Tag: librarians

library careers – two national organizations

Posted on by jessamyn

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).

PATRIOT Watch: Patriot Act smackdown: Librarians 1, FBI 0

Posted on by jessamyn

This news came down while I was at ALA, but I was running around too much to write it down. The government has closed their investigation in the now-infamous case in Connecticut where librarians who work at Library Connection, Inc [a library ISP] challenged the constitutionality of the gag order involved with a National Security Letter, saying “[I]t had determined through other means that the case was meritless.” National Security Letters are a part of the USA PATRIOT Act worth knowing about.

The NSL is a legal oddity of the Patriot Act, and it allows the FBI to make a unilateral demand which would usually require court oversight. In effect, an NSL requires the FBI to police itself, making it similar to asking the fox to watch a mirror. Although exact figures are impossible to come by, it is estimated that some 30,000 NSLs are now sent out each year. An NSL also comes with the added bonus onus of never allowing the recipient to publicly discuss its contents, topic, or even existence. In other words, the recipient is supposed to get the NSL, comply with it, and pretend nothing ever happened.

The librarians had already seen the gag order lifted, so the closing of the investigation doesn’t add legal weight to this issue, but it does wrap up the incident somewhat nicely. If you read all the way through the article, please check out the discussion on this page containing my favorite “go go librarian” quote of the week.

Librarians have long been the unsung defenders of our (US) privacy and open access. Publicly funded libraries are nearly as important as free education IMO.

Astonishing most people still don’t know they can call their library and ask for answers to most any question. Are there monkeys in Borneo? What is that goop on scratch tickets? Who owned my building in 1881? The reference librarian predates the web and the ‘net and is still sometimes better because he or she is trained specifically for the task: masters degrees in finding and sorting information AND privacy. Want to read that obscure 1938 SF title? Interlibrary Loan for the win.

Girl librarians are also hot. Recommended for geek dating: smart, techy goodness. I speak from experience, lived with one for seven years.

Reports from New Orleans

Posted on by jessamyn

People have been writing up their experiences from the ALA Conference in New Orleans. I’ll be linking to a few of them here. Feel free to send on conference summaries [not just conference blogging] and I’ll link to them.

Proud to Swim Home, New Orleans After Katrina by Karen Coyle
Notes on ALA Annual 2006 by Jim Casey
On New Orleans and the American Library Association by Phil Tramdack director of Bailey Library at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

You can find more incidental reportage and pictures by checking the PLA Blog, your favorite sites for the ala2006 tag or browsing HitchHikr’s ALA 2006 Annual Conference section which actually does pretty much the same thing with slightly more together layout.

I had a very good time in New Orleans. My small photoset is here on Flickr. There was an appealing synchronicity to the city’s struggles and renewal with a lot of the things that have been going on in my own personal life. It was a good time to do a lot of walking around and thinking, interspersed with talking library talk with friends and co-workers. I have been to New Orleans many times in the past fifteen years, and the city is so clearly changed. A lot of that change carries baggage, feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of regret.

I found the librarians were well-received and it felt good to feel that money spent in New Orleans may have been helping a larger recovery effort. By the time I left, late Wednesday after the last Council meeting, the city felt empty and a little hollow. It was easier to pretend that things in New Orleans would be okay when there were 20,000 shopping and eating librarians populating the place, but by the time most people had gone home, there was an eerie emptiness and I just kept feeling “I hope things are going to be okay.”