What I Learned This Fortnight

It's amazing what getting more hours at work does to your free time... even though I only work three more hours in a day, I feel like I only have time to work, eat, and sleep. I will try to fix this! In the meantime, here are some things I've discovered while cataloging, some of which will only make sense to fellow library science-ers.

1. There are a lot of romance novels, but there are not a lot of romance-novel titles.

2. Children's books like to come with doodads, like flash cards, temporary tattoos, and 3-D glasses.

3. My definition, the Library of Congress's definition, and my library's definition of "biography" are just different enough to annoy the crap out of me.

4. Libraries are strangely resistant to change, even when the work part of it is done by someone else.

5. Relatedly: libraries should never make cataloging changes, because I don't wanna do all the work!

6. Also relatedly: My library system apparently needs to own 40+ copies of every picture book ever written.

7. If you ask a cataloger a question for which you think there is only one right answer, you will end up with two catalogers debating the question for half an hour.

7a. You will have no answer at the end of this.

8. If you ask a cataloger a question for which you think there are multiple possible answers, you will get a strange look, a quick answer, and a "duh."

9. $v Blogs. This is a valid form subdivision. I love the future.

10. The cataloging process is not too different from, but far more fun than, putting stickers on books.

Notes on a Sunday

Wow. It is really fall here in Florida now... after many weeks in the 70s and 80s a big storm has taken us into the 50s and low 60s. I will be spending many hours warming up in the solarium, reading and drinking hot chocolate. In fact...

Mmm, hot chocolate. -sips- Much warmer now.

It has been an interesting week for reading. I don't do monthly tally posts anymore, but I do keep a tally in a lovely Google spreadsheet, and I discovered that in October I managed to read 18 books, which is the most I've read in any month this year, including the two months during which I had to read 20 YA novels for a class. This beastly total was helped in part by the six books I read for the Read-a-thon, and also by an unexpected airplane trip and, of course, my general lack of employment.

Of course, I'm not going to get anywhere near that this month... I haven't yet finished a book! This is mostly because I started The Name of the Rose this week, and while I think it is going to be very interesting I found myself skimming through pages and generally not paying any attention to the story. So I am putting it aside until such time as I can actually focus on it. This weekend has found me reading The Little Stranger, which I should finish today or tomorrow and which I am currently madly in love with. I have no idea what's going on, but I can tell that it's the kind of book where you're not supposed to, so I'm not terribly concerned yet. What I do know is that it's quite creepy and reminds me vaguely of The Fall of the House of Usher and also The Haunting of Hill House, which is a good sign for me loving this book.

It's also been an interesting week at the library — I volunteer there, as I've probably mentioned, and so far my duties have consisted of shelving things and also unshelving things that people want to read. It's actually a pretty good time, and I'm sure the library loves that I take many things home with me every time I'm there. But, having one of these degrees in library science, I've been begging to be allowed to do more, and this week I was finally able to present a list of ideas for readers advisory (matching readers with books, basically) that I'd like to help with. Everything has to get cleared through the director, of course, but as of my meeting with the assistant director it looks like I will be doing some blogging, creating fun bookmarks Twinsburg Public Library-style, and possibly helping out with a book group. I am possibly far too excited about this, but it means that I have more things to do! I like feeling useful.

All right, back to reading!

Fine, fine.

Remember how I said that my new library was not spoiling me? It's getting serious, guys.

I had to run over to the library the other day to pay a 20-cent fine. Was it because I am afraid of fines or am used to not having any? Ha! I'm pretty sure I still have fines at two libraries in Ohio. (Shhh, don't tell!) But I had to pay this fine, because the library here blocks your card if you have any fines at all, which means no checking books out, no putting holds on anything, and no renewing books. Which of course means that there's no way to stop your fine from accruing until you go in and return the book, at which point you need to pay the fine anyway because you can't do anything else until you do!

When I talked to someone on the phone about this before dashing over to pay my 20 cents, he said that they're going to change this soon. THANK GOODNESS.

My new library relationship

So I moved to Florida recently, and the first thing I did after getting my driver's license was head over to the library and get a library card, as one does when one is a NERD. Sigh. Even better, the library I went to turned out not to be the closest library to me, so I was compelled to head over to my neighborhood library just a couple of days later. And then I went back today. I now have a pile of eight books (after returning two today) on my counter. It's just like old times!

What's weird is how spoiled I was in Ohio without even realizing it. That's not saying that my new libraries are bad, not at all, and in fact I'm a bit in love with the downtown library, which I visited back in April. But I am just not used to branch libraries, with their more limited collections and smaller staffs. Both of the libraries I frequented in Ohio were main libraries, and my practicum library in particular had a large and wonderful collection, especially of the audiobooks I learned to love on my long commute.

But, I mean, I checked six books out today. And I've got holds on the ones I can't find in the library. So it's not like I'm deprived or anything.

Aaaaaand, I could walk to this library in about the time it took me to walk to class in undergrad. I declare this an excellent improvement. Now to read!

When library policies ATTACK (your ability to browse the shelves)

I found this post on a very odd library policy via @maureenjohnson yesterday, and found myself very confused. If you don't want to click the link, the idea is that there is at least one library out there (probably more...) that enforces age-restricted access to the children's and young adult sections. As in, if I, as a 24-year-old, went to this (these?) libraries, I would have to ask for special permission to browse around (retrieving specific materials is okay, apparently) the children's and young adult sections unless I brought my youngest brother or borrowed someone's teenager. Um, what?

The first principle of the ALA Code of Ethics espouses "equitable service policies" and "equitable access"; this policy seems to maybe a little bit totally break that principle.

It's like the opposite of what happened in Wisconsin last year, where some of the adult patrons wanted to move the "inappropriate" books from the YA section to the adult section, making it harder for the young adults to find them.

This particular age restriction policy also makes it more difficult for children under the age of 13 to get at the young adult materials — they seem also to have to go get a librarian to escort them, though young adults can use the children's section as they please. As a person who was reading at an eighth-grade reading level by first grade and who was also painfully shy until about the age of 19, I can't imagine that I would have read nearly as many books as I did in my childhood if this policy had been in place at my library.

I don't know what the staffing situation is at this particular library, but this policy doesn't seem to be very friendly to any situation. If there are plenty of librarians and staff in all sections, this policy seems to say that teen and children's area staff aren't competent enough to keep the area a comfortable space for the teens without age-restricted entrance. If there are fewer librarians and staff floating around the library, escorting through the YA section adults or children who could take care of themselves takes away time that could be used to help less knowledgeable library users or to work on making the library better. If this policy completely replaces a librarian or staff member in these two sections, well, that just doesn't bode well for the future at all.

In short, this sort of policy affects a lot of people, is silly, and is antithetical to good library service. What are the upsides?

Should you become a librarian?

Not if you believe this. This makes me a little sad. But a little more mad.

Firstly, and most obviously, because I am in library school. I'm certainly qualified to do other things, I like respect, and my cat has a historical cat name — crap. I guess I should just quit now, right?

That's the secondly: Seriously? Seriously? Because I want respect as a librarian (this seems to be the overarching theme of the flowchart), I can't be a librarian? So we're going to leave the profession to people that don't want respect anyway? This seems a little bit off to me.

Some of the commenters on the post find this flowchart funny, and maybe that's its intent. Because while I'm sure that public librarians, especially, find themselves feeling like overpaid babysitters at times, I'm also sure that there are times that make those librarians say, "This is why I became a librarian." Because otherwise, why would they still be going to work every day? But to have this flowchart out there, where non-librarians and potential librarians can see it (potentially) taken out of context... that's going to drive away some really great future librarians.

Other commenters note that librarians are going out of style, that they're being replaced by paraprofessionals, that soon enough everything is going to be automated so why should anyone enter library school right now? To that I say, because library science and information science are changing, too. MLIS students don't just learn how to shelve books. They learn how to use new information tools and how to teach others to use them. They learn how to put together and maintain digital libraries. They learn how to be a librarian of the future, not of the past that these commenters seem to be living in.

If your boss doesn't respect you, and especially if you don't respect your boss, figure out why not. If it's a personality clash; find a new boss. Get out of there. If you're doing something wrong, make it right. If your boss is doing something wrong, make it right. Take initiative.

If the customers are fighting you, and you are doing your best to help, you need to find a new way to help. Ask more questions. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. Don't be confrontational. Make the customer happy, even if you can't answer the question.

If your coworkers despise you, you are probably doing something wrong. Fix it. Or possibly you are doing everything right. Fix them, but be respectful about it.

If your mother cries and begs you to join a religious cult, your mother is crazy. Get her professional help. (Okay, this one's obviously meant to be humorous. But just in case.)

I agree with one (sadly anonymous) comment: "Instead of whining about being a librarian, go be something else." If you don't, there's a chance you'll soon become the disrespectful boss or co-worker that ruins things for everyone else. There are plenty of excited young students (I am one of them) who want to change your profession for the better. Let us do it.

Google vs. the Dewey Decimal System

The other day I found myself a bit confused by a question from a relative: "Do we even need the Dewey Decimal system anymore, now that we have Google?" Her question was mainly based on not knowing what Dewey Decimal is at all, but might it be a valid question?

Well, let's look at this. Google is, as I'm sure everyone who can read this knows, a search engine. If you're looking for, say, information on whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain (this is an example given to me by the aforementioned questioner), you can use Google to find the answer, or at least potential answers on a variety of websites.

The Dewey Decimal Classification system, on the other hand (and along with its friend the Library of Congress Classification system, among others), is an organizational tool. It says that if you are looking for, say, an item about whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain, you can find it on the shelf in probably the 530s (that's the lovely physics section) or so. But the trick is that sure, you can find books on physics in the 530s, but you might find the answer to this particular question somewhere else entirely. Like in the 613s in a book on health... I suppose you'd want the best way to avoid a cold, after all. You're really better off finding the book you want via the catalog (or Google, as I did here) and then heading for the shelf with decimal in hand.

So you cannot use Dewey directly to find an answer; that's what the books are for (which you can locate in your library using Dewey). You cannot use Google to find a book on a shelf (unless, of course, it gives you a call number), though you could use it to find a digitized book pretty quickly.

And that's another thing. Now that Google is digitizing books like a madsearchengine, I can see why Dewey and other classification schemes would be falling out of style. Who needs a call number for something intangible? But even with this mass move to the Web, libraries are still housing books that need to be organized. And even on the Web, people are interested in finding items that are related to the ones they are looking at now.

Why else would we have social bookmarking sites or an online encyclopedia that has at least a few good articles or even Google image search? Clearly, information wants to be organized (or at least we silly humans like it that way). Is there really a difference between using Dewey to sort books into categories like Technology and History and using tags to sort blog posts by the celebrities they mention?

No. Not really. So maybe Dewey and his decimals aren't going to prevail in the world of digitized books, where books can be "shelved" next to any other book that shares a tag (and really, that is a much nicer system to use!), conflicting topics be damned. But the concept behind Dewey, that of being able to sort and organize information, of being able to figure out which darn Google link is going to give you the answer you want... that's definitely going to stick around.

The LIS ramble

We interrupt your regularly scheduled book review post to bring you: Alison's study break! That's right, it's Finals Time: Round 1 and I am cramming into my head all of the information I didn't have time to put in there for the last five weeks. Sigh. It's actually working out pretty well; it helps that I have Dr. Llewellyn C. Puppybreath III to amuse me. I wish I were kidding. :)

Since I haven't been doing much in the last week that hasn't involved the words "library science," I figured I'd give all of you out there in Internet-land an update on my studies. I'm at the beginning of the end of my second semester of library school; one of my classes ends tomorrow, another next Tuesday, and another... in December, so I guess I don't have to worry about that one yet.

It has been an interesting semester in that two of my classes were online and I was very worried ten weeks ago that this was going to be a terrible, horrible thing, that I wouldn't meet anyone and that I'd forget to do all of my homework. I guess that last part happened once or twice, but I definitely managed to meet people! I joined up with the ALA student chapter and took on a small role as a publicity committee member, but when your friend's the president, there are really no small roles! I ended up agreeing to plan a social event for the winter and... well, we'll get to that in a second.

I went to my first library conference, one for the Academic Library Association of Ohio, last Friday, and it was, you know, a conference. Pretty lame, not leastly because my ride decided we were going to leave at 3am to get there. No, really. But I stumbled my sleep-deprived way through the conference, met some awesome people, and got some swag, so all is good. Then, on the way home, the three of us in the car decided that what would be really awesome would be to have our own student-led conference. In the spring. That we are going to plan. I know!

So I'm pretty excited, but having been to not many conferences in my life, I need your help! We want to make this conference specifically the least boring conference ever. What have been your favorite things about conferences (of any sort) that you've attended, ever? Was it a keynote speaker? Breakout session? Snack table? Was there anything you ever thought would have improved the conference you attended if only someone on the planning committee had thought of it? Please share it here!

Okay, back to studying. Thanks for letting me ramble!

Teen Read Week!

Teen Read Week is this week! What is this Teen Read Week, you ask? Why, it's simply a week in which libraries (and probably other people, too), persuade teens to read books! Yay reading!

I'm not a librarian just yet, so my ability to push books into the hands of teens is limited and I need your help! :) If you parent a teen, know a teen, see a teen on the street, whatever, remind them all week that reading is fun! If they need some convincing, here are some books you can tell them to read, ones that I have read recently and enjoyed:

Liar, by Justine Larbalestier — The story of a liar who is totally going to tell the truth this time, honest.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart — Secret societies, they're all fun and games until you infiltrate one and then get in lots of trouble.
Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer — Because being a teenager isn't difficult enough without worrying about the moon looming ever closer.
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins — Because being a teenager isn't difficult enough without worrying about being forced to kill other teenagers.
Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi — Because being a teenager isn't difficult enough without worrying about being stranded on a colony planet.
Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns by John Green — Because being a teenager is just difficult.
Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow — Awesome teenagers take on the government using even awesomer technology. Recommended in e-book form for your tech-savvy teen.

Wisconsin Library Debate

This showed up in my Google Reader today and links to a CNN article about a public library in West Bend, WI that has some patrons railing against inappropriate books. These books include The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Baby Be-bop, neither of which I've read, but both of which are apparently inappropriate for teens.

But what really strikes me about this protest is the proposed solution. CNN, of course, latches on to the radical group that wants to burn some books, but the intent of the original protesters was to have the books moved from the young adult section to the adult section. Young adults would still be allowed to check out Chbosky's book, but they'd have to know that they wanted it and either be able to use the library's catalog or be willing to ask a librarian to find the book for them.

While I agree that the books should not be moved, mostly because browsing is how I found many a book before I joined the book blogging world, this does bring up the question of how and why we separate books into children's, young adult, and adult. I read plenty of novels that are considered children's or young adult and I am not either, anymore. Conversely, I was reading YA books at the age of seven or eight and venturing into the adult section not long after. But in all crossing-over cases, I was pointed to a specific book either by a blog, now, or by a friend or librarian, years ago. And there are plenty of books that I've recommended to friends that I've purposely not declared young adult, because said friends don't read "kid books." Doesn't this arbitrary separation itself limit access to a lot of great novels?

The other day I noticed books 5-7 of the Harry Potter series in the adult fiction stacks at my library. A quick look on the library's online catalog shows that they are also in the young adult and children's areas. How was this determined?

I'm sure these aren't questions that can really be answered, but what makes a young adult novel? What makes an adult novel? Why can't we combine them? Why can't there be a section for "sexually explicit" material (and wouldn't that really just encourage kids to read them, anyway)? Is there a better way to lay out the library?