The 4th Grade

My grade school in Quincy Illinois had been built in the early seventies right next to the old brick school building which was practically an overgrown one room school house. The year I entered 4^th grade was the year that they finished renovations on the old school house and guess what they did with it? One half of the basement was an music, art and activity room, the other half of the basement was a fourth grade classroom. The entire upstairs was converted into, you guessed it a library. Guess which 4^th grade class I ended up in. That’s right the one underneath the library.

Some might think this is a coincidence. They probably also think it is a coincidence that the LC call number for the Bible starts out with BS. Again it was a conspiracy by those misanthropist ALA demons again controlling my life, carefully leading me down the path of addiction and then obsession. The library was of course staffed with this friendly young lady, who read to us and let us get our own books to look at and read. She had a stack of large wooden keys painted in bright colors. We would take one of the keys and when we found a book that we liked we would place the key by the book and turn it to spread the books open and then we could pull our book out. We needed to remember our color so that when we were done we could go back and turn the key again to spread the books open and place our book back where we got it. I of course was her “big helper” in collecting the keys and putting away books others had left out. To this day I can not walk into Hastings without forgetting to get a movie and just get lost in alphabetizing their videos. It drives me insane. Their military section has a whole stack of shelves labeled WWI and the shelves contain nothing but WWII books. I almost had a seizure. The WWI books were in a completely different stack. I hunted down a staff member and asked her what was wrong with this picture? (Turns out it was Cassies’ old boss who wants her back) Do you know what the reason was? Hastings labels their books with price tags combination barcodes and a topic. They do not have a WWI or WWII topic or subject heading, they just have World War as a topic. So they sent a bunch of WWII books and a bunch of WWI shelf labels. So the store has to put a bunch of books about D-day, the Nazis etc. under WWI shelf labels. Has the world gone insane? This might explain why when I go to a book store and ask for a book on a topic they can’t do a topic search on their computer they can only do title searches. I have to instead b lead to this section with a generic label like “Sports” and look to see if they have anything related to what I want? That would be like someone coming to the reference desk and asking for a book on Tai Chi Chuan and us telling them to go look in the GV section. What’s up with that? How did bookstores become so popular with that kind of service? I don’t even get people asking if I need help anymore (Maybe it’s the clothes; maybe it’s the torturing of the staff) but I think it might just boil down to displays and merchandising. Maybe we need one list of what’s new this week and another of what’s hot this week? (Besides me)

Anyway by the fourth grade any chance I ever had of enjoying a video or bookstore was gone. Linda and I two anniversaries ago after dinner and a movie in Lufkin ended up in their super Wal-Mart alphabetizing their discount video sales bin. Is that sick or what? I’ve got a monkey on my back and he has a digital dictionary and thesaurus he carries with him. I’d hate to think what it would be like if I knew more than one language. Unfortunately this story does not end in the fourth grade. It continues on into one of the levels of Hell that Dante feared to write about, Middle School.

My Name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic

4:45 AM the Last Night

There is one group. Up on the fourth floor. Being loud playing music (quietly) talking and having a good time. I have had to talk to this same group all week. Tonight it is to darn late, and I am to darn tired to get into a confrontation or scene on the last night. If there is anybody else on that floor and they don’t like the noise the can move to one of the three other empty floors in the building.

Now, I know that some of you librarians are wondering if you will chicken out under fire. Don’t you worry about that, I can assure you that you will all do your duty in a confrontation. That when you put your hand in a pile of confetti that a moment before was the third volume of the Oxford English Dictionary! (Cham – Creeky) You’ll know what to do.

Now it will be my pleasure and my privilege to serve with all of you anywhere anytime.

That’ll be all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDecLiA_Qbw

R Philip Reynolds

Librarian

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

Well its 4:00. Yup that’s what time it is. Don’t know what else to say. Some people are sleeping and some are studying and some are chatting away like it is the middle of the day. The woman’s bathroom sign is now gone off the third floor in the back. I think guys are stealing them for their dorms or apartments. I think physical plant ought to get a stencil and some spray paint and paint those suckers on their be (oh wait inside words outside words) on there and then just have a little plastic Braille tag underneath. I doubt the tag would be much of a prize for a dorm room, and it would not be a big deal to repaint it each semester if it was just a stencil. Of course if their were to many forms and the cost of the painter was to high I could just got to Wal-Mart get a can of Spray Paint and take care of it. Just give me the word. While I’m at it I could paint some additional signs. Let’s make this a group effort. Everyone think of a good sign to put up in the library and email it to me. Then we will just see where this goes. Ok, nobody tell Tiffany. We don’t want me to get in trouble or something.

Die Hard 2

Well after “discussing it” with Linda, Bruce Willis, Antonio Banderas, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, and of course Nicholas Cage, may not do dishes but apparently R Philip Reynolds does. I tried to bring up the ninja point again put she asked” what would a bunch of ninjas want with our dirty dishes?” She had me there. I’ve seen a lot of Kung Fu and Samurai movies and they were never after the dirty dishes. I tried to say that a librarian of my stature shouldn’t… but I didn’t get to finish that sentence. Then I thought of the old “I take care of the outside of the house you take care of the inside”, but before I said it I looked out the windows and noticed the lawn was covered with leaves and remembered that the lawnmower was broken. That reminds me “What do you do when the lawnmower stops working? Slap him upside the head.”

But seriously, Linda was very sweet and did the last load of dishes while I was “sleeping” today. She had already heard all of my Bruce Willis jokes anyway and so I knew she wouldn’t be mad. I am lucky to have here, but I am going to have to come up with some new stories or she might get bored with me.

R Philip Reynolds

The Dishwashing (better looking than Nicholas Cage) Librarian

Die Hard

I hate Bruce Willis. He always plays such a stud. In the Die hard movies he was ridiculously macho but in Armageddon (spoilers coming) when he rips the suit of his antithesis who is going to marry his daughter so that he can stay on the meteor to trigger the nuclear bomb by hand, that is just way over the top. And then the big guy goes you the man Harry you the man. Now how’s a guy supposed to compete with that. I take my wife to a move looking to have a good time, drink a couple of gallons of coke, eat several cubic meters of popcorn, hear some Aerosmith, maybe put my arm around her? J and then here comes Bruce Willis “the man” after ramroding this whole impossible project during the movie he then sacrifices his life by blowing himself up on a meteor with a nuclear bomb and saves the entire planet. How am I supposed to compete with that? I mean what kind of chance do I have to save the world. Oh hey Linda I saw a squirrel in the road today and slammed on my breaks just in time to save it. Good thing I changed those rotors last week. I mean give me a break. Like Die Hard the building is full of terrorists and he single-handedly kills them all and saves everyone. I’ve been in Nac 9 years and have never seen a terrorist.

Just for the record I want everyone to know. If the library is ever taken over by a band of heavily armed international terrorist who want to steal the OED that I’ll be there to stop them and save the day. Or if NASA ever calls and asks me to fly in the space shuttle to blow up a meteor and save the world, I’m there. I’am all over it. Now its true I didn’t get the dishes completely finished yesterday, but if ninjas break into our house to steal those dirty dishes I’m there. Any way Bruce Willis doesn’t seem like the type that does dishes. I think I need to spend that time resting up for that NASA gig.

Anyway someone ripped the sign off the wall by the women’s bathroom in the back on the second floor and I wasn’t there. Not sure when it happened. I had been coming from the other direction most of the time and tonight I came a different way and saw it. Everybody seems to be getting more and more ancy and irritable and I am hearing a lot of coughing. I think that tomorrow may be a pretty rough night. But hey don’t worry about it man, because I’m there, I’m all over it. I’ll keep an eye on those dishes too.

R Philip Reynolds

The Machine

The Human Search Engine

The Man

The Librarian

Where Wise Men Fear to Tread

Fourth floor Steen Library, encyclopedias, philosophy, religion, history, law, education, music, and a party between the elevators. I have made two trips up there in the last half hour. At least they are on the right floor “HX Socialism; Communism; Anarchism.” I think they have settled down. Some I think I just chased off and some got the idea that either UPD or my self were going to keep coming up there, and some got to hear my speech. I tell them about the vandalism and how if it keeps up they won’t have 24/7 hours anymore, then I tell them that I really don’t care what they do just as long as they 1) Don’t tear anything up, 2) Don’t bother anybody else, 3) Try to keep you clothes on. I don’t know why but there is something about peoples’ pants and being in the library in the middle of the night that just doesn’t work out. I’m not talking about some guy hiding in a corner somewhere. I’m talking about guys and girls of all races out in the open, changing pants, having their pants fall down, getting tears in their pants, I don’t know what is going on but I think we are missing out on some great money making opportunities. We need a stand that sells purple sweat pants with “Steen Library Sweeps Week” on them the library logo. These pants would only be available during dead week and finals. Fleece blankets and purple U shaped airplane pillows should be sold, insulated mugs for cold drinks. Wade and I had this idea of building a deck on the roof or maybe just clearing out the fourth floor adding some lights a DJ a cover charge and some drinks and we would have the hottest club outside of Dallas or Houston. We would just call it The Library and have lights streaming up from the roof. My younger brother Will said that a library in one of his home towns had the local strip club have a “librarian night” where all the girls at the club (not the librarians) dressed up as librarians (or at least started dressed that way) and then gave a portion of the proceeds to the library. They made a fortune. We could do that with that club down by the river. I bet I could take my camera and get a poster session at ALA for that! (I wonder what my travel request should say? I could also get comp time for it and Linda couldn’t complain about me working harder to further my career.) That would also go along with that have a librarian on your desktop ad campaign I keep talking about. I’m telling you it is a winner. We would get lots of attention. Anyway things are quieting down. I should be able to cut my trips around the building back a bit.

Well I think I’ll see if Netflix has a copy of “The Full Monty”

R Philip Reynolds

“I’m to sexy for my shirt”

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