Newest on my “list of librarians on IM who I bug a lot” is John Blyberg (I know, I am slow on the uptake) who I haven’t met and in fact had never seen until this past conference. This will all change at Library Camp East, coming in on the tail end of the Virgo Month of Leisure, on Septemebr 25th in Darien Connecticut. It’s an unconference which means that anti-authoritarian — and broke — dorks like me will probably appreciate it. I’m just hoping I can carpool with both Meredith and Casey. Here’s the wiki. sign up and I’ll see you there.
library careers – two national organizations
I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?
Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results
while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).
showing movies @ your library.
I noticed when I went to one of the libraries I work with that they had received their public performance rights to show movies at the library, apparently as some blanket deal from the Department of Libraries. I read the documentation that came from Movie Licensing USA, an outfit that provides public performance licensing to schools and libraries. With a cost that they never state but call “reasonable” this group will give you a piece of paper that seems to say that the MPAA will stay off your back if you want to show movies @ your library. Well, not all movies, just ones by the major studios that they represent. You also can’t advertise the showing of your movie to the general public. If you want to put a listing in the newspaper you can only do so in the vaguest of terms — without actually using the name of the movie you are showing. They suggest ideas like “The library will be showing a tale of wizardry by the author JK Rowling.”
While the company won’t give you information about copyright law in general — ALA has this page for the curious — they seem more than happy to tell you what you are NOT allowed to do under copyright law. The printed materials that come with the license are even more bizarre and talk about “avoiding the embarassment of a lawsuit” as one reason a library might want to obtain public performance rights.
If your library is looking into obtaining public performance rights, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has a good list of questions to ask a licensing service.
Skills for the 21st Century Librarian
Meredith Farkas spells it out. Cogent, readable and clear. The tech stuff we need to know isn’t how to make a blockquote in HTML, we have buttons and software for that. The tech stuff we need is big picture stuff, how to solve the problems that are different than the problems that came before them.
So what skills should new librarians have in this first part of the 21st century? At first, I was thinking about specific tech skills like HTML, network administration, PHP and MySQL, etc. While those are certainly important, what I really think library schools aren’t teaching students is the “big picture†topics; how to really be able to keep up with technology, make good decisions about its implementation, use it and sell it to others. Here are a few of the things I came up with.
Librarian gap? This again?
Apparently University of Missouri-Columbia got a big grant through IMLS to help them train more librarians. Apparently this is because there is a librarian shortage. They are not even trying to bring up numbers to justify this anymore, there are just statements like this
“With only a certain number of accredited programs, we can only graduate so many people a year,” [Professor John] Budd said. “There is a bit of a supply-and-demand inequality.”
Reading the actual grant guidelines is less of an exercise in tooth-gnashery than reading the way it is portrayed in the article.