Bourke, C. (2010). LIBRARY YOUTH SPACES VS YOUTH FRIENDLY LIBRARIES: HOW  TO MAKE THE MOST OF WHAT YOU HAVE. APLIS, 23(3), 98-102. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

This article talks about the way that libraries tend to design youth space away from the other physical space of the library. Libraries have had a tendency to marginalize youth, but the ideal situation would be to provide a space where teens can gather, but also where they can be both safe and unsupervised; the most important aspect of this is that it should be a dedicated youth space if at all possible. Most libraries that do have dedicated space for teens and young adults only dedicated about 2.2% of the library space to it, even in larger facilities.

According to Bourke, one of the most important aspects of making young adults feel comfortable in the library can be the attitude of the staff. However, there isn't much in the way of professional development for librarians who wish to make youth feel welcome, and this should include more than just the youth services team. Librarians need to be aware that their attitude can make or break the experience for young adults, an idea that seems especially important to me as we go forward hoping to maintain libraries in our communities. young adults grow up to be the adults who continue using the library, and the parents who will bring their kids to the library.  

Bourke suggests that formal surveys and less formal fly-on-the-wall behavior can give us insight into how we're doing with the youth. We need to look at the services we're providing and see whether our collections meet the needs of our younger patrons - which includes our databases, our music, our movies, and other kinds of materials. If we can create more space for the YA patrons and then make sure we're marketing to them as well, we can let the young adults know they're welcome in the library and we're trying to meet their needs. 

Tech Support

I'm always amazed at how much of my life is basic tech support. I feel like I have a slightly better-than-average grasp on technology, but it never ceases to amaze me that 1) I work somewhere that requires me to constantly show people how to use a computer, and 2) I know how to show them, mostly because their answers are incredibly basic.

Generally, I understand that not everyone gets how our printer works. It's no problem - it's so easy to do, and I love how amazed some patrons look when I show them how to release a print job. However, some tech problems require me to step back and really think about how natural technology has become to me, and how unnatural it is for some people. For example:

1. Twice in the last week, I've helped people who couldn't figure out how to sign into their yahoo.com account. It turned out that it wasn't working because they were trying to sign in on hotmail.com. 
2. I've had at least 2 girls who were within 5 years of my own age who had no idea how to use an external hard drive. One was actually younger than I am. How does one avoid learning how to use a thumb drive until they're 18 these days? 
3. I had to explain to a man the other night that even though you have to use an email account to sign in to amazon.com, your email account is not automatically connected to your hotmail account - i.e. amazon doesn't know what your hotmail password is, so it won't automatically sign you in with that password until you've set up an account with them. He was very confused - as was I after awhile, because I didn't actually know how to explain that your login is individual on every website (unless it's a google-related website, but let's not go there) and you have to set it up for each new site. (This gentleman also told me that the hand-eye coordination of a computer was difficult for him, and he didn't know how to make it all work together. He hasn't had a lot of experience, clearly, but it was jarring all the same.)
4. I was trying to figure out how to help a lady get into her hotmail account, but hotmail didn't recognize her username. At that point, all I could do was explain to her that ther was no way for me to recover her password if I didn't have her username. There is no list of usernames for you to peruse to see what yours is. Because there are millions and millions of usernames.
5. Yesterday, I taught a man how to move something up a line - using the Backspace key. He said, "Ah! I learned something new today!" 

It's fascinating to try to disconnect myself from what I feel is common knowledge and try to approach problems from their perspective. Everything is like a foreign language to them, and they're trying to use a tool they aren't familiar with to do something they don't actually understand the theory behind. It's like helping my parents with my computer, except that from years of living with their kids and from having jobs that involve computers my parents have picked up things like what programs will take them to the internet and what a word processor is. (I tried to explain word to a woman in her 80s the other day. I told her it was like using a typewriter except you could edit your work without retyping everything.)

Public libraries, you are a brave new world. 

Festival of Ghost Stories

Friday night, I went to the library's Festival of Ghost Stories. It was a collaboration event, so the library had teamed with Bloomington City Parks and the Storytellers Guild. The night included creepy tales about ghost-summoning, one great babysitter story (why is babysitting so scary??) and a really crazy story about a childhood cuddle toy that wouldn't go away. It was fun sitting out on the grass drinking cider, and even though the stories weren't terrifying, it was still a lot of fun to watch great programming at work.

One of the things I really like about this program is that it's been a long-established tradition in the community. People expect it to happen. They expect K from AV to get up with his guitar and sing murder ballads. They come ready to accept the silly stories and the occasional creep-fests about rotting corpses. I like the idea of certain programs that make themselves more essential to the community, and I think this is something that at least some families plan around for their Halloween entertainment.

Keep the Customer Satisfied

I've worked a lot in customer service professions, and customer satisfaction is one of my goals as a librarian (even if the terminology becomes something more like "patron" or "client.")
Today a sweet middle-aged lady came in looking for a book called Getting in Touch With Your Inner Bitch. We didn't have it. I offered to put in a request for purchase for her, but after talking to her for a minute, it became apparent that what she wanted was not that particular book so much as something fun to read with her sister, who was coming in from out of town. I did a quick keyword search for "assertiveness" and then scanned the list for other titles that looked fun (discovering quickly that the only ones that sounded like fun had the word "bitch" in the title, and by the way, it's awkward to say that word over and over from the reference desk) and found one that was checked out. I gave her the call number and she headed to check out, but at the last minute I saw another title that was in. I ran over to circulation, told her the title, and took her back to the shelf, telling her that other books near that one might also be fun. About 10 minutes later, I saw her leaving the library with a stack of books she hadn't had before. I hope she and her sister have fun reconnecting.

A few minutes later, a man came in hoping for a complete list of colleges in Indiana - specifically to the person they would contact for a job. "I know that's a big request," he said, "but a good reference librarian can find anything, right?" Right. I did a search for HR Departments at Indiana Universities, and soon I had a list of universities with links to their HR pages. "Oh, you're good," the man said. "How many times a day do people tell you that?"

Well sir, not nearly often enough. Clearly. (Have I mentioned that I love this job?)

Genealogy Class 101

Yesterday, after a couple of busy hours at the desk, I attended C's Genealogy Basics class. I've always been fascinated by the methods here, and by the demographics of the people who get into it. It's something that happens a lot in my home town (where we're 15 minutes from a huge genealogy library), and I figure that if I ever end up near home, I will probably end up needing to know about the resources (most of which also come out of my home state).

Unfortunately, the beautiful fall afternoon and the scarcity of parking cut into our class size. Seven would-be genealogists had signed up, but only one showed up. C gave her a basic overview of the resources, and then we spent some time trying to find her family in the Census. Note to future librarian self: most of the 1890 census is missing because it was destroyed in a fire, so if the information you need is in there, you might be out of luck unless you can find the information in veteran records or in the state census. Tricky.

After our student left, C talked to me about the difficulties of hosting a program, particularly free programs. She said that one program was so time consuming to prepare and so consistently under-attended (despite having full registration) that they started charging for registration and then gave the money back to the patrons if they came. She said most people's theory is that if something is free, it will always be offered again, so it doesn't matter if they skip it without telling anyone.

Another interesting tidbit I picked up while helping C clean up: a county official had been pressuring her for a long time to set up a class about county records. He wanted her to create flyers, advertise in the paper, tell reporters about it. C was frustrated because he could have easily reserved a room himself and held the meeting on his own time, but he didn't seem to want to - then she realized that he had been pressuring her to get it in before November - election day. "It's just so transparent," she said. "And it's not like I can turn him down, because we get funds from that and need to have a good relationship with him. But I just feel so dirty! They don't tell you about this stuff in library school!"

Indeed, they don't. The politics of libraries are complicated, especially in public libraries where we're so dependent on funds from the government. It was certainly an interesting, informative night.

Reader's Advisory: Horror

Today I attended the monthly Reader's Advisory meeting for the library. Each month, they choose a genre and everyone has to read a book in that genre. One librarian presents materials about how to serve the readers of this particular genre and what the librarian should know about the features of the genre, and then everyone gets to talk about their books (which is awesome and makes me feel like I'm an English major again.)

This meeting started with a presentation by P, one of the head tech guys. He had recently reconfigured the library's "Author Alert" system so that most of it is online. Until now, librarians have called people on the author alert list, manually placed holds, and generally had to spend a lot of time. The hope is this new system will be less expensive and more efficient. Patrons can create their own Author Alert list and specify what kinds of materials they want (Large Print, Audiobook, etc.) and then the system searches for new titles every day and sends either an email or a text message to the patron whenever new materials are available from his or her favorite author. It doesn't seem like a perfect system, but it's certainly a step up from they way they have been doing it, with paper Author Alert forms and lots of man-hours. Check it out here (because you  might never find it browsing the website - it's a little buried right now): http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/fiction/author_alert.html.

From there we moved into the discussion of the Horror genre by our resident Horror expert, E. (She also brought Halloween cupcakes, which endeared her to me greatly.) E had a powerpoint and detailed handouts for everyone, with sample authors, notable feature and appeal factors for each subgenre of horror. She told us about everything from haunted houses/ghosts, vampire and werewolf novels, psychological horror, and splatterpunk. (I'll probably be steering clear of splatterpunk.) The most important thing to remember when doing RA for Horror is the level of violence, gore, sex, and general terror in the book. It's also one of the harder things to judge unless you have experience with the novel, because NoveList isn't always very specific about what the novel contains. Some people like a little chill up their spine and some people like something that's a knock-down, drag-out gore fest, and you really don't want to give people from one category something meant for someone in the other. E did mention a few other resources that could be helpful for getting more specific content information about books, some websites and some books.

The best part was just sitting around as librarians and talking about the books we'd read - what we liked about them, what we didn't like, what kind of patron might like them. I love the way this library tries to stay fresh and explore new ways to better serve the patrons.

Moyer, M. (2009). Talking with Gary Giddins. Library Journal, 134(16), 55. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database. 

This article from Library Journal was actually an interview with a leading scholar in jazz music. The librarian was discussing what artists are essential for every library to own in their jazz collection, both old and new, and what the place of public libraries is for introducing people to jazz music. I was reading the article to help me as I prepare to start a collection evaluation project at MCPL, but one of the most interesting answers for me was "With libraries, it's great to know the music is there. But how does the library foster it?" Giddens argued that unless the library brought in speakers, made displays, etc., having jazz in the collection is just storage.

The rest of the article was very informative for the project purposes - a great list of essential artists, lesser-known artists, and new artists. Giddens's list will become part of my evaluation list, and includes Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and others.