From Columbia to…Columbia!

Reading Reality is going on the road again. On September 13 and September 14 I will be at the South Carolina Collection Development Conference taking place in Columbia, South Carolina.

The entire day tomorrow is devoted to adult collection development. There will be talk tables and a keynote speech in the morning. I’m the afternoon speaker. My topic: “The Brave New World of Genre Fiction Selection, the Rap Sheet on the Fiction Vixen, or what the Locus are all these book blogs about?” I’m going to be encouraging collection development librarians to use book blogs as sources for not just reviews, but as trend spotters, to help them find what readers are looking for. I’ve got a whole list of my favorites. I’ve also got a whole lot of slides to show, not just the increasing importance of genre, but what some of those genres are. Steampunk is just so much cooler when you have a picture!

On Wednesday I’ll be leading one of the table talks. Wednesday is the children’s and teens CD day. A lot of YA literature these days is genre fiction, particularly of the creepy-crawly variety. And that’s where I come in. I’ll be leading a table talk on the “creature features” of YA fiction, titled “V is for Vampire, W is for Werewolf, Z is for Zombie: the continued trend of the dark, weird and scary in teen literature”. It should be a scream.

The official title of the conference is “Collection Development for South Carolina Libraries”, and it is presented and sponsored by the South Carolina State Library. I was incredibly excited when Kathy Sheppard from the SC State Library emailed me last month, right after I got back from Missouri State Library Summer Institute in Columbia, Missouri. The happy coincidence makes for a good omen. And I’m looking forward to thanking Kathy in person for inviting me.

Opening day at ALA

No matter where it is the American Library Association conference always feels like librarian’s old home week. All the people look vaguely familiar, convention centers all look alike, and even the signs are pretty much the same from one year to the next.

Some of the content is even repeated. RDA has been a topic for several conferences in a row, and probably will be for several more. The budget squeeze on libraries has been an unfortunate ongoing theme for too many years. “Doing more with less” is a refrain that is heard over and over.

Moving right along, I spent most of the day in a truly fantabulous pre-conference– “Assembling your consulting tool kit” by Nancy Bolt and Sara Laughlin. For me, the topic was relevant and timely, and the presenters did a bang up job. Setting up as a consultant is just something that goes against the grain of us librarians, we’re all used to thinking of ourselves as publiic servants and not as businesspersons marketing a product, particularly not when that product is ourselves. Nancy and Sara made it sound imminently doable, and their tips from the pros were very much appreciated by this newbie.

When the exhibits opened this evening, there was one book that I was more than willing to carry home  in “dead tree” form, if I could get one. Penguin was supposed to have advanced reading copies of Lev Grossman‘s The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians, in their booth. I beat a path to their proverbial door as soon as the crowds were let in, and managed to worm my way through the crush to get one. Score!

And ByWater Solutions had a “booth babe” that proved me wrong about the exhibit halls all looking alike. This particular lady could only have appeared in New Orleans.

Who am I this time?

The above is the title of a surprisingly sweet made-for-TV movie starring Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon from before Walken was firmly entrenched as the weird crazy evil guy. It was a long time ago. The movie is a romantic comedy, and the two characters are rather shy and nerdy in different ways. They both get talked into joining a small community theatre group, and turn out to be great actors. They lose their extreme shyness only when playing their parts. As long as they have other people’s lines to say, they’re fine. Unscripted, they’re lost. They can only express their growing love for each other, by acting. They end up spending their lives together, living theatrically. If you can find a copy, it’s worth an evening’s popcorn.

I have a sign in the kitchen that I bought when we moved here, that reads, “I only have a kitchen because it came with the house.” I used to say that I cooked in my last life. Or that the microwave cooked, I didn’t. After coming home at 6, or 7, or occasionally later, cooking simply wasn’t worth bothering with.  But in the last couple of months, while we’ve been here packing up, the priorities have shifted.  My old recipes have come in handy again, and we found some new ones.  There’s nothing fancy involved, but yes, I do cook in this life, and no one has died. I may need a new sign. I wonder if there’s a source for “Dinner will be ready when the smoke alarm goes off”, since that’s already happened a couple of times.

But some parts of my previous lives are not coming back, and going through the books and boxes is making that abundantly clear. I’ve moved my needlework patterns and books and supplies from Chicago to Anchorage to Tally to Chicago to Gainesville, and I have shoved them into deeper and deeper closets each time.  It’s a hobby I enjoyed when I did it, but it’s time to acknowledge that I’m not going to pick it back up in the reasonably foreseeable future.  Or even the unreasonably foreseeable future.  I used to do cross-stitch when I watched television, and, considering that vast wasteland, I don’t do that either. Social networking, video games and the internet in general have taken over that time. But letting all that go and giving it to a friend who will use it, that’s difficult.

Even harder, I have a truly big collection of Star Trek books.  I think I have all the mass market paperbacks, trade paperbacks and hardcovers up until last year. That’s the point where I finally realized I was never going to catch up to reading all the ones I had, let alone any new ones published.  I have all the episodes of all the series on DVD, and all the movies.  I’ve seen every movie on the first night, even the bad ones.  But the books are dead weight at this point. I have a few collectibles mixed in there, including a copy of Trek or Treat, which still grabs the funny bone even decades later. The really good stuff like that will be hung on to. I still love the Trek universe, and I wish the rights-holders would do something good with it again.

Getting rid of entire swaths of stuff feels like losing parts of my identity. It’s hard to separate what we own from who we are, which sounds stupid when written, but is very different in actual practice. I’ve always believed I’d go back to cross-stitching someday, but if that day hasn’t come in 10 years, realistically, it’s not likely, and it’s time to move on. I know someone who will get more good out of what I’ve been carrying around than I have, no matter what postage to her is going to cost.

I watched the last season of the initial run of Star Trek with my dad. He passed away 20 years ago this coming October. Star Trek was the first science fiction I ever got interested in, and without that first taste, my life would have gone down a very different leg of the trousers of time, to mix in a Discworld metaphor. But I have to keep telling myself that all the mass market paperbacks are available as ebooks if I really want to read them.

Sometimes, it’s not the thing, it’s the memories attached that make all the difference.

 

 

If Reference is dead, we need an ID on the body

The latest outcry in the library world is that Reference is dead.  Where’s the body?  What part of reference is dead?  And what should we do about it? 

Reference isn’t what it used to be.  Librarians are not the high priests and priestesses of information, and probably weren’t even when we thought we were.  The type of ready-reference questions that used to make up a significant part of a public library’s reference diet have gone to Google.  Ready-reference is dead.  And that is not news.  Joseph Janes has been talking about this for five years at least, based on these notes from his Internet Librarian keynote in 2007.  I’m pretty sure I heard him say this sometime before 2007, but this is the earliest date I can prove.

OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries 2010 report shows that users don’t start their information searches on library websites.  Is anyone actually surprised?  On the other hand, what does surprise me is the number of times that this data point is used to support the argument that reference is dead.  What does one have to do with the other?  Reference has never been about the question, it’s always been about the service.

The OCLC report goes on to say that people who have positive view of libraries support libraries, and that people are increasing their use of libraries, in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that people are increasing their use of technology across all age groups.  Everybody does everything online at every age, and everyone seems to want to continue to do it at the library.  And although reference may be dead, everyone wants more service.

So what is service if it isn’t reference, and who should provide it?

Service is whatever the person who comes into the library, whether that is online or physically, defines it to be.  If they walk out happy, we’re golden.  If they don’t, we’re idiots.  Some of the pundits seem to have lost sight of this.  I agree that directional questions are not reference, but someone needs to assist people with them, otherwise we don’t just seem, we are, cold and unhelpful places.  But the fortress-type reference desks of the past are not what users expect to see in the here-and-now, and staff who go out among the PCs, the wireless user area, and the stacks to seek out people who need help are a better way to provide service for most people.  At the same time, it’s not the only way.  Just like some people won’t ask directions when they are lost, some people won’t admit they need help when someone approaches them, they will wait until they are totally befuddled, then seek a place where help is available.  Human nature is contrary.

A lot of what used to be reference questions have turned into questions about how to use technology.  There are a lot of places outside the big cities, suburbs and university towns where the library is the geekiest spot in town, even if high speed bandwidth is only DSL speed.  And that’s not because the librarians are resistant to change, it’s because the library is located somewhere in that infamous “last mile” for broadband service, and DSL is all there is, and that’s if the library is lucky. 

Is reference dead, or dying?  Or is it just changing?

The cry that “reference is dead” sounds a lot like an echo from McMastergate a couple of weeks ago.  Librarians are expensive staff, and most libraries are facing budget cuts.  If reference is dead, then just cutting reference librarians is a quick and easy way to reduce the budget.  If reference has changed, and job descriptions and qualifications and staffing levels need to be seriously re-examined, that takes time, effort, and unfortunately, committees.  It’s certainly not a quick and easy fix.  But it provides better service if it’s done right.

And right is just not the same thing everywhere.  One size doesn’t fit all.  Saying “reference is dead” makes a good sound bite, but depends a lot upon definitions.  The late Tip O’Neill is famous for saying, “All politics is local”.  So is all library service.  It’s provided by your funding agency to your community, whether that be your taxpayers to your city and county, or your student tuition and grant monies to your students and faculty.  If the service is the right service, whether you call it reference or information services or just plain, “get help here”, users will keep coming in.  If you don’t provide the right service, you will become irrelevant.  There are some libraries, as Karen Schneider has posted, that are increasing relevance by providing, among other services, more research (in other words, reference) services. 

And, for a reminder of just how varied local service can and should be, the profiles of just the nominees for the Best Small Library in America should remind all of us of the sheer number of things that libraries and librarians do.  It’s not all about big libraries in big cities, or even medium sized libraries in medium sized towns.

Two of the three biggest lies are:  1)The check’s in the mail; and 2) One size fits all. 

Library budgets are hurting right now.  The checks that we have in the mail are smaller than they used to be.  Using the one size fits all sound bite of “reference is dead” to cut reference librarians, instead of going through the more extensive exercise of transforming information services into what our communities need now will make us less relevant, not more relevant.

Free books vs carrying charges

I am a Librarian.  And I have not bought a book in over 10 months.  I almost feel like I’m confessing something here.

When I travel, my entire carry-on used to hold books.  And I usually bought more while I was on the trip.  But, I bought an eBook Reader (a Nook) over a year ago.  I started taking it instead of the little suitcase.  My husband was so happy!  (He usually ended up pulling my little suitcase of books at some point on each trip)

This Xmas, I got an iPad.  Even better.  Now I don’t carry my Netbook or any books.  (I lie.  I carry one paperback for those moments on the airplane when they say “Turn off all electronic devices.”  So annoying.)

At the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference in January, there were free books available on the conference floor.  I could have picked up several.  Lots.  I always have before.  I didn’t pick up any.  I would have had to carry them.  It just wasn’t worth it.