Past Projects Now Bearing Fruit

Although I started at the PDLibrary as a children’s librarian, I was always the designated genealogy specialist and local history librarian.  One of my first LSTA grants was to fund creating an index to our local newspaper.  Work continues on this project, now over 20 years old, and I’ve often wondered if it is worth the time and effort of the volunteers.  Last week, I got my answer!  An author from Florida spent seven days in our library researching the histories of the families that started the various air rifle factories in Plymouth.  He is writing a book on the topic and used our index to speed along his work.  Over and over again he thanked me for this wonderful tool.  I also showed him our photographs of the various gun factories, businessmen involved, and the homes in which they lived.  These historic photos were yet another one of those projects I spent a lot of time and energy developing.  I learned how to scan glass plate negatives and then digitally restore them before sending them to the Making of Modern Michigan project.  I had bemoaned how little they were viewed and questioned the wisdom of adding yet a second collection online.  My author used both collections while here in town and told me how much he appreciated being able to view them on the web from his home state.

When his book is published (due out in December) I’m hoping that he will send the Library a copy.  When I see references to our unique index and photo collections in print, it will be truly exciting!

Social Networking in my life

I thought that having a blog and five different email addresses was enough social networking in my very busy life.  I then added four newsreaders for my RSS subscriptions and went into overload.  No more, I swore to myself!!  My Flickr page has well over a thousand photos and videos on it, and my del.icio.us page has hundreds of tags.  I follow over 50 folks on Twitter.  I was determined not to take on any more. 

 Then I discovered that I was required to create an account on Facebook if I wanted to put up a page for the Library.  What harm could one little personal page do?  Facebook has slowly sucked me into its pages just like Dove chocolate beckons to me.  I couldn’t imagine what appeal it would have to a “mature” librarian.  At first, I think the student pages at work felt sorry for me and added me as friends.  Then I found myself connecting with a younger generation of librarians that I either currently work with or have had as professional interns when they were working on their degrees.  So far, so good.  Slowly but surely, older friends from church and past classmates asked to be part of my network.  Suddenly it was becoming very addictive to check every day to see what was happening online. 

Today, I totally hit the Facebook jackpot!  I’ve always wished I had a larger family.  Both my mother and brother are gone and my father is my only remaining blood relative.  I have a few cousins close to me in age, but none are in the state.  Most I haven’t seen in many years.  Wonder of wonders, each time I checked Facebook today, another cousin had asked to be my friend.  I have now ended up with five cousins – from both sides of my family -  in touch with me through social networking on Facebook.  Two of them I’ve never met in person and two I haven’t seen in almost ten years.  The 5th one I saw over two years ago for only a few hours at my son’s wedding in San Diego.  I feel like Facebook has given me a chance to establish new relationships with my extended family members.  Each of them was able to see photos of my sons’ weddings, my beloved granddaughter and the recent med school graduation.  I have no idea how much additional time I’ll be spending on this site, but I suspect it will be well worth it.  For those who say social networking is only for young people, I’d beg to differ with them.  To me, it’s a way to stay in touch with old and new friends & family as we enter a stage in our lives when financial or physical limitations may keep us from visiting each other in person.  I can’t wait to see who will show up next, asking if I will be their friend!

Power Surge Woes

In today’s world, we go about our jobs taking for granted the technology tools that allow us to perform our duties and make life easier for both us and our patrons.  Then “mother nature” – or in this case, downed power lines due to an accident – remind us of what life used to be like before computers.  Our power started surging about 11:30am this past Friday.  The lights in the building were flashing like neon signs on marquees, and we could hear the blowers on the AC and fans turning on and off constantly.  The computers went down, rebooted automatically, and then went back down again in endless cycles.  We finally got stuff unplugged, servers taken down, and even the staff lounge fridge and microwave taken off the grid.  By 1pm we kicked the remaining patrons out and closed the library to the public.  As staff, we had to stay either until closing or until it got too dark or too hot to work.  So what did we do – - well, I got a lot of professional journals read.  I shelved every DVD in the public area.  Other staff members straightened up the youth area and cut out stickers for Summer Reading.  Our student pages shifted books and shelf-read.  In short, we did a lot that we rarely get a chance to do when our computers are up and running.  We had no telephones to distract us and no instant chat or email to answer.  We were planning to leave by 3pm if power didn’t come back on.  At 2:53pm we came back up – what awful luck!!  We spent the next hour plugging stuff back in, bringing up servers and computers, and assessing the damage done by the brown-outs.  We lost several scaners and barcode readers but no servers.  We were very lucky!  But this day served as a reminder of how we used to work before the advent of the Internet.  Not a bad thing, in retrospect.

Job Posting Thoughts

I just sent out postings to several listservs and put a notice on our web page about a job opening for the Coordinator of Adult Services here at the Library.  The current head is retiring after being here for over 25 years.  She’s a good friend of mine, and with her departure I’ll become the senior functioning librarian on the staff in terms of years here.  (This doesn’t count administration.)  Several friends and co-workers have asked me if I intend to apply for this vacancy.  I certainly have the qualifications and knowledge to do a good job in this position.  Then reality hits and I come to the conclusion that I’m simply too old to compete when I’m already old enough to draw early Social Security.  Would I have filled out an application ten years ago – certainly.  Even five years ago I might have considered it.  Now it seems foolhardy.  I can’t tell you how sad it makes me to openly acknowledge  that there are challenges I can’t accept and jobs I can no longer hope to obtain.  What remains is being the very best, up-to-date electronic resources librarian that I can be.  There are still productive years left in my career.  I still want to leave a mark on my profession, no matter how small.  But today, I know that I’ll never take over the office of my retiring friend.

Wedding and Graduation Time

May and June have been extremely busy times for me this year.  My youngest son, Patrick, married his girlfriend of almost 5 years, Brandy, on May 23rd.  This was the wedding that almost didn’t happen!  Two days prior to the big event, Brandy broke both her tibia and fibula when she missed a step and took a bad tumble.  They were due to close on their new house that afternoon and this ended up taking place in the Emergency Room rather than at the bank as planned.  The scheduled “bachelor’s party” turned out to be a dedicated bunch of friends helping Patrick move furniture into the house until the wee, small hours of the morn.  The wedding itself involved the groom’s father finding a medical transport van a mere 45 minutes prior to the Wedding Mass – and he did it, even over Memorial Day weekend!  The bride was wheeled down the isle by her father and the ceremony was conducted on the main floor of St. Valentine rather than on the altar as planned.  But they were formally married and were able to go to their reception as planned.  Unfortunately, the honeymoon was cancelled since the bride had surgery on her leg the week following the wedding.

Yesterday was Patrick’s graduation ceremony from medical school.  We loaded Brandy in our van, along with her wheelchair, pillows and walker and made the drive to Ohio.  I was so proud of my youngest son as he received the hood of a Doctor of Medicine.  To top it all off, he won an award as the outstanding student in psychiatry in his class.  What a day !! (See photos at the bottom right on this page.)

I’m now back at work, ready to start learning about Joomla.  It’s been a stressful few months, but I wouldn’t have traded them for the world!

Swine Flu and the Public Library

First of all,  I realize I need to call this current outbreak by its official name – H1N1 flu.  So how does this relate to our suburban public library?  Well, we just got word that there is a “probable” case of flu in our local high school and now all the community schools are closing for the next two days while they determine if it’s a confirmed case.  We’ll find out on Tuesday if they plan to stay closed the usual fourteen days that we’ve seen in other local school districts. With over twenty schools involved in this massive closing ,  you can only imagine the total number of students who are missing classes!!

Will the library close – of course not !!  We will become the unofficial babysitters for all the children (K-12)  whose parents work and don’t have daycare.  Besides, there are far too many patrons in our community who have come to rely on the library for free Internet access for job search and filing unemployment claims.  What will result is a stretching of our staff to care for the needs of the regular patrons as well as controlling our bored students who would rather be anywhere else in the world other than a library – perhaps even in school!  It will be an interesting two days or more…  In the meantime, we’ll be doing lots of hand washing.

Michigan Economy Relected in Libraries

Unless you live in Michigan, especially metro Detroit like I do, it’s hard to realize the scope of our current economic “recession.”  I work in a suburban library serving a community under 50,000.  Our public Internet computers used to be  half-empty on any given weekday morning.  Now when I’m on Reference at 11am during the week, all computers are filled and we must open our computer training lab for the overflow.  Most of these users are filing for unemployment benefits electronically, looking for jobs online, or trying to create a resume.  Computer skills are non-existent for at least 50% of these patrons.  They can become frustrated, angry or depressed by their situation.  It takes very little to “set them off,” especially when the computers don’t act the way they think they should.  These are our new Library users and we must learn how to deal effectively and patiently with them!

For those of us who use technology for hours on end daily, what we think of as simple keyboarding on a MS Word document or searching the Web  is often beyond the skill set of  those who now ask us for help.   For the past two days I’ve experienced outbursts from patrons who have “lost” their documents online and feel compelled to take it out on the staff.  It’s hard not to feel compassion for their plight, but I can’t allow public profanity to become commonplace in our public area. 

 I don’t know what direction the local automotive industry will take in the near future , but I suspect it will get worse before it gets better.   I just hope we can serve these new patrons in our Library community with the same friendliness and great service as we have our traditional users.

Trying to Keep up with Facebook & Twitter

While I love the social networking of Web 2.0, I find myself having to prioritize my time spent online now that I am maintaining my own Facebook & Twitter accounts as well as the Library’s.  This is in addition to  four e-mail accounts and two blogs.  Did I mention my webmaster duties for the Library’s web page, three other community web pages, and my own Parish web site?  No wonder I have a blister on my mousing thumb and my right shoulder is perpetually sore!  The unfortunate part of this scenario is that I used to spend time at home reading books and newspapers.  The last four best-sellers I’ve had to return to the Library unread – and not even opened.  I miss my reading!!  Online activity can become addictive without us even realizing the subtle signs.  I believe the time is quickly approaching for me to wean myself away from the laptop with its instant news and tweets and return to the mundane tasks of cooking dinners and reading the evening newspapers before they disappear.

Being a Librarian In Charge

Those of us who are designated as “LIC”s  (Librarians in Charge) often joke about not wanting to be the one called in a crisis.  When we get the phone call asking if we’re in charge, we usually try to think of someone else in the building who might have more authority than we do.  This afternoon, it was my turn to step up to being the “LIC.” 

Without going into detail, I needed to make the decision to call the police – who then called the Fire Department and then the EMS – all for a patron who had experienced medical problems in the building.  I stayed with her the entire time, trying to make polite conversion and finding out a bit more about her.  To make a long story short, it turned out that the Library had caused her such anxiety over an overdue book notice, that she became ill once she got here.  Needless to say, I felt terrible each time she repeated her story to the public service personnel.  She personified to me the people in this area who are unemployed and living with only the barest of necessities.  I was glad I could be there to make her understand that the Library didn’t want to cause her additional stress – and that we truly want her as a patron.  But I know I’ll have trouble sleeping tonight thinking about what is happening to the less fortunate in our own backyards.  This is the down side of being in charge, if only for an evening!

Adding Twitter into my Blogging Class

It’s time again for me to update my web page for the Blogging for Librarians Class that I teach for Michigan Library Consortium.  I felt it was time to add a small segment on Twitter since it’s defined as a “micro-blogging” service.   In doing research for this update, I was amazed at the number of libraries already having a presence on Twitter.   The Library of Congress is using it as well as Penn State and Yale.  I feel humbled that Plymouth District Library has joined such noble ranks.