. Separated the light from the dark, (what does unseparated light and dark look like?) separated the Heavens and the Earth, Water from the land, fish from mammals plants from animals birds from insects and creeping things and on and on. Then what did he do? He had Adam create the first controlled vocabulary. He brought all the beasts to Adam to see what he would name them. These stories are thousands of years old and part of the basis of our Western Culture! How did the ALA get this stuff in there and in the very first chapters? They must be more secretive and powerful than the Masons, Knight's Templar or even the Priory of Sion.

Then there are their partners in this conspiracy, PBS. Yes I'm talking about Sesame Street. Do you remember? "One of these things is not like the others, One of these things doesn't belong" Yeah, more cataloging. Tell me Bert wasn't a librarian.

Finlay the coup de gras of the whole process. Right about the age where a boy starts to form his identity. Who was he as a son, a boy, a friend, a member of a group, or a team. That's right a team. This is where the third conspirator comes in, Major League Baseball. We all had to join a team. It was part of being male, being a son, being an American. The national pass time. And with that came the baseball card collecting. That's write collection development. First your favorite team, then their rivals, then star players and rookies. Soon you had all the teams for the whole year, then you had to get the next year and if you got that there were always previous years which were more valuable and drove your collecting. Soon it became an obsession a compulsion, you had to get card #127 to finish your set. Then you would make the trade, and get card #127. What ecstasy. The dopamine, the adrenaline the sense of achievement, of accomplishment, of completeness, what could be greater?

Then the high would wear off. You had your set you had no more money to buy other cards. No one had anything you wanted to trade for. So you begin to sort. You would sort by card number checking the index card (Shelf List) to be sure you had them all. Then you would sort by team, by position, by player's name. I did not learn to alphabetize or sort by classification numbers in library school. I learned it in my bedroom sorting and resorting my baseball cards over and over again. Little did I know I was being prepared, conditioned, groomed even. Groomed for the next step in the process.

My Name is Phil, and I am a Biblioholic

Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

I answered my first 4:45 AM reference question of my career today. When did Gutenberg invent movable type? Unfortunately there does not appear to be a good answer for that question. I checked a couple of sources and Britannica Online seemed to summarize it the best. Sometime in 1436 Gutenberg borrowed money for some type of project he was working on. He was farther along and borrowed more in 1448 then by 1450 his press was farther along and by 1455 he had printed his famous Forty-Two-Line Bible. So Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was invented sometime between 1436 and 1455. That is a stinky answer, but pretty darn good standing at a table with someone else’s laptop at 4:45 AM. If we had instant messaging and we each had a laptop and an alarm we could provide that kind of service year round.

Kinda makes yah go hmmmmmmmmmm.



Only a few diehards left. I had to quiet some people down. Trying to pick my subject databases but the text keeps moving on the screen. Or maybe the desk is moving? I am sick of those little red and green squiggley lines in my email. I think I’ll just start adding words to my dictionary. How come Chaucer got away with writing the way he wrote, and I got hassled for it all through school? I think that maybe the public school system deprived the world of a 21st century Chaucer. Or maybe I should have just done my homework? Who Knows?

2:14 and still awake

I had my second can of full throttle. The library would probably double its investment if they just had a stocked fridge of that stuff and some Freetos in my office all the time. Don’t let Tina or ME near it or it will be like Hammy the squirrel in Over the Hedge.

Mach 6 Drink http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFUGMkpnJrU

The building has cleared out a lot. But I see no sleeping or signs of those that are left slowing down. I noticed that a lot more trash has been picked up and put in the garbage instead of being left out. I think I have begun to make some sort of bond with the natives. They appear more docile and cooperative. I brought my camera with me this time around the building. Some were shy and had to be coaxed out of their hiding places while other strutted and thumped their chests demanding that their primitive nobility be recorded for the ages. I quickly made new friends and passed the word about the vandals and damage, and recruited their help in watching for trouble. I don’t know if this will help but I suspect that it has. Word is spreading of the strange silent pale one who stalks the stacks at night.

经册府明皇

Jing Ce Fu Minghuang



Emperor of Clear Bright Understanding of the Classics, Sacred Books, and the Library

I am way to tired for Midnight

The building is packed. I have never seen it so full before. There were some noise and water gun fights on the second floor but apparently UPD was called and it was taken care of. Its times like these that try librarians’ souls. I wonder why I became a librarian. I figured that since I needed to start writing every day, that I would start a couple of Blogs. The serious professional one is not ready yet. The other one you can find at:

http://himynameisphil.blogspot.com/