I think the administration of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library have a thing or two to learn about staff motivation, unless they want to motivate the staff to loathe the administration and quit en masse. I’m not sure what else one could make of a survey handed out to employees at the beginning of the library’s staff development day. Via LIS News, here’s a link that reproduces the survey, on official letterhead and everything. Here’s the survey: If your position were to be potentially targeted for (imminent) layoff, how would you like to be notified: 1. Would you want to know ahead of time? (circle one) Yes  No 2. How would you prefer to be notified? (circle one) a. E-mail b. Letter c. Telephone call d. Group meeting I’m trying to imagine myself in the place of the person who wrote this survey, but it isn’t easy. I certainly don’t think I could have written a sentence like the first one. There are so many qualifications to the sentence - the ...
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I'm going ignored "Banned" Books Week this year. The ALA has worn me down with their inanities, so you'll just have to read whatever I've written in the past. Until the ALA is able to distinguish the "freedom to read" from, say, handing porn books to children, then their arguments can't be taken seriously by intelligent people. If you read the ALA propaganda, it's clear they can't make that distinction, hence this intelligent person has decided to stop arguing with them. You can't argue with unreasonable ideologues, whether they come from the ALA or or the Communist Party or the Tea Party. So let's get back to videos! There has been so much furor over that guest post on the Webtamer’s blog a couple of weeks ago, where a librarian seemed to believe her library’s limited budget for DVDs made it okay to use Netflix despite violating its terms of service. Why anyone pays attention to that blog I'll never know? Meredith Farkas obviously reads it, and didn’t like the hypocrisy ...
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Last time I wrote about a depressing video. This time I’m writing about a depressing statistic. According to this LJ article, despite constituting only 7.6% of “total adult holdings,” DVDs accounted for almost 60% of the circulation of the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library. Sprucing up your DVD collection will do wonders for circulation, and many librarians have a naive faith that whatever the library does is right as long as circulation stats don’t fall. To her credit, the assistant director of the library doesn’t seem to be one of these librarians. To Assistant Director Helen Rigdon, the results represent a double-edged sword. "While this increase in numbers is good for circulation, we worry about just being thought of as a ‘video store,'" she told LJ. That should be worrying, because as everyone knows, video stores are a dying industry. Every public library I’ve ever used has had hordes of people in the video section while the book stacks were mostly ...
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Libraries Will Survive is the most depressing video I have ever seen, and in so many ways. In case you don’t want to torture yourself watching it, I’ve fallen on that grenade for you. In the “long version,” we see a busy librarian (or library worker of some sort) running around the library helping out various freaks as best she can, even though budget cuts have eliminated many of the computers and equipment she needs to do her job. The freaks, with their serious “information needs,” are unable to play great video games or watch Star Trek. It’s all very sad for them. The narrative portion segues into a montage of librarians “dancing” to the tune “I Will Survive,” while singing alternate lyrics about how libraries have missions to uphold and how pretty manga displays are. And why is this depressing? Some people might be depressed by the consequences of slashed library budgets, but since everyone in the video seems cheerful enough over the fact, I won’t let ...
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Recently, I read an exchange between librarians in which one librarian argued that MLS-holding librarians should be doing different work than paraprofessionals, and that to check out books or other rather simple tasks often left to high school graduates was inappropriate for professionals, or something along those lines. Another librarian accused the first librarian of elitism. You know it’s a sad day for the elites when a librarian has wandered into their midst. We often hear things like, “I didn’t get an MLS so I could [insert menial task].” And it’s true every time. Had I wanted to spend my life shelving books or staffing a circulation desk or punching a clock at break time, I would certainly not have gone to library school. The professional master’s degree should mean something, but it’s an open question as to whether it actually does mean anything. What should it mean? It should mean that the professional does work of a higher caliber than the ...
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Obviously I wasn't paying enough attention last week, because I missed this gem from the ALA in response to the proposed (and later canceled) Koran burning by “Pastor” Terry Jones to commemorate 9/11. In response,  ALA staff were planning to stand outside ALA headquarters reading from the Koran. Supposedly, “Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning,” and we know how the ALA hates the “banning” of widely available books. I don’t understand this response at all, just as I don’t understand the incessant media coverage of the threats of some ignorant cracker in Florida, President Obama’s dignifying said cracker with a statement, or the violent protests of nitwits in Afghanistan over something that a) was certainly not sponsored by “America,” and b) didn’t even happen. The ALA piece criticized the “mind-boggling logic behind Jones’s plan,” but the logic isn’t that mind-boggling, unless you don't have much of a mind. It’s certainly less ...
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