Bookshelf preparations

The new bookshelves should arrive tomorrow, so I have spent much of the evening preparing as best I can.  I don't have room to just pull everything off and leave it on the floor or a bed right now, so I've pulled off all the fiction and done so with that.  That was relatively quick; I didn't finish the LP I was listening to before I had that done.  Then I put the rest of the books in rough LCC order.  Since everything will be moving again tomorrow, I focused on getting it by the primary letter rather than anything more granular; I can do that when I reshelve tomorrow.

I used to shelve in Dewey, but I've worked in an LCC library for twenty years, and after a while, it became more intuitive to switch.  I do the fiction alphabetical by author, in publication order, but I'm considering splitting out the juvenile books into their own section.  There are some exceptions to shelving in LCC order: oversized books, TTRPG books (they are too heavy and need to go on a bottom shelf), knitting and sewing books, cookbooks, the Zane Grey books, and The Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature.

With the new shelves, I will have six additional shelves' worth of space, and I should be able to mostly avoid shelving items two deep.  I'll still need to keep the oversized and TTRPG books on a bottom shelf for weight considerations, and I'll probably put the Zane Grey books on a bottom shelf, as well.

I've also discovered that I can use TinyCat for free as a personal library, so once the bookshelf project is done, I can try to reconcile my Goodreads (1190 books tagged as owned) and the import into LibraryThing (1188 books tagged as own) and the actual collection, since I keep finding things on the shelf that aren't in either.  (I have been told we had a CueCat barcode scanner at some point, but it is either gone or buried in the attic.)

Hopefully once the bookshelves have all been swapped, I can find things more easily again, since everything won't be buried behind other books.  I'm apparently up to two full shelves of foreign language learning books, and that's one thing I'd like to get back into. 

Some stuff I've learned doing interlibrary loan

This may be a bit arcane to folks who don't work in a library, or those with no knowledge whatsoever of the process of getting materials from a library that isn't your own.  If you've never gone and looked at it, WorldCat.org will tell you what its participating libraries (and there are a lot of them in the U.S.) have, and depending on your privacy settings, where the closest copy is to you.  WorldCat is a product of OCLC, and it facilitates a large chunk of the inter-lending that goes on in the library world.

If we don't have a book, we can probably get it for you.  The main caveats generally are that, firstly, some other library has to own it; secondly, they have to be willing to send it; and thirdly, it can't cost us an arm and a leg.  Some libraries don't do interlibrary loan, or do so on a limited basis, especially because of the third factor, but also because, depending on the library and the population of patrons using it, the demand may be overwhelming for their available staff.  For large libraries, though, and especially academic libraries, interlibrary lending is just part of the deal.

The process is much more streamlined now than it used to be.  Even the libraries who don't have specialized software - even if they don't participate in WorldCat themselves - can use WorldCat's public interface to try to locate materials.  OCLC's database of library catalogs is a huge step up from the old union lists and printed catalogs for finding materials from another library.  There's many fewer incidences of just phoning around trying to find something.  Requests no longer come in via teletype, and although we haven't completely moved away from paper request forms on all fronts, electronic requesting has by and large taken over.  And if we do have trouble finding something?  There's a mailing list where the desperate can plead their case for you, their patrons.  (It's used for a lot of other discussion, sure, but "Please help!" requests are daily occurrences.)

Anywho, there are things you pick up on after a while doing interlibrary loan.  Some of them are intuitive, and sometimes you get surprises.

• Just because only three libraries own something doesn't mean one of them won't send you their copy.
• The mail doesn't lose nearly as many things as you worry they will.  Depending on your volume, something is probably going to get lost, but for us it's about an item a year, and sometimes it's not so much lost as it got eaten somewhere by the mail processing machines, and you at least got the digested remains back.
• Textbooks aren't going to come back till the end of the semester.  Sometimes this is okay - that chemistry text from the '90s?  Yeah, sure, I hope your homework problems match up.
• Invoices are sometimes the best thing you can do to help your borrowing libraries get things back from their more stubborn patrons.  (I know they tend to work on ours.)
• Ranganathan's Laws really do apply.  Books are for use, and if copyright allows, hell yeah, I'll scan stuff out of our historical collections, but a lot of it's too rare or fragile to leave special collections and go through the mail or a parcel service.  It's not that we're the only holder in OCLC; it's that it can't be replaced anymore because we're the only copy outside the nebulous world of private ownership.  That's probably why you're asking for it from us.
• It's usually pretty obvious when a library is desperate to get an item from you.  When a library places a request for an item from another library, they select five to fifteen holding libraries for the "lender string."  When you're not the Library of Congress, which one requests items from by listing it as all five target libraries, and your library's symbol is the only one in the lending string, be it once or five times, you know you're probably their last resort.
• Some packaging supplies, while effective, are particularly annoying for folks who regularly mail books.  Some padded envelopes use shredded paper as the padding between two layers of heavy paper.  This is fairly effective protection, actually, as long as the package doesn't get wet.  Unfortunately, the inner layer is vulnerable to the corners of books, which results in pulling a book out of a bag, only to find it infested with pulverized paper fluff.
• Speaking of mailing supplies:  Tape over staples as a method of closing a mailing bag is bad.  Effective, but dangerous. 
• LVIS is awesome, but if you're the only LVIS library that lists your holdings for a moderately expensive journal in OCLC, it's going to be your #1 requested journal.

Technological Wishlist

The longer I work in a library, the more I wish there was a technological solution for some of what goes on.  A lot of what I think about is RFID potential.  Some of the stuff I'd like:

• Smart shelves:  Able to tell you what books are on them and if they're in order.  But even if all we can get is sum of books on a shelf, misshelved books would be so much easier to find.  Shelves that could be programmed to know what books are supposed to live on them (hopefully easily reprogrammable, like, enter shelf number the call number range or something) and then tell you when they have an intruder would be great.
• Smart security gates:  Able to detect a patron's library card in their pocket/wallet/purse and whatever library materials they have on them, and check out the items as they walk through.  Items not allowed to leave the library or patrons without cards would set off the gate alarm and have to go through the circulation or security process with the desk staff.
• Chat reference widget on our in-building computers: I'm sure these probably already exist, but given that we haven't entirely finagled automatic shutdown of our lab computers at closing, it's probably down the road for us.  Some kind of "click here for chat help" on the desktops would hopefully help those students who don't want to get up and "bother" us at the desk.  I'd add remote desktop support, but really, they're in the same building, and the customer service face-to-face interaction is important in and of itself.
• Useful QR codes: Step one, of course, is teaching students what QR codes are and how to use them.  So many of them have a gadget that will read them; we could do things like put the table of contents for a current print periodical next to its shelf tag, do in-stacks cross-referrals for frequently asked questions ("if you're looking here, you might also find this area over there useful" kind of stuff).  Kind of pro-active reference/instruction out-of-body in the stacks stuff.  Maybe a "Need Newbery/Caldecott books? Scan me!" for that assignment we have most semesters here, and it would pop into our catalog with the search term.
• Decibel sensor auto-shushers.  Okay, not every librarian would go for that.  But if you've got a quiet study area that's not immediately staff-observable, a little sensor that could simultaneously ping the staff and play a little "please refrain from excessive noise in this area" message might help with awareness that, hey, you're in a quiet study space.

There's more that I'm not remembering right now, of course, but I'll remember it when the problem I want it to fix presents itself again.

On Bookstores

Going into a bookstore can be profoundly frustrating for me.  I don't know how much of it is because I'm a librarian, but one of the largest sources of frustration is because the books are never where I expect them to be.  Bookstore classification and whatever logic underlies it just don't mesh with my internal ordering of books.

This leads to other problems.  I wanted a book on making sewing patterns.  I had read McCunn's excellent How to Make Sewing Patterns, and I was hoping for something to expand on that.  Sewing, whether you're looking at Library of Congress (LC) or Dewey Decimal Classification, is in the technology sections - the same area as cooking, engineering, and so forth.  For LC, this is the T's.  Well, at Barnes & Noble, sewing is in the vicinity of neither the cooking nor the other technology books.  No, sewing is over by... the paper crafts materials they also sell.  That makes sense from a marketing perspective (hey, you're into craft books, here's the craft supplies we sell), but if you're looking for a book on handwork that they don't sell the resources for, the logic breaks.

I suppose part of the problem I have in bookstores is that I don't go in to browse.  I go in to find specific books or subjects.  Modern brick & mortar bookstores aren't really good for that unless you're looking for something recently published (say, the Dresden Files) or something in perennial demand (a dictionary).  I want a copy of McCunn's How to Make Sewing Patterns, but going to the bookstore in the mall probably isn't going to work.  (I've tried.)  It's in print, but they don't stock it locally.  Heck, Barnes & Noble doesn't even sell it new on their website.  Amazon it is.

I've been using the library as a reader again more recently - for the Dresden Files, for example.  But books I check out that I really like I tend to buy, especially non-fiction titles.  The gardening book I love (the Self-Sufficient Gardener) I borrowed several times from the library, then bought. I started reading Halberstam's book on the Korean War, got into a time crunch, and ended up buying it later from Borders when they were going out of business.  But just because I found it in the library doesn't mean I can find it in the bookstore.

To some extent interlibrary loan spoils me.  If I find a book I want to read that some library owns somewhere, as long as they're willing to send it, I can probably read it.  Unfortunately, if I really like the book, finding a copy to buy can be more complicated.  S. E. Smith's book on the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II has been available used on Amazon for a while; I read it three times in junior high.  But it was always more expensive on Amazon than I wanted to spend.  I ended up getting it in Delhi when we stopped for lunch in a cafe/bookstore on a trip for work.  (I may have, ahem, gasped when I saw it on the shelf, halfway through lunch.)  I could have gotten it easily through ILL (you can see in that WorldCat link that almost a thousand libraries own it), but purchasing it was a bit more complicated.  (That cafe has amazing sandwiches, and if I could find an excuse to go to Delhi again, I'd really like another tomato/bazil/mozzarella panini, hold the tomato and basil.  Yes, basically a grilled cheese with mozzarella.  It was awesome.)

Another problem I have in bookstores also stems from working in interlibrary loan.  If I don't have a specific book in mind, a bookstore isn't necessarily going to help.  Say I want to read a book on the Korean War.  Is the bookstore going to have anything?  Is it going to be a historical book, or something else?  Something as engaging as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is for World War I?  What got me about Borders was that they had sections - history, military history, U.S. history, politics - that broadly overlapped and required extensive browsing to find things.  Genre fiction?  Not generally a problem.  Non-fiction?  Well...

I think this is why Amazon has been getting so much of my book business.  If I want to read a book about, say, Secretariat, I can pop it into WorldCat, see what comes up, and see if there's anything local.  My local public library is pretty good about getting books on racehorses.  And then if I like it, I can pop the title into Amazon and buy it.  (There's a book I read a while back about the American Eclipse that I've been thinking about getting.)  Going to the bookstore isn't really the most useful way to find a book on a specific topic if nothing on the topic has been published recently.

It's been a long time since I've bought a book I didn't know anything about just browsing in the bookstore that wasn't either deeply discounted or... well, deeply discounted.  The last time I recall doing so was Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy, back when I was in high school.  (I read them in one night.  It was, perhaps, a mistake, given that I had school the next day.)  Nowadays I tend prefer to borrow before I buy.  For a while I was buying bargain books because they were a subject I wanted a book on and they were cheap, but they didn't necessarily turn out to be helpful.  I'm trying to make my book purchases more efficient, more meaningful.  Borrow it, read it, and if I want it to read again or for reference, then buy it.  If I don't get around to reading it when I borrowed it from the library, I probably don't need to buy a copy.  I don't gamble on authors by purchase anymore.  (A good thing, too, since I tried getting into George R. R. Martin's series that everyone is so excited about, and it just didn't work out for me.)

At this point I go to the bookstore a) if I'm looking for a book for someone else; b) if there's a book I want and I know it's in the building (and that it won't be cheaper to buy online, because someone with an Amazon app on his phone will point it out to me if it is); or c) if I've got a gift card or they've got a really good sale going on that makes it work buying a book I wasn't planning to.

For something new to read?  I'm back to the public library.  So that's at least one bad college habit crossed off my list.

Time management

Theoretically, I'm of the post-daily-planner generation.  I don't operate off a paper calendar, though I'm starting to think I'd be better off if I did.  I've got one; the hard part for me is analog synchronization.

I started on a file reorganization project on Thursday afternoon.  I really shouldn't have; I had a car appointment at 6:30, and I forgot about it until 5:30, when I was midway through scavenging my filing cabinet for spare folders.  (I really need to go through the whole thing, since the bulk of it was inherited from my predecessor, and I don't know if I still need all of what's in there.)  The car place is about an hour from where I work, so I was a bit press for time getting there.

The punchline?  I was reorganizing my filing system to try to put into place something to help me better stay on top of projects I start.  I started an equipment "DNR" list on Thursday (DNR as in, do not resuscitate), and fleshing it out has several steps that I need to do.  (Consult with someone who knows about who paid for what, get an estimated remaining lifespan on what we've got, and determine repair/replace/abandon for everything.  Hopefully this will allow us to budget for equipment the library will have to pay for.)  I wanted to be able to keep on top of the project rather than popping it in a file and forgetting about it for a couple months.

What I've ended up with (for now) is a file box on my desk with files for the days (1-31).  It's not a new or revolutionary system; I've considered using it before.  I'm just now getting around to trying it, though.  The next step will be actually planning timelines for my projects and inserting them into the appropriate slots.

I've tried using tasks in Outlook to keep me on track, but I've found that it works better for reminding me to pay bills than for reminding me that I need to run reports in the ILS.  Perhaps this is because I can pay a bill at any time on the day I've designated for it to be done, but I haven't blocked out when to work on reports, which means I will handle other fires during the day and run out of time with it undone.  In this regard the paper file may or may not help.

On the other hand, physical surrogates for tasks will allow me to prioritize just by how I stack them in the folder in the morning.  Some things can be passed off to the next day; some things can't.  The queues in ILLiad are very useful visual reminds for me of what still needs to get done: they're little bars on a chart for how many transactions still need to be handled in each module (borrowing, document delivery, lending).

Ideally, I could have both the physical and the digital; if I kept both I could see what I needed to work on the next day from home, while still having the physical surrogates of the tasks to help keep me on track during the day.  I have looked at things like Evernote before, but for that to be really useful, I would have to pay for it.  I really don't want to do that.

So I'll try this box of days for a while, and see if it gets anywhere.  In the meantime, I need to clean out my filing cabinet and see how much space in it I can free up.

Jargon Creep

I'm both a librarian and a gamer.  I suppose I was technically a gamer first, but given my slightly compulsive organizational habits and, well, compulsive helpfulness (ask a question and see if I can try not to find you an answer), librarian may have been inevitable once I had the requisite schooling.

Both areas are fairly steeped in jargon.  Raid, weed, stack: all common words that have enough of a jargony twist that when you're talking about the gaming or library usage, they cause confusion if thrown into general conversation.  Some samples I find creeping into my general vocabulary:

• Weeding.  If I mention to someone outside the profession that we're weeding at the library, it almost inevitably causes confusion.  It's really pretty straightforward - just instead of removing undesirable plants, we're removing books that, for some reason, no longer fit in our collection.  The material could be outdated, the book could be in poor physical shape, or the library's purpose may have evolved such that it's no longer relevant to the patrons.  For example, if our college drops a major, we'll probably have items in the collection that are no longer going to get used.
• Raiding.  People unfamiliar with MMO (massively-multiplayer online) games can have a hard time grasping the idea of raiding.  The general concept is the same as what peoples have done for centuries - grouped up to go attack something.  But in a gaming context, if the person's point of reference is, say, Pong, it may be hard to understand.  Raiding is a group of people in a game getting together to go assault an enemy stronghold.  In World of Warcraft, that generally means monsters controlled by the game, but there's also player-versus-player scenarios that use the same kind of group.
• WTB/WTS.  These tend to drift into my social networking posts (Twitter, Facebook, G+); they're shorthand for "want to buy" and "want to sell".  "WTS cold, PST" is shorthand for "Want to sell cold, please send tell."  ("Tell" is the inline command for a private message in many games.)  Translation: "Anyone want my cold?"  "WTB A/C" may have crept into my updates sometime this summer (I don't remember), but "Want to buy air conditioning" did apply to most of the summer here at the library.
• Everything related to maintaining order in a book collection: stacks, shelf-reading, shifting, and so forth.  Stacks are the collection of shelves; shelf-reading is making sure the books are in order; shifting means moving a section of books, generally to better distribute them on the available shelving.
• Library of Congress call numbers.  So many people only know the Dewey Decimal System (if they understand classification at all) that mentioning book subjects by their LC number doesn't really get me anywhere.  The P's, the S's, the T's - literature, agriculture, technology.  The only reason my home collection is in Dewey and not LC is because my collection isn't big enough to need LC's granularity.
• Fumble.  Fumble probably came into gaming from football (dropped the ball), but in Dungeons & Dragons, if you roll a 1 on a 20-sided die in a situation where a 1 is the worst possible roll, that's a fumble.  It means you not only failed in what you were trying to do, but you also botched the job so badly you probably hurt yourself in the process.  Normally this only applies to attack rolls and saving throws.  If you tried to play darts and the dart somehow ended up in your leg instead of the dart board, you fumbled.  If the situation in which the failure occurred wasn't a saving throw/attack roll kind of situation, however, you're more likely to have...
• Failed a spot check.  That pen you're looking for that you can't find that's sitting on the desk in front of you?  Yeah, you failed a spot check.  Fell off your deck?  Failed a balance check.  (If you hurt yourself when you fell off the deck, you possibly fumbled your reflex save.)  Skill checks can't be fumbled (you can actually succeed on a 1 if you have enough skill points invested in the one you're trying to use), but failing them can have disastrous results (especially if climbing or swimming are involved).  I generally notice deer along the side of the road at night; my husband doesn't.  Guess who has a higher spot check?
• /commands.  World of Warcraft's in-game command-line input is preceded by a / - so /dance makes your character dance; /hug will display the hug echo (generally "X needs a hug!" or "X hugs Y." depending on whether you have someone targeted).  You can actually do combat via the command line if you can type fast and know the commands.  (Occasional interface bugs have led me to chain-typing /cast Steady Shot for my hunter.)  But while most people #hashtag on Twitter, I compulsively /command - so instead of #hungry it's /hungry.  I really need to get out of the habit if I want to jump on the hashtag bandwagon.  (When people post bad days on Facebook or whatnot, I'm more likely to /hug than *hugs* - especially on G+ where the asterisks make the word bold.)  If you don't play WoW, though, the / may be unfamiliar.  In a way, this is similar to when I was still playing on the MUD regularly, and I would compulsively type in my gossip macro de jour (gg or gos usually) when replying to people in AIM.  I still occasionally "fbs" if I'm sitting at the keyboard thinking; that was the macro I made for "fill bottle spring" on the MUD, where you had to actively make your character eat and drink, or you'd starve/die of thirst.  If you ran out of water while you were out in the world, you'd have to go find some, so I got into the habit of filling my bottle every time I returned to the town square (also known as Recall...).

There are others, of course, but these are ones I've noticed slipping into everyday usage.  A lot of the library jargon I try to catch myself and talk around as I'm talking to someone, because things like OCLC, consortial borrowing, LVIS, and whatnot are sometimes easier to just use other words to start instead of trying to explain them in full.  (LVIS is said like Elvis, but is not Elvis, for example.)

Unfortunately I sometimes forget just which words are library jargon, and which are the ones the patrons use to describe something.  OPAC?  Catalog?  At least with a lot of gaming jargon, the origin is more obvious to me.  It's more concerning when words that shouldn't be jargon confuse our students: journal, article, volume, and issue should not be foreign words to them (or at least not to the native speakers of English), but unfortunately sometimes seem to be.  That's where the compulsion to help people learn comes into play.

Further exploration in Gmail

But first, a picture of the great blue heron that was stalking my fish this morning:

Yesterday I discovered the color-coding of labels in Gmail.  Despite having somewhere in the neighborhood of... fifteen active email accounts, I've started routing the bulk of what I get through one Gmail account.  I liked being able to have a spam account that I used for signing up for reward programs, but I haven't gotten around to syncing Outlook onto my laptop, which means I don't have easy access to half my accounts during the day.  (I guess I could set up the Gmails to all forward to each other?  Hm...)

Anywho, I color-coded all my labels yesterday - ILL-related mailing lists are one color, other library lists are another color, family is red, and so forth.  I briefly experimented with nesting the labels, realized it didn't give me label counts in bulk or let me view multiple sub-sets of labels concatenated, so I undid all of the nesting and just went with the color-coding.  The nested labels had the paths, which actually made them harder to read.

Perhaps I think too much about organizing information flow.  My email storage on my work account is relatively low (about 30 MB), so I end  up archiving it to the hard drive fairly often.  My archive structure has changed at least four times; it's currently broken down by month with four or five subset folders in each month.  I've gone back and forth at times about Outlook's rules: do I see important things faster when I'm putting them in their own folder, or when I let them hit the inbox and have to manually sort them for later reference?

On some level, organization of everything occupies a lot of my thought:  space, spices, cabinets (food and dishes), the refrigerator, paper files, computer files, books, clothes, plants in the garden.  You can see on my story list when I first started keeping my written-by-hand stories in a file box: about March 1998, because the story numbers and file numbers start to align (with a one-off anomaly cause by moving something later).

The end goal of organizational schemes, of course, is being able to find something.  That's what the labels or folders in the email structure let me do.  Color coding the labels don't help with finding things later, though - it helps with initial response prioritization.  If something comes in with a red label, I know it's one of the family labels, and I'll probably look at it before something that comes in with orange (all the merchants).  In a way, the color is acting as a folder, and the labels become sub-folders.  What I still can't do is look at the overarching folder all together.  I would have to apply a generic label to multiple label groups, and I really don't like doubling up labels.

For what I do with my email, this is probably good enough.  We'll see if I change my mind in six months like I tend to do with my email archives structure.

(Crap... I went to put tags on this, and... I don't have an 'information science' tag; I have a 'library science' tag.  Stupid classification schemes...)

Techies

So, I've been reading random Google+ evaluations I run across in the media since I first learned about it.  And most of them say that the initial users are/were all techies.

So... am I a techie?  This lumping in of all the early users as somehow part of a tech community confused me.  My brother?  Sure, my brother is a programmer.  I got my invite from him, in the last week of June.  Sure, he's a techie.  But me?  I don't know.  A geek, for sure.  But I'm sort of a technology Luddite:  if it's not useful, I don't use it.  I don't do tech for the sake of tech.  I don't even really read sci-fi.

The bulk of the people I have added to my circles (about 150 people) are relatives, friends (ones I've actually met in person), and other librarians.  That's not really different from Facebook, but I like the Google+ interface better so far.

But the people I've added - except for my handful of relatives who work with computer code, and my husband, who makes computers, printers, and other office equipment play nice again - they're not techies, unless you want to lump all of library-land into the overarching tech community.  And other than the librarians who work specifically with the systems side of things or are personally fascinated with technology, I don't think most librarians think of themselves as techies.

Information specialists?  But of course.  In general we know how to organize and retrieve information.  (It's kind of, you know, what we do)  Educators?  For certain.  Even if their training focused on classifying and cataloging information, most librarians can get help a patron find (and learn to find) information, or, if it's not locally available, find out where to find it.

But technology gurus?  Eh... not as a whole.  Sure, some of us in the library world can tell you why your laptop isn't talking to our wifi, and we can (if it's capable of doing so) probably make it work for you, but a lot of us will hit a wall of either knowledge or understanding if it's not a simple or routine fix, at which point we're going to point you to (if there is one) the IT department (or the librarian or library employee specifically tasked with knowing how to make such things work).  We may have fancy smart phones (if we can afford them), but a lot of us are just as happy with the simple little flip phones that don't even have a camera.  Blogging librarians abound, but (judging by a Web 2.0 class I recently took) just as many hardly even use e-mail at home.

So how did all these librarians, several of whom I'm fairly sure are not your average techie, get into Google+ within the first two weeks?  I have no idea, but what it does tell me is that the communities on Google+ are a lot more... well, personal, because the people writing the articles didn't see these clusters of librarians that I was seeing, and I wasn't seeing the clusters of techies that they were seeing.  And, at least for me, Google+ doesn't mean waiting for my friends to eventually be able to join.  Most of my friends and family are already there.

Four or five more people and I can, ahem, probably ditch Facebook.  Perhaps I will one day be free of the guilt trip that is Fishville.

ILLiad 2011

I figured I'd start off with the picture since it was so pretty (cold, but pretty) on Friday. I went to the ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach for the first time this year, and yes, as you can see, I drove. The college was gracious enough to pay for the registration and the room, but I couldn't find reasonable flights at times that actually let me attend all the sessions I wanted to go to.

Since I just wrote up a summary for my colleagues, I figured I would post it here, too.

Wednesday:

Drove all day. Traffic was great; Delaware is a boring drive. Car got about 39-40 mpg the whole trip. Gas is cheapest in New Jersey along 17 right now (about $3.25) and about $.20 cheaper than New York everywhere else.

Thursday:

I missed the ILLiad update session – had to hunt down a doctor in Va. Beach since I woke up with an eye infection Thursday morning – but I got back for the rest of them. Word is that 8.1 (the next major update) of ILLiad will take direct imports of PDF files (currently they have to be converted to TIFs), but they said that about 8.0, too, and it didn’t happen. If it does, it cuts out a processing step for all our article delivery.

The textbook ILL/reserve session was good – it sounds like several other places are doing more or less what we are and trying to make high-demand items available via reserves rather than processing repeated ILL requests for them.

The electronic delivery session highlighted that Ariel is still widely used, but the general consensus in the room was, given that its last update was in 2004, Infotrieve has more or less abandoned it, and it’s going to eventually die out due to incompatibilities with newer scanners and Windows upgrades.

The University at Arkansas/Little Rock’s presentation on assessment was interesting because they are trying to pull some of their ILL processing back out of student workers and into FT clerical positions to help with quality and turnaround time. The presenter laid out a variety of ways ILL units could be evaluated, and they decided to try to improve turnaround time as one of their main goals. (He moved very quickly and it was hard to take notes.) One of his interesting points was that negative feedback can be more useful than positive feedback, because it helps you know what you need to work on improving.

The Screenr session has a lot of possible applications for us – the woman who presented it said her library tech people were pushing it as an info lit tool (follow-up options to info lit sessions for reinforcement), but it also works great for computer-based task training.

The poster sessions: the two that really caught my eye were the one from U Buffalo (or Buff State? the handouts are in my folder) – they’re doing their ILL checkout in Aleph, partly so they could easily charge ILL overdue fines. They basically set up a collection for ILL and add circ bib records, using their local transaction number for the barcode. This is something I might like to try. The other was a college’s integrating their Eres and Doc Delivery units somewhat by having Doc Delivery do all the scanning for their Eres, since faculty provided copies were… less than perfect, and fixing them was eating up staff time. We don’t do much of any Eres directly right now, but if we started, using ILLiad to submit scanning requests via the Doc Delivery module in ILLiad could give us an easy implementation for that part of it.

Friday:

WorldCat Knowledge Base – OCLC is running with an idea similar to the one IDS had for automated article request processing. One of the things that participating in this might help with is that for open access and items owned, OCLC will more reliably kick the items back at you with a link to where you have your holdings for it. Apparently the process has also revealed additional electronic holdings at most of the place that have tried it out that just weren’t showing up in Serials Solutions, etc. Additionally, OCLC is working with more integration with ILLiad and other ILL/Circ processes, such as checking your OPAC to see if an item is checked out or doing some ILL/Circ integration.

The routing rules session had a few that I want to try using, plus someone brought up that they’ve been talking to Atlas about having a routing rules repository in the documentation for ILLiad, so that may turn up some useful changes if it gets implemented.

I skipped the closing session because it was almost 11:00 when I got out of my last session and the drive takes about 11 hours. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel is a gorgeous drive in daylight, and really boring in the dark. (The picture is Fisherman’s Island at the very southern tip of the Eastern Shore of Va.) Driving with eye ointment in one eye is interesting in the dark. Traffic was heavy on 17 in New Jersey, but otherwise not bad.

(I got home Friday at about 11 p.m.)

Book Sorting: Non-fiction

So I got through all the non-fiction last night. Mostly. I took it all off the shelves, and now it doesn't quite... fit. Despite weeding and shelving two deep. (Yes, I actually purged about 30 books. And discovered that, damn it, I already owned The Guns of August. But only 3 duplicates out of probably 400 or 450 books wasn't bad.)

The end result is that I'm looking at about 90 nonfiction books and 23 textbooks, including languages I've already taken. I excluded textbooks I remember reading that weren't math books, so I'm left with a couple of logic books, yoga and tai chi, calculus, statistics, physics, chemistry, and organic chemistry. (The organic chemistry text is huge, and given organic chemistry's reputation, I'm intending to save it until at least after calculus and the general chemistry text.) I also have German, French, Russian, and Latin. (I may be forgetting something. Photography, maybe?) Yoga and tai chi I think will be problematic; I can't very well do five chapters of one of them in a week, so I may have to incorporate them into the 1.5 hours of planned exercise a week.

Reference materials (and some miscellaneous over-sized books) got shelved in the corner bookshelf. I'm ambivalent about putting reference materials somewhere less accessible, but the dictionaries are what I use the most often, and they're still easy to get to. The textbooks and "how to" books that I've either already read or am not planning to (being in that I got them as reference materials) went on the lowest shelf of the left-most bookcase, which is larger and is basically double stacked. The textbooks I am going to go through are on the shelf above those.

The rest of the non-fiction - that is, basically, books that aren't in the G's, K's, Q's, S's, and T's - I shelved with stuff I've read behind stuff I haven't read by the same topic, with slips of paper in stuff I haven't read. They're on the top three shelves of the left bookcase, plus about fifteen books I haven't found room for yet. Most of it is history, but there's also some philosophy, and things like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. (I really wish I still had a copy of Leviathan, actually. Or my fourth semester German textbook. Anywho.)

And I discovered that, well, I really do think in LC at this point. The problem is more that I think in the alphabet letters, and not the numeric divisions below them. (Except in the S's. S, SB, SF, horse training before veterinary texts... So many S's in our library...) But the textbooks and reference are both in roughly A-Z order, although given the space I put reference into, it's a little... different.

But the three shelves of history? They're basically in approximately chronological order: classical history, then medieval, renaissance, early modern, the enlightenment, the post-French Revolution/pre-Bismarck central European texts, WWI, WWII, Korean War, although the Depression and the 1950s and the American South and historiography of the Holocaust (all classes I took) are jammed in there too. Biography should probably have been in the C's, but I put it where I had room for it. So I guess history in my head is still the 900s, rather than C, D, E, and F.

Once I get everything read, I can go and make it all pretty again.

Assuming, of course, I can cram in two more bookshelves so it all fits.

Tonight: The fiction. (Should be faster, since my method is going to be "to read" and "already read/not reading" and then alphabetical by author. And I already pulled the computer table out of the bedroom so I have room to work.)

Planning

Okay, so I started going through books at home last night, originally intending to just switch them from Dewey to LC, when I realized several things.

Firstly, even after having been using LC for close to ten years, I'm still more familiar with Dewey. I blame effective bibliographic instruction when I was in elementary school, as well as frequent immersion in the 940s, the 400s, and the 636's at the public library. (That... describes my pre-college nerdage pretty well, actually.)

Secondly, I don't have enough books to make a transition to LC reasonable. Half of my non-fiction is history. At least half of all my books are fiction. So I'd mostly have bloated D's and P's, and everything else would be sparsely populated. I'm not even sure what I have that would go in the A's. (Can you tell I took cataloging without an actual classification course?)

Thirdly, for what I want to be doing, I need to segregate my books into several distinct categories:

• Reference
• How-to/Self-help
• Textbooks
• Non-fiction
• Fiction

And then each category besides Reference needs to be divided:

• To read
• Already read
• Not going to read

So why do I have books I'm not going to read? It's mostly the how-to books: I'm not going to read the plumbing how-to book unless something breaks that I need to use immediately (I'm looking at you, Mr. Faulty Toilet Flusher) when my husband (son of plumber) isn't home. I also have quite a few books acquired over the years mostly for reference purposes which aren't actually reference books; when my mother was bringing home discarded books from the diocese, I acquired titles on various aspects of religion that I mostly wanted to refer to if I wrote something religiously themed. And of course the books acquired because one's personal library wouldn't be complete without owning x, y, and z... (Do I really have to read the Brontes? At least I've never bought any Austen...)

So, yeah. Step 1: Sorting the books. Once I know what I've got and what I need to get through, I can start actually getting there.

Reading goals:

• 1 or more books per week
• 5 chapters/week of textbook material
• 1 work-related publication/week

I'm thinking maybe on Sundays I'll lay out the week's reading.

I'm actually aiming at 1 fiction and 1 non-fiction a week as a baseline. (When I get to the two-ish Robin Hobb trilogies I haven't read yet, I anticipate hitting each one all in one Sunday.) I don't actually know how much fiction I own that I haven't read; we have a lot of R. A. Salvatore that we got because my husband was reading it (and I wanted to, but never found the time), a bunch of Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and so forth. This may actually lead to a small purge of books people gave me that I didn't really want to read.

The textbook material may go slower for some things - so far that I've found, I have calculus, statistics, chemistry, English grammars that by God I'm not doing English grammar again, Russian, French, German, Wheelock's Latin (or the Reader, I don't remember which), physical anthropology, and a boatload of library science textbooks that you would think I read. (Ahem.)

Work related publications may be underestimated, or it may vary. I may designate whichever week the American Historical Review shows up as its week, and then just get through my library periodicals backlog the rest of the weeks. I've got a couple years' worth of American Libraries that I really just

Writing goals:

• 1 blog post/day (or something like 3/week if I don't have the content for more)
• 1 hour of writing/day

I don't really plan my fiction writing - when something gets in my head, I'll work on it that day. (I thought of something last night that I kind of want to get down on paper, but, well, July is bad for me.) Blog posts I've just been writing as they occur to me, so I don't know if I need to plan them in advance.

Other... personal development? goals:

• 3 hours/week of Mandarin (audio CDs in the car)
• 1.5 hours of exercise/week
  
• 1 song/week on the piano
  

The hardest part about the Mandarin is remember to switch my car stereo over. Seriously.

I've been trying to start exercising for about five years now. It's clear by now I'm not very good at it. Part of it is working in 85 degree heat this summer (my office), and part of it is that I'm not sure where I can safely go by myself if I can't get my husband to go with me.

I added something on the piano since, well, I did take lessons for eleven years. I'm out of practice, especially compared to 3-4 hours a day the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I may as well put the piano in the living room to use. (Note to self: find a "Piano maintenance and repair" book. It needs tuning.)

Cleaning goals:

• Full house cleaning on Saturdays
• 2 hours/week of closet purging

I should probably add "vacuum out my car" to the list, but that's really not a weekly thing. But, yeah, I've had it for almost two years, and it really needs to be vacuumed out.

I hope to have the books sorted by the end of the week (and, um, the bedroom reassembled, since stuff is going to have to move for me to get at some of them).

Probably indicative

I suppose it's sad that, as I'm setting this blog up, when I look at the preview of the blog and see the title ("K."), the first thing that I associate with it is not my initial, but "Law." Damn you, Library of Congress Classification.

On the 5.

5, according to all the horoscope sites, is my "life-path number." I don't really know what that means, and I don't really have an affinity for the number 5 (what with 7 being always more enticing, followed by 2).

I do, however, spend more time than one might suppose ruminating on the 5 Laws.

Yes, those 5.

You see, I'm a librarian.

In brief, if you don't want to actually (gasp) read through the work, the Five Laws of Library Science, put forward by S. R. Ranganathan all those years ago, are

Books are for use.

Every reader his [or her] book.

Every book its reader.

Save the time of the User.

The library is a growing organism.

Over the years, people have written various adaptations and interpretations of the 5. This is all well and good; rethinking the profession as technology, learning, and media evolve is sensible. Fore me, though, the 5 are part of my guiding philosophy.

I got into librarianship because, first of all, I knew that writing was unlikely to pay. The odds were better that I could at least get by on a librarian's salary. And why go for librarianship, instead of linguistics or architecture (previous possible paths)? Because I spent my senior year of high school working for the high school librarian during my study hall. It was just stuff like shelf reading, sorting overdue notices, and such, but she was also the coach of one of my academic teams, and we loved her. (We won state competition and $300 for the library two years in a row for her.) The decision had no philosophical backing; I liked working in the high school library, and I had always been an avid reader/library user. So I got into library school right out of my undergrad, and while I had a basic concept of what libraries did, the philosophy was all new.

My first semester I ended up taking the reference class; this was mostly because I jumped in at the spring semester and took what I could get into. (This also resulted in me taking a public policy class that was chock full of doctoral students and required a presentation at the end of the semester. Terrifyingly great experience.) The reference class was, quite honestly, my first exposure to library databases. My high school didn't have any of that when I was there; we still used a card catalog. Bibliographic instruction involved MLA and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. And I was a history major during my undergraduate; that entailed microfilm, not databases. (The database exposure did help during subsequent my history master's program, since I didn't seem to have time to actually read books.) Databases, with their hierarchical structures, their thesauri, their logic, come very naturally to me. But on top of that, the reference class was where Ranganathan's Five Laws were introduced.

I didn't think much about them while I was in library school, actually. Or even during my first year or so of doing reference in an academic library. Really, though? They're part of my own core philosophy of librarianship.

Books are for use. We're a library. We collect resources not for the sole sake of preservation or the collection itself. Our collections are meant to support and enhance learning and knowledge. Some collections, yes, need to be protected - fragile materials, rare materials. But we should still find ways to provide access to the materials unless a part of our mission includes preservation of specific collections. Maybe items need to be made digitally accessible so that they can be physically preserved, etc.

Every reader his [or her] book. Somewhere out there is the resource the user needs. (Maybe. Obvious exceptions include the perennial 'photograph of a dinosaur' and such.) But, if it exists, we should do our best to get the resource and the user together. If it's something like unique microfilm or archival material, we may be able to locate it, but not bring it to the user; maybe we can get a copy; maybe the only way to access it is on site. And if the exact resource the user wants either doesn't exist or simply cannot be made accessible in a timely fashion, we should help the user find the next best thing.

Every book its reader. Somewhere out there is the user for the resources in your library. Not every user needs every resource; not every resource is needed by every user. A lot of ag-tech majors probably don't need Artstor, but a lot of graphic design majors probably don't need AGRICOLA, either. If the resource's user-base is no longer part of the community you serve, it may be time to consider weeding that resource. Holding on to something just in case an ILL request comes through for it doesn't make as much sense as deacquisitioning the item and possibly offering it to libraries whose users do have a need for it. (Assuming it's not a temporary lull in the existence of the user-base. A class not being offered this semester is different than the department being dissolved and the college no longer has, say, a videography major.)

Save the time of the User. Make your discovery guides simple, powerful, and intuitive. Excellent cataloging, classification, and indexing of resources will make them vastly easier to find. Automate where it makes sense to. Excellent reference will help the user refine their needs as quickly as possible, as well as help them locate alternate sources and subject terms to help steer them out of dead ends. Change when change is needed; keep methodology that works. Don't chase the new just because it's new; chase it when it's an improvement.

The library is a growing organism. Resources evolve. We're not just books and print periodicals anymore, but databases and electronic resources; websites and internet search engines; maps and realia; DVDs and CDs; laptops and digital projectors. Services evolve. We do so many things electronically now - email (and chat and text) reference; automated interlibrary loan; online catalogs and websites. Instruction is embedded into classes, relevant to research, and designed for life-long learning. Our paradigms shift. Graphic novels have made inroads. Games are no longer just games. (Want to bring people together at an open house or other event? Put out Scrabble or cards or set up a Wii.)

So, yeah. The 5.