TwentySevenLetters / B

Marian the Librarian in Kansas is my new hero.

Two down, 15 to go

Last night was my second program, and this one was also a success. It was the poetry workshop, which is also the first program that I planned on my own. Okay, I didn’t exactly plan the content on my own, but it was a program for which I wasn’t just handed a phone number and told “set this up.”

Going into the workshop, we had seven teens signed up for it. I consider it a win that we had seven kids (and three parents!) show up. They weren’t the same seven, but I’m in no position to be fussy. Lesson: sign-ups just don’t work. Astute readers know I learned this lesson at the last program, but with only two weeks between them, it was too late to change tactics this time. The audience was a little younger than I’d anticipated, mostly ranging from 12 to 16, with the two most active participants being one of the twelve-year-olds and one of the 16-year-olds, both of whom I’d be happy to have in another poetry discussion because they seemed so excited by the topic.

One of the participants was an eight-year-old, who had argued fiercely with her father the night before: “Dad! It says you have to be TWELVE. I’m EIGHT YEARS OLD.” She came with her mom after all, and listened and took notes in the discussion of the mechanics of poetry, but was very shy about reading her work from the writing exercises. She’s upstairs in the children’s room most of the time, and is generally bubbly, confident, and talkative. But in the workshop, surrounded by kids at least four years older than she, she was timid, overwhelmed, and nearly silent. She tried to conquer her shyness at the very end and read her poem, but she seemed on the verge of tears the whole time. I felt bad that she was so uncomfortable, but I’m having trouble working up a good head of guilt, since the workshop was advertised for teens 12 and up.

Anyway, the workshop was run by Steven Withrow, because if you can’t exploit your friends to run your library programs, who can you exploit? He did an excellent job keeping the discussion moving for all ages, which was impressive with the age spread. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to do much of the workshopping because not everyone had brought something, and again because of the age spread, very few people would have gotten much out of the ensuing discussion. Now we know things for next time, like restricting it to people actually in the demographic, splitting the workshop into two sessions (a poetry discussion and an actual workshop), and sign-ups still don’t work. But we also learned that it's fun and we'd both like to run this again.

Regardless, I think it went pretty well, and I’d be happy to do this again sometime. Some of the parents (and the teens) asked if we’d be doing it again, and I’d hate to disappoint my public.

Two successful programs down, with fifteen more in the works before September. (I wish I were kidding… we have a very ambitious Teen Summer Reading Program planned.)

Advise me!

When I was in library school, I learned how to answer reference questions, catalog things, structure programs, and even manage groups of people. One thing that we never covered in any great depth was Readers’ Advisory: how to find books people will like. It never occurred to me then that this sort of thing would be difficult. I mean, really: how hard is it to pick a book someone should read?

Now that I’m out of school and in a Real Library, I’ve learned: it can be next to impossible to pick a book someone will like. If someone had asked me who would be more difficult, someone with limited interests or someone who will read anything, I would have said that the limited interest would be harder to satisfy—and I would have been wrong. The other surprise for me is how hard it is to suggest books for the voracious readers: they’ve read nearly every book we own, and they want something new and different and somehow still the same. Answers to “what are the last three books you read that you really liked a lot?” are all over the map in terms of genre and style, or (better yet) are all on one topic that the kid is now completely bored with. Without a definite starting point, all we can do is grope around at random and hope to find something worthwhile.

There’s a 10-year-old girl who comes in sometimes, asking us to recommend a book. I want to find this kid totally annoying, but I can’t, because she’s the kid I’m sure I was and I adore her, though she makes me crazy sometimes. She likes funny books best, but she reads just about anything she can get her hands on. The last time, every book I suggested was met with “yes, I loved that book!” and “that’s one of my favorites!” and “I’ve read everything by that author; isn’t he wonderful?” and “I’d love something that was just like that book, because it’s exactly what I like!” On the one hand, I’m happy that the books I expected she’d like, she enjoyed tremendously. (There were a couple of long shots that I suggested that were met with a polite “it was a good book, but not to my liking, thank you.”) On the other hand, it’s really frustrating to spend fifteen or twenty minutes with a patron and not find anything she hasn’t already read that she would still like.

I think part of the difficulty with readers’ advisory comes in that fiction is arranged alphabetically by author, whereas non-fiction is arranged by topic. There are far more serendipitous browsing opportunities in the non-fiction collection. In the fiction collection, history cozies up to survival/adventure on one side and contemporary realism on the other—and that’s just Gary Paulsen’s stretch of shelf. Theoretically, readers’ advisory shouldn’t be that much different from a reference question—just pick a topic and append “—juvenile fiction” to the end of the subject search. Good readers’ advisory, though, requires an in-depth knowledge of the collection, authors, styles, popularity, tastes, and reading levels, and if you don’t get it right, the kid is dissatisfied and you feel useless and dumb.

I wish someone in school would have told me that the hardest question I’d ever get would be “I love to read absolutely everything, so can you recommend something good for me?”. But even if someone had mentioned it, I probably wouldn’t have believed them. I mean, really: how hard is it to pick a book someone should read?

Once you’ve been plasticized…

The Fall 2004 issue of Emerson’s graduate literary journal Redivider features a lengthy interview with Nancy Pearl, the librarian, author, and action-figure model who believes that “what librarians today need to do is to just be proud to be a librarian because it’s the best profession in the world.” (I agree.)

The interview is wonderful overall, but my favorite part is this comment:

My (brief) life as an action figure has generally been good—the only problem seems to be that now I don’t quite know what to aspire to next—after you’ve been plasticized, what worlds are left to conquer?

Reminder

Today is National Library Workers' Day. If you encounter a library worker today, show your appreciation!

Good Times

It’s been a really good couple of days.

Last night’s program went fabulously, and I got some extra feedback today telling me it went well. And the presenter said he’d love to come back in the fall to do it again. (For free!) My boss was impressed at the turnout, and decided it’s because I sent flyers hither and yon.

The booklists I created a couple of weeks ago are getting some attention. My boss showed them to her boss, who sent me a very nice email saying how great they were and, by extension, how great I am. The marketing person who turned my booklists into pretty handouts emailed me (and copied my boss, her boss, the head of marketing, and the head of HR) this morning to tell me that they’d also posted them on the web, cross-listing them from the Booklovers’ Corner, Book Resources, and Teen Pages.

Said marketing person has also solicited some input on what would make the neglected, content-light Teen Pages more interesting, more useful, and gave me the list of ideas that have come up in marketing meetings. She said lots of the ideas (blogging, live summer reading chats) were shot down for lack of interest, but they’re some of the same ideas I’d asked about a few months ago—and was told the marketing department would never go for! So I might be taking on a couple of extra content-creation tasks, and I think I may have been drafted onto the Web Betterment Task Force. (No, that is NOT an official title.)

And when I checked my mailbox today, I found a box of my very own business cards.

It’s been a happy day.

My First Success!

Tonight was my very first program, and it seems to have been a rousing success. The program was on the college admissions process, and was run by a former admissions officer at a fairly competitive school. He and I spoke on the phone, and I spoke to another library who had had him in (and spoke highly of him), and we set the whole thing up for April 11. Which seemed a million years away when I set it up.

Along the way, he sent me some information about the content of his program—student profiles, effective essays, and explanations of how admissions officers evaluate and rate applications. Overall, it sounded like a very interesting, worthwhile program for the college-bound teens in the area.

I forwarded the information to our marketing department, who made up an awesome flyer for us. I sent copies to four branches and all the area high schools. And up until Friday morning, we had exactly one name on the sign-up sheet.

One.

But it seems that the sign-up thing just didn’t work out, because a head count at the program showed that we actually had more like 15 people—six or seven teens and the rest parents and/or returning students. The few who came all the way upstairs afterward said it was informative and helpful (if a little nerve-wracking, says one high school junior who is doing her college applications now, in preparation for spending her senior year in Germany). The instructor said it went well, too, which is good.

So, the lesson here is that asking people to sign up doesn’t work. What this means for the future is that the poetry workshop at the end of the month might be better attended than it currently looks to be, BUT the drop-in folks won’t get all the information, which will make the program run less smoothly than it otherwise should. This makes me nervous, especially on behalf of the instructor, who I hope will forgive me for the poor sign-up rate.

But my first program surprised me in its success, so there’s no reason to believe the second one won’t, right?

National Library Week

It's National Library Week! Google even has a special logo today (I don't know if this will be up all week or not; if it's not there, check the holiday logos section). The extent of my library's celebration will be to drop the price of their new tote bags from $10 to $8. But hey, it's something.

Thursday will be National Library Workers Day. So when Thursday rolls around, hug a librarian! (It would be helpful if you knew them, or asked permission first. I'd hate for the appreciation to land someone with an assault charge.)

Notice My Collection!

The way this library is laid out, the children’s room (where I work alone at night) is upstairs, and the YA section (where I’m supposed to spend my time when teens are there—which is at night) is downstairs. Obviously, I can’t be in two places at once, so most of my time is actually spent upstairs in the children’s room. This means that I’m something of a phantom in the teen section: new books are ordered, booklists and flyers mysteriously appear, face-out displays change almost daily.

Since I hadn’t had a chance to go down on Monday and take a look during my shift, I wandered through after we’d closed. I was a bit bothered to find it such a disaster, with books scattered all over the place. The table was covered in books that had just been pulled off the shelf and left out. The display shelves had been stripped bare. And it was all left in a big mess.

But it was almost all graphic novels. The big piles on the table were all comics, some from the shelf and some from the display, but nearly every book was something from the fledgling GN collection. Someone—a couple of people, more likely—had been looking at what we had. A Cartoon History of the Universe. Sandwalk Adventures. Understanding Comics. A Few Perfect Hours. The collection sparked some interest, and I’m very happy about that. (Even if they did leave it a mess.)

Because I was lazy and didn’t feel like shelving it properly, I put most of it on the face-out shelves and went home. By the time I went downstairs on Tuesday (around 3:30 or 4 PM), most of it was gone. I replenished it with some of the inexplicable shelf-sitters (Astro City is one); we’ll see what happens.

I honestly have no idea what makes some titles circulate better than others. Sometimes it’s name recognition (Superman : True Brit has gone out twice since we got it mid-February), sometimes it’s an eye-catching cover (Toon Art is also in its second circ, with a renewal), sometimes it’s a mystery (Sgt. Frog has gone out four times since December). But even more than Sgt. Frog’s popularity, I’m baffled by some of the shelf-sitters. The Dark Knight Returns. Ghost World. Maus. Sandman : Preludes and Nocturnes.

Sandman is particularly interesting in that two other libraries in the system have it: from one, it circulated 14 times in just under a year and then was lost. From the other, it went out 7 times in 13 months. We’ve owned it for about two months now. After 3 weeks of sitting, it was requested by someone at another library, and we haven’t seen it since. (For the mathematicians in the crowd, yes, it’s now two weeks overdue, besides.) But there’s an anthology called Gothic! that has also seen no activity—even with a prominent display spot—so I guess we just don't have a big goth crowd.

As a tangentially-related side note, Soulwind came in at the end of last week. I put it on the face-out shelving, because I love Soulwind and thought it deserved the spotlight. I walked about seven feet to the main GN shelf to pick some other new books to put out, and by the time I came back, someone had already taken Soulwind to the circ desk. Face-out shelving works.

Content!

Two more booklists have been added: Teen Realism and Teen Speculative Fiction. I made sure to sneak some graphic novels into both lists. An interesting read is an interesting read, right? We do have some graphic novels that belong on the lists that I didn’t bother put on there—but Superman doesn’t need the extra attention the way Astro City does. Which is a sad, sad thing indeed.

Programs coming soon, honest. The main hold-up has been… well, none of my programs have actually happened yet, though some have been planned, so I have no idea if they’ll work or not. But I’ll post something there soon. Really!

The Fix-It Gene

I spent Easter weekend down at my parents’. It was good to see my folks again—between my spiffy new job and my every-other-Sunday job, Easter weekend was my first and last full weekend off between Christmas and Fourth of July.

While I was there, I asked my dad if he knew whether or not hardware stores sold spare lamp switches, those little turny-knobs that you spin to put the light on, because the one on our fluorescent lamp broke. He said he wasn’t sure, but he had a drawer of them down in the workshop, switches he’s harvested from other electronics. “Do you know what size the knob is, exactly?” he asked, pawing through at least 50 options. “Did you bring it with you?” Well, no, I hadn’t, because Alexander was at home, and the knob was just broken enough to make it annoying to turn the lamp on, not impossible. And I’d really asked just on a whim. But Grandpa has the same lamp, so if Dad remembers what that switch looks like, we’re in business.

Dad didn’t remember. But he called Grandpa and explained the situation, and we took a ride over with the drawer of options in my lap. We found a couple that fitted perfectly (hooray!) and invited Grandpa to dinner.

And that is a very long lead-in to what I was planning to talk about. On the way back from Grandpa’s, Dad and I talked about the Fix-It Gene—how some people want to fix something that breaks and others want to replace it, no matter how easy and logical a fix it is. I, obviously, am a Fix-It person, as is my dad. I finally confessed, 15 years after the crime(s), about the origin of all the broken toys, radios, assorted gadgets I’d brought downstairs to the workshop, asking if Dad could fix them. (The origin: usually, I’d taken it apart and couldn’t make it work again after putting it back together.)

I’m still this way. I like to take things apart and see what’s inside them. I like to fix things. I like looking at how pieces fit together and how they work in sequence. (This makes me good at things like Tetris, jigsaw puzzles, and long-term strategy games like chess, backgammon, or Chinese checkers.) When I see a mechanical object (having given up on electronics; I will never be able to look at a circuit board and understand what it’s doing), I need to know what makes it run. (Aside: a mechanical oven timer has a tightly-coiled piece of metal inside it. Do not remove this from the inside of the timer. You will not be able to coil it tightly enough to replace it, and you will need to buy a new timer.) If there are pieces around from other projects, I wonder what I can build out of them. I Trick-or-Treated one Halloween as a car that Dad helped me build, with real working headlights.

My Fix-It Gene is, I think, related to my Documentary Nerd Gene, and it all relates to a constant need for information. As a kid, I used that set of encyclopedias on the living bookcase for way more than just homework. I can trot out all sorts of Fun Facts at parties (making me quite popular, I assure you) and educate people on how common everyday objects work (see also: mechanical oven timers.) I watch spelling bees on DVDs borrowed from the library.

I think this is why I like working in the library so much. Every day I get to find out something new. Every day I get to diagnose a problem and find information to fix it. (Someone needs to know about icon worship! How can I solve this?) When a kid checks out a book on robots, I watch the shelving carts until it comes back and I can read it. Today I read Tomie de Paola’s The Popcorn Book after someone returned it, and learned all about one of my current favorite snack foods, everything from corn varieties to cooking methods.

This is a very long post saying exactly what I said a few days ago: I love my job. But this time, I can blame it all on my parents. Who, I’m reasonably sure, knew that I took all that stuff apart.