OHSU Library: Why are we here?

Although I am no longer working with the OHSU project, I am very honored that I was included in this project. Produced by User Experience Librarian Laura Zeigen and directed by Amy Fraizer, a student worker, this video is an excellent look into why librarians and library staff love their jobs:

As seen online

There have been lots of fun tidbits floating around the internet the past week. Here are some that have caught my interest:

The first is from the public library in Troy, Michigan. In 1971 construction of the new library was finished, and the children's librarian wrote to hundreds of celebrities, authors and notable public officials asking them to wrote the children of Troy about their new library. She collected 97 of them and they are now up on their website. Some of my favorite's include Issac Asimov, Dr. Seuss, Saul Alinsky, Pearl Bailey, and Vincent Price. Even Ronald Reagan and Pat Nixon wrote some very sweet letters!



Here's an article on how the University of Chicago has built an underground book storage facility that is powered by robots. While this has the potential to cut down on the potential for browsing, I think that this still awesome for an academic library. It creates more space for studying and creates a protected space for valuable materials and archives. Plus, robots are cool.

The Chronicle published another great article looking at innovative academic libraries. This one describes embedded librarians at Johns Hopkins and reworking space to match students needs.

I love working in a medical library and I love learning about new (and free resources). This interactive 3D Human Anatomy Search Engine is pretty rad, and I feel would be an excellent resource for a more general academic or even public library.

I've posted about Snooki before, and I will probably post about her some more. Here is a great article about two academic librarians who use MTV's The Jersey Shore to their advantage.

Effects, seeing

One of the great aspects of my job as a student worker in a medical academic library are the opportunities to gain some pretty amazing experiences- experiences I wouldn't necessarily get in the MLIS classroom.

One project that I have started working on is for our Digital Resources Library, specifically the Campus Collection. The library has been gifted a large collection of digital photographs of the University's campus - which feels like a citadel overlooking Portland. The Cataloging and Metadata Librarian has been working with a number of individuals on sorting through the images, coming up with naming conventions, and cataloging them for the collection.

I am one of those lucky individuals.

There has been a lot of conversation in some of the library blogs about the future of MLIS programs. Hack Library School just had a great post about the importance of practical experience in the library school curriculum. While my program does have an optional practicum component, it is projects like these where I don't feel like I need one. For example, I haven't taken a cataloging class, and now that I am working on this project, I feel like I don't even need one. The librarian who is supervising this project has been an excellent teacher. She doesn't just explain the bare minimum to complete this project, but includes conversations with me on the bigger picture issues. She is providing an excellent, be it quick, hands-on cataloging education.

Working the circulation desk is rewarding in its own way - you can help people face to face- but seeing an image you cataloged added to a live collection offers such a wonderful sense of self accomplishment (click here to see an example of one).

Historical Medical Zine?

Look what I found! Could this be a medical zine from the 1950's...



...probably not. It's from a legit publisher, so it is more of a chapbook. But it has the look and feel of a well put together zine. It's a subject index and it's pretty neat nonetheless. It list such amazing titles as:

Hare, R. Pop and pestilence. Infectious disease, its origins and conquest. London: Gollancz. 1954.

and

Waksman, S. A. My life with the micobes. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1954.

and

Erlam, H. H. The history of medical librarianship in New Zealand. Librai, 1954, 3, 296-203, bibliog.

It also lists international publications, which meant I could have fun trying to figure out what some of the titles meant. Thankfully the good lord invented Google Translate, turning "Zur Geschichte der Milchzuckergewinnung, besonders in der Schweiz" into "On the history of milk sugar, especially in Switzerland."

Being a student worker is a medical library could be one of the most interesting jobs out there. Now if I can only figure out how to make it to librarian status...

The sky is falling

Alright, after last week's post about keeping things brief, I'm going to eat my words and go off on a bit of a rant.

Sometimes I wonder if librarians are their own worst enemy. There, I said it.

The above image - from PostSecret, a collaborative art project where total strangers mail in post cards with their secrets on them - illustrates beautifully where I am coming from.

We get it - the economy sucks and the sucky economy is screwing over libraries left and right. We've talked about this for ages now. Can we please move on?

It's really frustrating as a library student to be hearing the same thing over and over again: libraries aren't hiring, librarians aren't retiring, budgets are getting cut, folks are getting laid off, branches are closing, rah rah rah rah rah....

It seems like most librarians, library workers and fellow students I come across - both in person and (mostly) online - are broken records, stuck in the "woe is us" mentality.

I - the naive library student - say enough is enough! We've gone through the cathartic bellyaching phase and now is the roll-up-our-sleeves and work harder phase. It doesn't sound like fun, but I think it's what we've got to do.

Personally, I am a little nervous about what my job prospects will be like when I graduate in a year, but I've been hustling, and I'm willing to hustle a little more when school is over. I'll do what it takes to get a personally satisfying job. I'm well aware that I am going to leave Portland - an amazing city that has been my home for four years now. There is a strong reality that I'll have to live in a much less glamorous part of the county. Maybe even Kansas.

Except for who we vote for and what we choose to do with our money, we have very little control over the state of the economy. So let's try and focus on what we do have control over: ourselves. What can we do to stop library closings? Advocate, advocate, advocate. One of the things that most attracted me to the idea of becoming a librarian/information professional was the activism that seemed to go hand in hand with the position. Librarians fight for the right of the patron, for the privacy of the patron, for the access of the patron. Well - now is the time to fight for ourselves!

Here is a great link to librarian.net, with a list of single-link library advocacy sites.

And here is link to contact your elected representatives to ensure that libraries get in on the Jobs for Main Street Act.

What else can we do? Accept change. I feel like a lot of the hand wringing that librarians are doing is not only over the state of the economy, but also the fact that libraries are quickly changing. Well - if we want to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our communities, we are going to have to change. The mission of a library - from my prospective - is to connect an individual with information. If the format of the information is changing, than the format of the library will change too.

I don't intend to sound insensitive to the very real fears people are experiencing out there - although I am sure that I am coming off that way. For those who have been laid off or lost jobs - I'm sorry. Bad things happen to really really good people. I wish you the best and hope you are quickly on your feet.

I know I am in a very lucky position - I'm a young student without a family, mortgage, car, pets. I'm highly mobile and I have grown up using the technology that libraries now employ. But these are my skills and attributes that I have to take advantage of. This is something that we all should do, especially in this day and age of volatility, look at what we bring to the table and how to use those skills to our advantage.

I write all of this after attending a quarterly staff meeting at the library where I work - and while it was pretty mundane, it was also pretty exciting as well. The library where I work - before I started working here nine months ago - has gone through a lot of the same troubles that most libraries have gonethrough. Between lay offs, retirements and hiring freezes the staff here is half to a third of what it was before this great recession.

Yet here we are today still working - albeit a bit harder. Not only are we surviving, but we are thriving. The amazing library staff is working on building the resources for a mobile library, we are opening up a 24 hour study space for the students, we are outreaching to the different academic departments and schools within the university and applying for competitive grants to secure our funding into the future. And with the wage/hire freeze lifted - there is hope for more job opportunities.

What I guess it all boils down to - for me (this is my blog so I'm allowed a bit of selfishness) - is that I am the future and this is my reality. In a way, I am glad to have entered library school in 2009 - it means that I am a blank slate. I don't know what it was like when budgets were flush and things were easier. I am cutting my teeth when the industry is facing some of it's worst challenges than ever before. And I'm going to be a better librarian for it.

Let me know what you think. Am I too harsh? Too idealistic? Too Unrealistic? I would love to read your thoughts...

new ways to ask questions...

One of my first assignments this term is simply to shadow and observe a reference librarian for an hour or two, and write down my impressions of the reference interview. Working at a medical research library, I was looking forward to sitting at the desk and eaves-dropping on the interview, imagining what kind of crazy medical quarries I would be privy too.

I came, I saw, I was kinda bored.

That's not entirely true. I had a great conversation with the librarians about library school (he's an alumni of my program) his diverse experience (before becoming a librarian he worked for a video game development company) and librarianship in general (get us started and we go on and on and on....)

We just didn't have patrons come and ask us a question...in person.

We did receive a phone call, and the librarian was logged into the "chat with a librarian" and checked the general reference email. I was a bit frustrated, as I sat in during one of the busiest parts of the day - I was hoping for a little more action than what we got.

However, the hour wasn't a total loss - it did give me a chance to think about the future of information and information gathering behavior, making me wonder how we will be assisting information seekers in the future. As information dissemination becomes predominately digital, will librarians interact more and more with their computer screens? You can email with a librarian and chat with a librarian. There are companies currently developing programs that allow you to text a librarian from your cell phone. Maybe libraries should start a skype reference program....

In the next few days, I'll try the assignment again, and hope for better success, and maybe even recommend a revision to the assignment. After all the reference interview seems to be getting rarer and rarer, but there might be a future for the reference texting....

okay folks. I'm back. srlsy.

Man two months go by fast.

Maybe it wasn't the wisest decision to start a blog and go back for a master's at the same time, but I haven't always been known for making the smartest choices.

For those of you out there who don't live in Portland and are not my immeadiate family, here's a little update of Turner's life in library land.

Working for a medical library has been awesome. At first I thought it was a relatively small library - and physically it is, but the abundance of resources is staggering - and a little overwhelming. Most of the patrons in the library don't realize that A) I'm not a librarian and B) I have absolutely ZERO medical experience WHATSOEVER. Except for watching a kid in summer camp throw up once.

I think the medical students just see a dude with a beard and square glasses sitting behind a desk and they think he knows what he's doing. If only they really knew what was really on my screen. I mean really on my screen. I mean really on my screen.

In all seriousness, I may not understand the content that they are searching for, but I am getting pretty good at pointing them in the right direction. And my coworkers and supervisors are all amazing and supportive. That's the other great thing about working here: working along side fellow library students. The online aspect of library school is great in the relative flexibility it offers, but it can get kind of lonely, too. And its really nice to see other students, even if they aren't in my same cohort or program, on a weekly basis and know that we understand what we all are going through. It's pretty grand.

Along with working in the medical library, I'm also volunteering once a week in a small art school library. Which rocks my world. The library feels like it is a major artery of the school, which has a tiny student body, but they all come through the library - whether it is to research, to document their work, or to eat their lunch. There's artwork everywhere. It's located near the center of the city. It's vibrant.

When I get overwhelmed at the medical library (which is often - it can feel like a behemoth that I will never fully understand), the art library feels safe and comfortable. And while both libraries will continue to grow - the art library feels like a rocket about to take off. There is a lot of potential there and it seems that there is very little bureaucracy to hold it back. Not that there isn't a lot of potential at the medical library, it just feels more like an elephant plodding it's way to the watering hole...

It creates a really nice juxtaposition between the two libraries. I'm gaining invaluable experience from two diverse perspectives, using what I learn through school at work, and what I learn through work in school.

So here we go. Another post. I'm back. And as the semester wraps up, I'll be sharing a lot of the lessons I've learned. For those of you who constantly asked about the blog, thanks for showing that you wanted to read more, and I promise you more to read....