JP Porcaro for ALA President

My fellow librarians,

Have you voted in the ALA Elections yet? Well, you officially have until 11:59pm tonight (CDT, of course, because the ALA has its headquarters in Chicago) if you haven't. Be sure to vote- you pay more than enough for the privilege of belonging to our esteemed professional organization, so it would be a shame if you didn't exercise your right to vote as an official dues-paying ALA Member. Despite making it easy to do so online, only 20% of the ALA Membership actually vote, so for the love of Ranganathan, take some time out of your Friday, read up on the candidates in your section, and make your voice heard!

Also, there's something special going on this election season. If you're not aware of this fact already, there are four candidates running for ALA President, one of whom is the first Millennial ever to run for the office: his name is JP Porcaro, and even if you don't know him you probably know of him. One of ALA's Emerging Leaders in 2010 and named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2012, JP was also one of the founding members of the ALA Think Tank, a Facebook community with over 12,000 members which has been described as "social media's largest space for librarians." He is the Librarian for Acquisitions and Technological Discovery at the New Jersey City University Guarini Library.

I met JP when I was feeling particularly disillusioned about my career and my involvement with ALA as a whole. Although my employer at the time didn't actively discourage participation in ALA, like many large academic library systems they were always more inwardly-focused or more concerned with what was going on in our immediate peer group instead, so they didn't exactly encourage me to get more involved either.

Also, there was a certain amount of cynicism among our administrators about the value of ALA- in retrospect, I think this was more a function of where these librarians were in their own careers and not an objective assessment on their part of the potential energy and enthusiasm their entry-level librarians could find by meeting and interacting with other like-minded librarians in a conference setting...  but that's a screed for another day.

So let's just say that I was feeling somewhat adrift when I attended the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston back in 2010. That's when I stumbled upon JP while he was doing publicity for 8 Bit Library at the LITA Happy Hour. 8 Bit Library was the brainchild of JP and Justin Hoenke, and I found myself pulled in immediately to help explore the intersection of gaming and librarians. JP and I went to PAX East that Spring as members of the press, and that's when I started to get to know him as a person and not just the legend which always seems to precede him.

JP is always working overtime to bring his unique energy into whatever it is he is doing at the moment. I've heard him speak recently at the Connecticut Library Association Conference about emotional contagion as a key component of leadership, and I think he's absolutely spot-on in that respect. Here I was, a jaded young librarian with a tendency towards introversion when left to my own devices, suddenly finding myself wanting to dive back into my profession headfirst.

My relationship with ALA changed fundamentally as a result of meeting JP. Instead of being about libraries, ALA became about librarians (i.e., about people and not things), about making connections and sharing enthusiasm. While I became more active along my own professional track, I also went out of my way and out of my comfort zone to become more active with the organization as a whole, volunteering whenever possible- such as this last Midwinter in Chicago, when I co-hosted Library Camp for Monday conference-goers to decompress and reflect.

(And yes, I also did some stumping for JP's campaign).

I'm voting for JP not because of the hype, but because he made me a better librarian. I believe that he can make the ALA a better organization as well- one that is more inclusive, more passionate and engaged with the issues that really matter to our profession, and (dare I say it?) more fun. I encourage you to make the same choice, but even if you don't, I encourage you to vote nevertheless. Help us get the organization we actually want, and not the one that is handed to us by default through apathy and inaction. And thanks for listening!

Me and JP at the 2015 Connecticut Library Association Conference 

Bibliophile

Amid the backdrop of interstellar war, a librarian at the edge of the galaxy must make a decision which will determine the course of the rest of his life. "Bibliophile" is a 11,000-word short story and the first installment in a series of library-themed science fiction called L is for Librarian. It's available for sale now in the following formats:

Amazon Kindle Edition
Amazon Print Edition (via Createspace)

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And if you do like it, please consider leaving a review!

Volume 2 of L is for Librarian is tentatively titled "Heist," and should be available by the end of February.

Make It Happen 2012: Day 29

One of the things that I resolved to do as part of Make It Happen 2012 was to pay closer attention to the business side of my writing. While I always seem able to find the time to eke out a few words here and there on a new project, when it comes to editing, polishing, submitting, or self-publishing my works online I tend to procrastinate like there's no tomorrow. Today however I took advantage of a lazy Sunday afternoon to finally get my entry for this year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest ready for submission. Although I had entered the 2010 competition (with my fantasy novel Confessions of a Gourmand (/shamelessplug)) and actually made it to the second round, for various reasons I ended up missing the deadline for last year's contest and regretted it terribly for not having given it another try.

Well, I'm back this year with a new entry-- another fantasy novel called The Librarian's Tale. However I fare this time, I will be sure to release the book as a Kindle edition, just as I did with Confessions, but in the meanwhile wish me luck!

(I've also been working on something else today, but I'm saving that announcement for tomorrow for reasons which I hope will become obvious. Let's call it the best kind of procrastination...)

The Great Librarian Massacre (and Other Episodes in Harvard Cultural History)*

If you are a librarian and you have access to the Internet, then you've probably already heard that Harvard fired all of its library staff yesterday.

Well, sort of. By which I mean: not really. Which is to say that no one was fired at all, in fact.

Nevertheless I have to say that we Harvard library folk were by and large blindsided when we went to one of three "Town Hall Meetings" yesterday for an update about the Library Transition, as many of us had been cautioned not to expect any substantive news until at least next month. Imagine our surprise then when after a few brief introductory remarks our Senior Associate Provost and Executive Director began outlining some of key points of what's being called the "Implementation Phase" of what's now been a three-year reorganization.

I was in attendance and livetweeting at the first of the three meetings, but I can confirm through other colleagues who Tweeted from the second and third showings that even though we have not been fired or laid off, that the following things were announced:

1. Pending approval of the Implementation Plan by Harvard's President, an overall reduction in library staff is guaranteed- of the jobs that remain, "There will certainly be new roles, requiring new skills" (direct quote)

2. Next month library staff will be informed by local library directors or HR whether or not their jobs as considered to be "local" or part of "shared services"

3. The final disposition of local library staff is a matter for the deans and their respective school budgets

4. Library staff falling into the category of Shared Services will either be assigned to new positions or required to apply for them anew in some informal or formal capacity, with preference going to existing Harvard Library staff

5. The Harvard Library will be offering some kind of voluntary retirement staff reduction incentive,but has not ruled out as well as involuntary retirement staff reductions to meet its strategic goals (edited x2)

6. All library staff have been encouraged but not required to create and submit an Employee Profile, which is meant to highlight one's individual strengths and accomplishments and "inject oneself into the process" (direct quote)

Colleagues, please feel free to correct me if I misreported any of the above!

Anything else at this point is mere speculation. Seeing that President Faust has yet even to approve the Library Transition's plan, even what I've reported above is by no means carved in stone yet. So be careful what you read on the Internet...

That being said, I don't think I'm the only librarian at Harvard who feels that however well-intentioned yesterday's Town Hall Meetings were envisioned to be, the overall effect has been the exact opposite of whatever our Library Transition team was hoping to achieve. The most frustrating aspect by far of the meetings was the lack of concrete answers to any of the natural follow-up questions one would anticipate given the situation. While I understand that what's coming down the pike next month is potentially so big that they felt they needed this meeting to try and prepare us for it, but the manner in which they did it only served to ratchet up the level of anxiety among the attendees.

My primary concern right now, however, is not for my own neck but that of my support staff, who have worked in this office for an average of ten years or more each. After having endured the departure of two coworkers- one in 2010, the other last Fall- and taking on their workloads to ensure that our services to our patrons and other libraries remained unaffected, they are now frightened that even in a shop cut to the bone there is no guarantee that they'll be kept on in the new University-wide shared services. I have heard that the HUCTW has been working with the Library Transition team, and that the union has assured workers that changes such as the ones currently being proposed must be done through "union-management consultation," but that hasn't prevented a gallows-like pall from settling over my office nonetheless.

{EDIT: In a letter to its members, the HUCTW confirmed that it had not in fact been alerted about potential layoffs by Harvard Library administrators, nor had it been informed about the need for library staff to fill out Employee Profiles and possibly re-apply for changed positions within the new University Library structure. Needless to say, this is extremely disappointing news, and I hope that from this point forward the union is appropriately consulted in good faith about any changes on the table.)

So while a lot of what's been said on the Internet has bordered on hysteria, I hope you'll at least forgive those of us Twittering from the epicenter of yesterday's announcements for our gut reactions to the endgame of a very long and painful reorganization process. For a more objective take on the whole brouhaha, Chris Bourg- aka The Feral Librarian- an associate librarian at Stanford University, did some serious yeoman's work in teasing fact from fiction during yesterday's social media shitstorm. I highly recommend her blog post as the best third-party observer to what's going on here in the Harvard Library.

The tl;dr? We're not dead quite yet, though this feels an awful lot like we're walking the Green Mile (or would that be the Crimson Mile?). I promise to keep all y'all informed as to how events proceed, but in the meantime I hope our leadership takes a good hard look at how poorly the day went yesterday and plans accordingly for what will no doubt be even more charged and contentious Town Hall Meetings next month if/when the Library Transition plan is approved. I still cling to a shred of optimism that we can use this reorganization to create something special, but right now I'm feeling like I'm living one Office Space cliche after another.

* Apologies to Robert Darnton, who, ironically enough, was Director of the Harvard University Libraries until last year and who continues to serve on the Library Transition board.

Make It Happen 2012: Day 10

"I'm going to ask you for a favor, but just so you know I'm not expecting you to say yes."

These are my favorite moments as a librarian, when I get to snatch a Yes out of the jaws of No. I love being the person who can make things happen, though I wonder what it says about a workplace when people expect to be disappointed by their colleagues.

Are we too busy? Too siloed? Too worried about setting the bar of expectations too high?

I don't know, but I've never been comfortable with letting people down- especially when I've been given explicit permission to do so.

Make It Happen 2012: Day 5

Professional development is always a tricky prospect, because to a very large extent the opportunities are defined more by external factors than internal motivation. That being said, even during these times of declining library budgets I've been able to attend a few more conferences than I otherwise would have been allowed to go to by presenting instead of simply attending. My presentation about international interlibrary loan at the IDS Conference in Oswego, New York in the Summer of 2010 garnered a couple of additional invitations from impressed attendees, and I was just informed that my joint proposal with a colleague to present about our electronic document delivery service (aka Scan & Deliver) was accepted for the 2012 ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach.

What I've really missed, however, are the ALA Conferences, which have been more or less off the table for a few years due to reduced travel funds. This was a bitter pill for me to swallow at first, especially as I was only just getting my feet wet as a budding library professional with committee work when the hammer came down. Fortunately Boston comes up on the Midwinter circuit frequently enough that I've been able to attend two of the January meetings, but aside from one summer in Anaheim (2008) I haven't been able to attend the Annual Conference since then. Now that my wife is finishing her Masters in Library Science this June, however, I would really like her to experience the full library conference experience- the fact that Annual will be returning to Anaheim this year means that we could even bring our daughter and make a Disneyland vacation of the long weekend while we were at it.

So I put in for the travel funds today, emboldened by the news that due to some recent departures we might actually have enough professional development money to go around. Even if I don't end up getting approved, I suspect that my wife and I will find a way to Make It Happen anyway, because 2012 is shaping up to be that kind of year. Just the same, I'm hoping for good news. And who knows? Maybe ALA will become a regular gig again, and I'll be able to pick up where I'd left off with my committee participation. Now that's optimism!

A pretty good explanation (I hope!)

Okay, so my last post of 2011 was on October 31. Why so much radio silence?

Although I didn't end up doing NaNoWriMo, I was inspired nevertheless to kickstart my creative writing again. Having just finished reading Michael A. Burstein's excellent sci-fi anthology I Remember the Future, I decided to return to science fiction myself and wrote "Bibliophile," an 11,000-word short story about a librarian at the edge of the galaxy.

I wasn't even a few hundred words into the effort when it suddenly hit me- why not write a whole collection of sci-fi shorts where librarians are the central characters? As an homage to Ray Bradbury, I'm going to name this anthology "L is for Librarian" (after Bradbury's own collections "R is for Rocket" and "S is for Space"). I'm already working on the next installment, and am busy brainstorming the stories after that.

The breakthrough for me on this particular project was that I realized that of the several science fiction short story ideas I had gestating, the common theme which ran through most of them was that they all somehow involved a library or librarian. I know, what are the odds? Even the ones which didn't feature a librarian, however, took on a new creative life once I started to re-imagine them with this new focus. Which just goes to demonstrate the inherent awesomeness of librarianship... I wonder if I manage to post a copy of "Bibliophile" and sell it before ALA Midwinter, would I be eligible for The Great Librarian Write-Out Award?

I promise to share the first story in L is for Librarian in the near future (getting my writing organized and for sale online is a big part of Make It Happen 2012), but in the meantime I thought I'd let you know what was keeping me away from my blog for all of these weeks. I hope you'll agree that it was a worthy cause, but I promise not to keep you in the dark about such matters for so long in the future!

After the sky

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible Giants
in the sky!

Maybe it's just the air travel that always makes me think of this song from Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods whenever I go to a library conference, but the more I reflect upon the phenomenon the more I'm convinced that there's something deeper going on. Having just returned from Interlending & Document Supply in Chicago, I thought I'd take a closer look at the lyrics and how they apply to the library conference experience.

When you're way up high
And you look below
At the world you left
And the things you know,
Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are.

Conferences provide both perspective and context. Simply being removed from one's everyday library environment is an important aspect of this shift in perception, and one of the main reasons why virtual conferences (as relatively cheaper and useful as they may be in certain circumstances) will never be able to replicate fully the experience of traveling and meeting your colleagues in person.

One of the more humbling aspects of Interlending & Document Supply was the international scope of the conference. Even working for a major university library I routinely felt that each speaker was opening up vistas that I could only dimly apprehend before, giving me a true sense of my place in the grand scheme of global research sharing.

When you're way up high
And you're own your own
In a world like none
That you've ever known,
Where the sky is lead
And the earth is stone,

You're free, to do
Whatever pleases you,
Exploring things you'd never dare
'Cause you don't care,

Being at a conference can be absolutely liberating. While you may have some colleagues there whom you look forward to seeing again, often you will find yourself in an unfamiliar setting (perhaps in a city you've never even been to before), speaking from the heart and sharing your thoughts and opinions with total strangers. As much as this social aspect of conference-going can be daunting, I always look forward to those serendipitous encounters that bring me in contact both with new colleagues or people I've actually been doing business with from afar for years.

In that light, it's funny and a little frightening how one's reputation can precede oneself among your peers. On the first day of ILDS I was standing in line talking with someone when suddenly the person in front of us whirled around and said: "Wait! You're Tom Bruno?" As it turned out, she was a colleague at a library that we have a lot of dealings with, many of them rather complicated and headache-inducing for both of us to resolve. Never in a million years did I think I'd meet the person at the other end of those ILL requests, but now that I have I feel a much closer kinship than I had before. I had worried that I was at the very best a "frenemy" in her list of resource sharing contacts, but by the conference's end we were fast friends.

When suddenly there's
A big tall terrible Giant at the door,
A big tall terrible lady Giant
sweeping the floor.
And she gives you food
And she gives you rest
And she draws you close
To her Giant breast,
And you know things now
that you never knew before,
Not till the sky.

I'm a fairly extroverted guy when I need to be. but the library conference experience always pushes my limits in how social I can be. After an exhilarating day of engaging presentations and thought-provoking conversations with fellow libraries during coffee breaks and over lunch it can be sorely tempting to crawl back to your hotel room and zone out in front of the Food Network for the rest of the evening, but a conference is charmed time. You only have it for so long, and once the opportunity is lost you will almost certainly regret having squandered it on something mundane that you could do any day of the week at home.

There are indeed giants in the sky, but the rock stars and superheroes of our profession are more accessible than you might think. After hours is the time when keynote speakers, distinguished presenters, and guests of honor mix and mingle with the rest of the conference attendees, and there's literally no telling who you may end up talking to after the first two glasses of wine. It's okay to be a gobsmacked fan- I must have amused the heck out of the folks of the Center for Research Libraries by telling them over and over again that visiting their library facility was on my "Bucket List" of things I wanted to see before I died- but it's not okay to be a wallflower.

Only just when you've made
A friend and all,
And you know she's big
But you don't feel small,
Someone bigger than her
Comes along the hall
To swallow you for lunch.

And you heart is lead
And your stomach stone
And you're really scared
Being all alone...

And it's then that you miss
All the things you've known
And the world you've left
And the little you own-

The fun is done.
You steal what you can and run.

No conference can last forever. At some point your brain will be filled to bursting with new ideas and you will be so emotionally tapped out that even the prospect of gourmet food and an open bar won't be inspiration enough to spend another night out on the town with your fellow librarians. It's funny how quickly this threshold can be reached at a good conference, which is perhaps all for the better that some of the best library conferences I've attended over the past few years have kept it short and sweet. No sooner have you accepted this caffeine and adrenaline powered whirlwind of ideas as your reality than it is time to leave- and suddenly you are rushing to make your travel connections because you pushed your conference agenda to the very envelope so as not to miss so much as a minute of the magic.

My flight out of Chicago on Wednesday night was sufficiently late that I was able to take that Bucket List tour of CRL I had always wanted, plus visit the brand spanking new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, where robotic cranes pluck items out of high-density storage bins and whisk them up to a glittering reading room under a glass dome. Between the charter bus scheduled to ferry us from library to library and the thought of having to ride two subway lines to get back to the airport- not to mention the prospect of having to run the TSA gauntlet once I got to O'Hare!- I was already sweating bullets as the conference was declared closed in the early afternoon; fortunately, however, my colleague at the University of Chicago helped me avoid a full-bore panic by arranging for an early tour of the robots at Mansueto and even drove some of us to the nearest L station (thanks again, David! You are a prince among librarians).

Fortune favors the bold- sometimes it even smiles upon the foolish...

And you scramble down
And you look below,
And the world you know
Begins to grow:

The roof, the house, and your Mother at the door.
The roof, the house and the world you never thought to explore.
And you think of all of the things you've seen,
And you wish that you could live in between,
And you're back again,
Only different than before,
After the sky.

Coming home is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand it's nice to be back among friends and family, and who doesn't look forward to sleeping in their own bed after several nights in a hotel? But returning to the office can be jarring, even after just a short conference. When I was a support staff member I would invariably dread whenever my supervisor came back from a library conference, as she'd want to implement all of the new ideas she had picked up from her colleagues... usually all at once!

Now that the tables have turned and I am the one coming back to the office in a hyperstimulated state of mind, I more keenly appreciate the dilemma my previous boss must have found herself in. I try to temper my enthusiasm, but at the same time I don't want my time up in the sky to have been all for naught. Trying to share the creative energy one brings back from a conference without overly disrupting your support staff's daily workflows is a more delicate balancing act than I had imagined when I was on the receiving end, but it's the most important part of attending a library conference in the first place.

This is why we go to conferences, not only so that our experiences there change us for the better, but so that we can share our experience and effect positive changes of our own when we return. It will be a long day indeed -- if ever!-- before this transformative aspect of conference-going can be replicated by other means. Until that day arrives, I will always look forward to the next opportunity to visit the giants in the sky, and as a manager and future administrator I will be sure to advocate that this kind of professional development be properly valued for what it is.

Librarians should be going to conferences not despite declining financial fortunes and shrinking travel budgets, but precisely because of these pressures. It has never been more important for libraries and librarians to share what they know, and there is no better way to facilitate such an exchange of information and experience than by coming together in person. Our email boxes are filled to bursting, our RSS feeders overwhelmed with blog entries, and our social networks are already jammed with so much noise that it is difficult to cull any meaningful signals. Library conferences on the other hand provide an intense albeit brief period where most if not all of our mental and psychic bandwidth can be devoted to absorbing ideas and contributing to the Big Picture issues which so often elude us in our workaday lives.

We need the giants. We need the sky. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a cynic or a fool.

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible awesome scary wonderful
Giants in the sky!

Library Day in the Life: Round 7

It's one of my favorite times of the year:  Library Day in the Life.  The brainchild of Bobbi L. Newman, Library Day in the Life challenges librarians two times a year to document a day or week on the job, both for the edification of non-librarians and as inspiration and validation for one another.  Participants sign up on the wiki, then either blog away, Tweet (under the hashtag #libday7), or add pictures and/or video at Flickr and YouTube.  Library Day in the Life is now in its seventh round, and with each iteration it attracts more participants-- librarians, library support staff, and LIS students-- from all over the planet.

This will be the third time I'm joining in the festivities.  My name is Tom Bruno, and I am currently the Head of Resource Sharing at Widener Library of the Harvard College Library.  Most of my day to day activities revolve around managing our interlibrary loan and electronic document delivery (otherwise known as Scan & Deliver) services, but as the Harvard Library system in the midst of a vast and comprehensive reorganization I am occasionally asked to serve in a broader capacity as well.  I also coordinate training and troubleshoot any problems involving ILLiad, our common system for ILL and Scan & Deliver, and act as liaison between Harvard and OCLC and/or the vendor, Atlas Systems for any service or support issues.

Resource Sharing is one of the oldest disciplines in librarianship, addressing the basic problem faced since time immemorial:  i.e., that no one library can possess all of the knowledge in the world.  Even as we experience wave after wave of disruptive technological changes it remains unlikely that our patrons' need for information beyond the collections of our library (be they physical, digital, or whatever comes after that), although the tools with which we meet our patrons' information needs will no doubt change and/or evolve. I hope that over the upcoming week I am able to shine a little light on what it is I do-- feel free to ask any questions, and I'll do my best to answer them!

The virtues of living out loud

My friend Genie-- the one who taunts me about my Homeric odyssey of a commute-- issues a monthly writing challenge on her blog that she calls the Living Out Loud Project.  Each month is a different theme, about which her readers are encouraged to write about in any way, shape, or form.  The goal of Genie's project is to create a digital haven for self-expression:

Having attended many sessions at BlogHer or read online horror stories of people baring their souls and having the Internet collectively spit on them, I wanted to foster something positive from sharing a bit of ourselves.

In this month's challenge, "On Writing," Genie elaborates on the virtues of sharing what she calls 'the mundane magic of our everyday lives.'  I agree with her that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as too much information.  What struck me most about this post, however, was her opening paragraph about how writing itself makes her feel:

I see my therapist Gary every other Friday. When I come in and sit down, he asks me how I’m doing. Not every visit, but many times the topic of my blogging comes up. I explain to him that the more I’m writing the better I feel. Gary is not a writer. He’s a good man and he’s clever and he has many interesting stories, but he is not a writer. He’s not a sharer. So when I say I feel better because I’ve been writing more, he just smiles politely. 

I've already mentioned the fact that I've had something of an emotionally tumultuous year.  Amid the rollercoaster of normal ups and downs, I have noticed something curious.  On those days when I'm feeling my absolute worst, there is always one common denominator:  I haven't written anything.  At first I thought that this was correlation and not necessarily causation, but the closer I pay attention to this phenomenon the more I realize that it's legit.

Conversely, on the days when I have written something, I feel downright indestructible.  I can't quite explain it, but if I've spent my morning commute lashing words together rather than noodling around with the MBTA's flaky wifi in order to surf the web or, even worse, attempt to answer some work email I get off the train with a bounce in my step and a twinkle in my eye.  Writing makes me feel six inches taller, and I carry that positivity with me kicking and screaming into my workday so that even a bad day at work becomes a good day by default.

This was an important connection for me to make, and I'm glad I made it.  Yet as I drifted through the doldrums after finishing my latest writing project-- Varonian Nights, the fantasy anthology I've been chipping away at for the past three years-- I realized something else.  Writing is more than whatever work in progress it was that I was in the middle of.  It is the very core of my being.

There is a fantastic scene in the movie Sideways where two characters-- Maya and Miles, played by Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti, respectively-- are talking about why they love wine so much.  Maya launches into a beautiful explanation of the life, death, and afterlife of the grape and those who cultivated it, then concludes her encomium with what may perhaps be one of the sexiest lines ever delivered on the silver screen:  "And it tastes so fucking good."

Writing is my wine.  But all of this time when I should have been pouring my heart out, I've been bottling it up instead.  Writing became divorced from the rest of my life and sequestered to an hour every weekday morning-- and only that if I was lucky and I didn't end up sitting next to a fellow commuter who had neglected to bring his or her own reading material and watched every single word I typed (at least give me a couple of bucks for entertaining you, willya?).  While this hour was much more than I had ever been giving my writerly urges in a very long time, it wasn't enough.

Perhaps it is only now that I've found my voice as a librarian, just as my colleague Jessica Olin seems to have discovered hers after several years of listening, learning, and making those essential connections.  I was quite the prolific LIS student blogger (chronicling my trials and tribulations as I worked my way through library school at The Library Ass), and although I fully expected that I would continue to write about my first year as a library professional-- working title:  The Librarian:  Year One-- the words just failed to materialize.

Now am I a bit older and wiser, and as I sit down at the keyboard I find I suddenly have an awful lot to say about a lot of things:  about my vocation and its future, about writing...  about life, the universe, and everything.  So this is me, Living Out Loud at long last.  I sure hope nobody shushes me!

Harry Potter and the Terrible Revelation

Now that Pottermania has taken its final curtain call with the blockbuster release of Part Two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I feel that I must finally reveal a dark secret which I have been harboring for all of these years:

I have never read any of the Harry Potter novels, nor have I seen any of the movies.

There, I said it.  Though my Master's of Library Science may now be forfeit, and my fantasy street cred be dashed into a million tiny pieces, I can no longer live a lie.  When you were geeking out over something Harry Potter-related and I was nodding enthusiastically and smiling, in reality I had no clue as to what you were talking about.  Dumbledore?  He was one of the good guys, right?  And Voldemort was the Big Bad, I think.  Aside from knowing the proper pronunciation of "Hermione," that's about all I've got.

Severus Snape?  He might as well have been a Roman emperor, for all I know.  And Quidditch makes about as much sense to me as baseball does to my Greek immigrant father-in-law.

Mind you, I'm not a fantasy snob, nor am I a hater due to J.K. Rowling's phenomenal rise to literary stardom. When Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone made its U.S. debut in 1998, I was in over my head with Real Life issues-- falling out of school (again) and falling in love (again).  The only thing I was reading at the time was a dog-eared copy of Sophocles' Antigone, in Ancient Greek, which my soon-to-be wife and I would pretend to pore over between classes in a Boston University coffeeshop on a series of "study dates" before either of us put two and two together and realized that we should perhaps give actual dating a try as well.

Soon after that were days-long road trips off to romantic locales, a whirlwind engagement, and even a Big Fat Greek Wedding, but by then the Hogwarts Express had long since left the station.  With the release of each successive book it occurred to me to try and catch up with the craze, but then I started writing again myself and I found myself feeling a bit protective of my own little patch of genre fantasy-- not only did I not want to lose my inspiration to write, which had returned at long last after more than a decade of silence, but I also was worried that I would unconsciously emulate any fantasy writers I was reading at the time.

So I maintained a respectful distance, smiling politely when people discussed the plot twists from the latest installment and trying not to lead on that I was a Harry Potter naif.  Pretending in this manner got infinitely more difficult when I started library school, as it was almost a foregone conclusion that anyone who wanted to be a librarian would be ipso facto a J.K. Rowling devotee, but trying to explain how it could be that I-- an aspiring writer, librarian in training, and a fantasy buff no less!-- hadn't read so much as a page of a Harry Potter novel seemed so difficult at this point that I felt I had no choice but to commit myself to this "Talented Mr. Ripley"-style deception.

Time passed and before I knew it diehard fans were donning their wizard robes and gathering at midnight in front of their local bookstores in eager anticipation of the final volume in the series.  In a sense this was a huge relief, as the topic of Harry Potter would now come up less and less often in casual conversation with friends and acquaintances, but at the same time I began to appreciate more fully exactly what it was that I had missed out over all of these years.  Here was the cultural equivalent of the Star Wars phenomenon, only in literary form (!!!), and somehow I had allowed this to pass me by?

Mea culpa, my fellow librarians!

I remember feeling this way when Deathly Hallows was first published, and while I'm feeling shades of this sense of loss again with the end of the film franchise, this time around there is a glimmer of hope.  My wife and I have been stockpiling the Harry Potter novels, you see, with the intention of reading them together along with our daughter Andriana.  She's just at the right age now that I think she'll get a huge kick out of them, so even as the rest of the world's Pottermania is dying down, hers (and ours) may only just be winding up...

Just no spoilers, please-- okay?

Rock Stars and Superheroes

"I don't need to be a library rock star- a library superhero will suffice."

This was one of my status updates yesterday on Facebook and Twitter.  For those of you not in on the joke, there's been a lot of back and forth in the library community as to whether or not librarians should strive to be 'rock stars'.  Proponents say that in an age of ever-declining fortunes for institutions such as libraries, librarians need to be larger than life in order to advocate for their future (also, rock stars are cool);  the naysayers, however, counter that such self-aggrandizement may benefit individual librarians but ultimately shifts the focus away from the libraries, their collections, and most importantly the patrons whom they serve.

I am firmly of the opinion that librarians need to bring all of the Awesome they possibly can at this critical juncture for our profession, and if that means turning librarians into the new celebrity chefs so be it-- they can even be hipsters from Brooklyn, as 9 out of 10 Food Network stars inevitably are these days.  And I must admit, the allure of library rockstardom has always captured my imagination as well.  Come on, who wouldn't want to be the Elvis Costello or Amanda "Fucking" Palmer of librarians?  Alas, becoming a library superstar is more difficult than it appears, as library conference budgets aren't quite what they used to be and we're already a fairly prolific community in the blogosphere and elsewhere in cyberspace.

That it is difficult to stand out in a field with such dynamic and thought-provoking company as (just to name a few) Andy Woodworth, Jenica Rogers, Joe Murphy, Amy Buckland, and the incomparable Will Manley should not be a cause for despair, however, but one for celebration*.  If the secret to a good life is keeping good company, then we as librarians should consider ourselves very fortunate, indeed, to have one of the best damned peer groups in any profession I know of.  Besides, even if we can't all be rock stars, we can still be superheroes.

Full disclosure:  I have been wrestling with the issue of job satisfaction for the better part of the last year.  While objectively my position seems to be a perfect fit for my skills, aptitude, and prior experience, I couldn't help but increasingly feel that something important was missing from what I was doing.  Needless to say, this prompted quite a bit of soul-searching, as well as a job search that resulted in a callback and even a second interview.  Though ultimately I did not get the job offer, simply going through the process as far as I did-- both intellectually and emotionally-- finally helped me clarify the root issues that were causing my discontent:

1.  Libraries need managers who will inspire their staff, now more than ever.  Whenever I talk to librarian colleagues and library support staff, either in my own workplace or elsewhere, I can't help but discern a common theme: "This used to be a lot more fun."  You know what?  It still can and should be fun.  Let's face it, librarianship is one of the most absurd occupations under the sun, a vocation that has improbably called scholars, scribes, and cat devotees since the days of Ancient Alexandria (and earlier).  We get to purvey spiritual goods in a material world, with an ecumenical philosophy that puts most organized religions to shame.  Librarianship isn't just a job, it's a way of life.  When we fail to celebrate what makes this profession special, we not only fail our fellow professionals, but those who work for us as well.

2.  Assessment is critical, but it's not a substitute for leadership.  Please don't get me wrong here-- I am in no way, shape, or form against assessment of library services.  My particular field (resource sharing) is particularly awash in data, and I use every tool available at my disposal in order to foster a culture of continuous improvement among my staff and colleagues.  Every librarian should know how to work their mojo with pivot tables in Excel and coax the statistics they need out of a SQL server, and we must do a much better job at training would-be librarians at how to use the data they obtain and present it to various audiences and stakeholder groups so as to obtain the maximum desired effect.  Even the best-derived numbers cannot possibly prepare you for the unknown, however, and retreating behind wall after wall of metrics is just a nerdier way of circling the wagons.  Sometimes leaps of faith are called for-- assessment may get you to the precipice and may even tell you how far you need to go to get to the other side, but leadership is what you need to get your organization to actually make that jump.

3.  Librarianship is about listening, sharing, and helping--  i.e., being a superhero.  Not too long ago I did something I haven't done in ages:  I opened up my Gmail folder containing all of the ILL listserv posts I was automatically archiving and never reading.  In the process of getting caught up  I noticed that someone was asking for assistance tracking down a fairly obscure citation in a foreign journal that I was pretty sure we should own, given the language and subject matter.  Sure enough we do have the periodical in question, and not only was I able to provide my colleague with the correct citation but a PDF of the article as well.  Even before the other librarian had a chance to thank me I was already glowing.  How could have I possibly forgotten how good it feels simply to help someone out of the blue?

We're all so busy grinding through our daily workflows, monthly statistics, and annual reports that it's easy to lose sight of what makes our job so awesome:  listening to people who are in need of information, navigating our library's resources in order to locate that one all-important thing, then sharing it, not for profit or personal advancement but for the expansion of human knowledge and the simple joy of sharing.  If you can imagine that exact feeling I'm describing and consider it one of the most wonderful things in the universe, then you might just be a librarian yourself.  Since then I've tried not to end my workday without finding a way to commit at least one random act of kindness, and I've found myself infinitely more energized as a librarian as a result.  I dare you to try it yourself...  there's always room for another library superhero.

* Andy, Jenica, Joe, Amy, and Will-- you are all both library rock stars and superheroes in my book!  Keep doing what you're doing, as you have no idea how many of us in the field look to you for inspiration.

Library Day in the Life- Thursday

This is the Thursday tl;dr ("Too Long, Didn't Read") Edition. I often chide my colleagues for sending me any email that's longer than a paragraph, but here I am writing a novella-length rundown of my day on the job. If you're feeling like your attention is somewhat deficient at this point in the workweek, by all means skip down to the end.

8:11am- The hooplah surrounding the launch of Apple's iPad finally trickles down to our discussion of e-readers, which I have been investigating and trying to pilot in ILL for almost a year now. Whereas buying a Kindle or Nook locked us into a proprietary form of hardware, the iPad has the advantage of supporting the existing iPhone/iPod Touch apps, including the Kindle and BN e-reader apps, as well as providing access to the ebooks in iTunes store. While this doesn't make the iPad 100% platform-neutral, it's the closest we've come to a reader that lets us have our cake and eat it too.

8:22am- One of my freshman advisees emails about dropping by for me to sign his Study Card for the Spring semester, as it's that time of the year again. We set up a block of time for tomorrow.

8:47am- Hey, wasn't the train already supposed to at North Station by now? At least the wi-fi isn't flaking out this morning so I can get some work done- I thank one of the IT staff for answering a question about network access for one of our satellite ILL operations at the Science Library.

9:49am- It's been a while since I've posted to one of the ILL listservs, but this issue is one I've been thinking about since last November, when the ILLIAD-L listserv shut down and moved to a message board over at OCLC. Ending the mailing list was fairly unpopular at the time, but as my fellow ILL librarians were reluctant to split the community by starting another listserv and going online with the new message board. Three months later, though, and it's clear that the whole community never quite made the jump. I have nothing against message boards per se, but I simply don't have time to monitor one on a daily basis, and it seems that many of my colleagues are in the same boat. Listservs are some of the oldest information age technology at our disposal, but they still work for certain forms of communication, and serve as emergency hotlines for the ILL community in manner that even a dynamic message board can't replicate. So I add my two cents to the post mortem, hoping that if enough of us voice our discontent then perhaps someone will offer to host a new listserv.

9:49am- An email to one of the Harvard libraries interested in joining our electronic document delivery service. There's enough interest at this point that we have dubbed it "Phase Two", which means we'll likely spending this Spring on training and troubleshooting as we did the previous year. Nevertheless it's exciting to bring new libraries into the fold, as it's the surest indicator that we have launched a popular and useful service for our patrons. Speaking of which, today is one of the days that I am gathering detailed information about processing times for every step of the request fulfillment process, so that I can put together our first cost model based on hard data.

10:24am- A rare opportunity for me to lay down the law. While the heart and soul of my job is finding ways to say "yes," there are times when I'm obliged to tell someone no and this is one of them. 'Nuff said!

11:00am- You knew there'd be a meeting in there somewhere, didn't you? But this one is different, as it's one of my own meetings with my own team- the ILL Borrowing and Lending Coordinators and our newly-hired Student Trainer/Coordinator for the department. We've been working on some ambitious changes in our workflows for request processing since the beginning of the Fall semester, but now that the Spring term has started we are kicking things up a notch. It's a good meeting, as everyone here understands my vision and is excited about it, because although we'll be doing things differently my staff see that if we're successful we'll be doing things much more efficiently as well. I love that feeling when things click and you realize that not only have you convinced your team, but motivated them as well!

12:41pm- Another advisee emails me- can she come by later this afternoon? Sure thing, I say. Come on down!

(But first let me grab some lunch.)

1:01pm- As I munch a flatbread sandwich from the Dunkin Donuts across the street, I check in with our IT people about our scheduled upgrade to the latest version of ILLiad. Although we were originally concerned that the change would affect our billing scripts that push invoice transactions to our Accounts Receivable department, we have received confirmation that this should not be an issue. Whew!

1:30pm- My advisee finds her way down to the office and we catch up. Even though being a freshman adviser is a significant time commitment at the start of each semester, I've enjoyed getting to know the incoming class and helping them find their way through their first year at school.

2:15pm- Our central OIS people send me a troubleshooting email from a patron who can't log in to our ILL/Doc Del system, the cause of which is a past expiry date. I update the account and send the patron on their way.

2:24pm- The same expiry date issue has just cropped up again, less than ten minutes later- funny how these things tend to cluster, even when they're completely unrelated.

2:25pm- I briefly correspond with the Circ staff at one of College Library's component libraries, as they need help with some of their document delivery scanning workflow since they're neck-deep in course reserves processing right now. I offer to take the backlog on their hands, for which they are grateful, and they tell me they'll be sending over the items for scanning later in the afternoon. One of the great things about being the hub for resource sharing in our school is that we have the manpower to help in situations exactly like this.

2:57pm- A message on Facebook from Justin Hoenke's (of Justin The Librarian and 8bitlibrary.com) band Belsapadore. Would I like to become a fan? Hells, yes!

3:31pm- More correspondence with the other College libraries, this time about upgrading their scanning capabilities to support Odyssey sending rather than ARIEL, as Odyssey libraries now represent well over 3/4's of all electronic deliveries.

3:41pm- Another one of my freshman advisees wants to meet tomorrow, so I need to shift a meeting in order to fit everyone in. Friday is starting to look quite booked at this point.

3:47pm- More correspondence with OCLC and our school (not library) IT, as we are moving to Microsoft Exchange for our email and we need to make sure that there are no issues with automatically generated notifications from our ILLiad hosted server. Hopefully this round of information exchange should do the trick- fingers crossed!

3:55pm- A returning student wants to come back to work at ILL. Are we still hiring? We sure are...

4:00pm- Time for some good old fashioned hands-on troubleshooting, as our Circ scanner is on the blink upstairs. I spend some quality time with the machine, as I know most of its tricks and quirks, but try as I might I can't get it to stop spitting out a certain error message. I email the vendor, who is very responsive, and set up a WebEx session to fix it first thing in the morning.

4:36pm- An email from a friend who has been doing research at our library on Phineas Gage (the remarkable individual who survived having a six-foot tamping rod pass through his skull and brain during a freak accident in the 19th century) for the past several years, pointing us to an exciting new find just announced on NPR- although it was believed that no pictures of Gage had survived, it appears that someone recently identified a photo of Gage on Flickr! I love when people share the fruits of their scholarly labors with us, and in this particular case it's been fun to watch my friend's project develop over the years.

4:38pm- Some more follow-up from our morning meeting with the student coordinator, who is having Instant Messenger installed on workstations where we will have student assistants working on ILL request processing, giving them instant access to the Borrowing and Lending coordinators whenever they run into trouble. It's a great idea, and I'm glad to have someone helping behind the scenes to get all of this in motion.

4:39pm- Correspondence with a colleague about doing a poster session about our document delivery service for an upcoming digital scholarship fair. Can I have something ready by the end of next week? Despire the fact that I'm already chock full of deadlines this is a great opportunity to do some marketing and outreach for the new service, so I of course agree.

4:44pm- More strategic planning with my staff about finding better ways to incorporate student assistants into our processing workflows so that our staff have more time for troubleshooting the truly problematic requests. A fellow resource sharing librarian observed that in the world of ILL the easy requests are getting easier and the hard ones harder, and I know that my Borrowing staff can definitely corroborate this. So the goal is to free up as much of their time to deal with these truly difficult requests, and I think we have a great plan for doing just that.

5:19pm- One more email to schedule another of my advisees and it's time to go. I crunch my way across a frozen Harvard Yard and hop on the subway, so I can catch my train and get home just in time to do it all over again in another twelve hours or so.

It's been a busy Thursday, but a good kind of busy- a nice mix of troubleshooting, problem-solving, and strategic planning with my staff both in formal meetings and casual conversation. Heck, I even helped a patron or two along the way. I'm happy that even though mine is a managerial position, the job still gives me an opportunity for front-line public service. It's something I would definitely miss if I didn't have it.

Library Day in the Life- Wednesday

Today was everything I love about my job. This was not a day for Getting Things Done or Taking Care of Business- no, Wednesdays are generally reserved for team meetings and my 1:1 with the boss, and in both cases we had an awful lot to discuss. I enjoy sitting down with the various Heads in Access Services and talking , as due to both the nature and location of my job I wouldn’t get much face-time with my colleagues otherwise.

Our ILL shop is situated so as to be convenient adjacent to both the library’s mail room and the closest service entrance to the Stacks, which is great for workflow synergy but cuts us off from our colleagues at various public service desks upstairs. On a good day I refer to our office space as “the bunker,” or even the Bat Cave; on other occasions when I’m feeling less charitable, though, I just call it a cave. However I refer to it, it’s a welcome change of pace to leave it for a spell and not think about the thousand and one fires I need to extinguish. Given our request volume it’s hard to tear myself away even to grab something from the café vending machines, let alone lunch someplace in Harvard Square, so I appreciate having a weekly break that is not mine to cancel or postpone.

We don’t normally go the full two hours for our Team meetings, but today’s agenda items invite lively discussion and we are reluctant to break early as we brainstorm our way through several pressing issues and connect the dots between our various areas of responsibility. Like most libraries, we have seen so much change over the past year that it is good to resume an air of normalcy, and even though there will doubtless be even more change around the corner being able to sit down together and anticipate it makes a world of difference. There is a spirit of camaraderie at these meetings that I greatly enjoy, and it speaks well to us as a group that we are able to laugh and joke with one another as well as we are able to work.

Whether or not to break for lunchtime is also entirely out of my hands today as it turns out, as I am being taken out to a nice little bistro to celebrate an award I won for my work involving the document delivery service we launched last Spring. It’s a real honor, and over an excellent meal I get to talk about the role of libraries and resource sharing in the 21st century with my colleagues, my past and present bosses, and our library’s director. I’ll admit that I recycled my own blog post yesterday about how the ability to say yes is the true bottom line of our profession, and I’m happy to report that it was well-received.

After lunch I have a brief respite before launching into my 1:1 with my boss, which feels more like an extension to the day’s conversations, albeit with more action items specifically for me. I end up walking out of my boss’s office with an even fuller plate than I already had for the next couple of weeks. Part of the challenge of what I’m tasked to do is that our resource sharing efforts continue to grow by leaps and bounds, so much so that we need all the help we can get. This means more cross-training, more coordination and cooperation across traditional boundary lines, more dotted and horizontal lines on the org chart, more willingness to explore and implement new solutions to the unique problems of the postmodern library. In light of everything that we’ve talked about today, however, I can see how each of these new projects fit into the larger picture, and I am excited to tackle them head-on.

So granted, I spent approximately forty-five minutes in the office today, during which time I barely had enough time to touch base with my staff, let alone get anything else substantive accomplished. But sometimes the most important part of being a librarian is thinking and talking about the Big Picture. And that's what my Wednesdays are all about.

Library Day in the Life- Tuesday

“Meetings and emails,” a colleague apologizes on Twitter. “Emails and meetings. I wish today were more glamorous.” I nod sympathetically as I take a look at my own agenda for this Tuesday- my Google Calendar entry for today is a patchwork of one-hour meetings, punctuated by hour long blocks of free time during which I will be making a frantic attempt to get everything else done… including answering the dreaded email, which I’m still behind on as a result of ALA Midwinter. Like yesterday I’ve gotten an early start to my day, neglecting my writing efforts for a second day in a row as I knock out some easy questions on the train ride in to work. It sounds funny, but I think the fact that we librarians have put ourselves under the microscope for the week has energized me in a way that is most unusual for a Tuesday morning.

I’d like to say that the emails in question were about matters so riveting that I just couldn’t wait until I got work to answer them, but in reality they were the day-in, day-out sorts of little problems that my inbox inevitably accumulates over time. I like to joke to my staff—no strangers to the challenges of time management themselves-- that library work is all about identifying the 10% of your workload that is truly important, but once you join the professional ranks you’ll quickly find that you have no choice but to distill that 10% down yet again. What remains is the essence of librarianship, which can so easily get lost in the background noise of any postmodern workplace. It is what makes our job not just another job, but a vocation. The rest is of course important, and as the boss you’re the one on the hook if the daily grind doesn’t get ground, but in reality it’s that quintessential one percent that gets us out of bed every morning.

Here are the fundamental questions of access to information, many of which we must wrestle with daily on behalf our patrons. “Err on the side of ‘yes,’” I always encourage my staff, mindful that behind the scenes we are an operation with a bottom line, obliged not only to satiate our users’ desire for information but to observe the limits of publisher licenses and copyright law. I think I actually laughed when someone first suggested that libraries should be run like a business, but as I walk through my ILL shop (yes, we call it a ‘shop’) I am ever mindful of the calculus of profit and loss. Are we scanning library materials as quickly as we could without sacrificing quality? Are we shipping our ILL loans in the most cost-efficient manner possible? Are we searching for our Borrowing requests against the right combination of lending libraries and purchase on demand vendors? These seem like questions more suited to a maker of widgets than a librarian, but if I do not take them seriously our ability to facilitate research—not just that of our own patrons but of students and scholars worldwide—is diminished.

And this, I realize, is the true bottom line: our ability to say “yes.” The fancy-pants term for what I do is called Resource Sharing, and my job is not only to share our resources now but to ensure that we will be able to go on sharing those resources long after my tenure. Every detail I sweat is another loan we can fill somewhere down the line- one more term paper finished, one more research grant approved, one more bibliography complete, one more happy patron. And this is worth all the meetings, all the emails... all the Tuesdays in the world.

(Thanks to Andy Woodworth for inspiring today's post!)

Library Day in the Life- Monday

It's that time of the year again for Library Day in the Life, where librarians blog about what exactly it is that they do on the job with that mysterious MLS. Do we spend all day stamping books, collecting overdue fines, and shushing noisy kids, or is there something else to the profession beyond the stereotypes?

(SPOILER ALERT: This post is 100% shush-free)

My Monday starts with a question. Although I'm not even in the office yet, on my train ride into town I spy an email from my boss' boss about our document delivery service. Since launching it last April we've filled over 20,000 scanning requests for articles and book chapters for Harvard University Library patrons, but at the same time we are mindful that this is a service still very much in its infancy, with plenty of room for improvement as we learn more about what works and what does not. The question is about some of these potential improvements, which I've been actively thinking about since entertaining a colleague just before ALA Midwinter who offered his advice as to how we might make our operations more efficient, so despite my original plans to spend the morning commute on my own writing I spend the hour banging out a thoughtful response highlighting some easy upgrades that we could implement over the Spring and outlining a strategy for developing the "next generation" of the service.

Once I finally do make my way to the office (let's call it 9ish), it's time to do staff time approvals and request whatever adjustments are necessary for the next pay period. Many weeks this is a fairly straightforward affair, but owing to the three-day weekend from the previous week time entry is a little trickier than it normally is, so I spend some additional time sorting out everyone's timesheet so that there are no unpleasant surprises come payday. Many librarians fail to consider the possibility that they may find themselves in a supervisory or managerial role, especially if they end up following a public services track. I am responsible for five full-time support staffers, plus over a hundred hours per week of student help, which means that even during a good week I can rightly expect to spend a certain non-negligible portion of my day on human resource matters. Fortunately we've been successfully experimenting with students self-reporting their time worked in our online system, which means less paperwork and generally speaking more accuracy, as students have proven to be rather compulsive in adjusting their hours throughout the week to reflect actual hours worked (whereas written timesheets are invariably either incomplete or incorrect).

By ten o'clock I've dispatched all of my payroll problems, so I can finally set myself to triaging the mountain of email that has been accumulating since last week. Email is the bane of any office worker's existence, but librarians seem particularly vexed with this form of communication, which with each passing day feels just as archaic as faxes, snail mail, or-- dare I even say it?-- phone calls. There's nowhere near enough time in the day/week/month/year to craft a thoughtful response to every work email I receive, so I must prioritize the genuine emergencies and hope I have the opportunity to circle back later in the day to mop up some of the less urgent matters arising in my inbox. So what merits an immediate response? I need to coordinate an essential upgrade to our FedEx shipping capabilities, touch base with my student workers returning for the Spring semester (as for many of them this is their first day back from the holidays), and exchange email with a staff member at our central OIS as we try to troubleshoot some slow response time when patrons attempt to log in to our ILL and Document Delivery system. This doesn't seem like all that much, but before I know it it's a few minutes before noon and I am obliged to close my email and get some other work done.

Over the weekend I decided that I needed to adhere a little more closely to a regular schedule in order to make sure I dedicated enough time to recurring weekly, monthly, and quarterly responsibilities that could just as easily end up forgotten in the daily deluge of email, phone calls, questions from staff, and anything else that comes up that is capable of diverting my attention away from my best-laid plans. Take statistics, for instance. While all modern librarians deal with stats in one form or another, Interlibrary Loan librarians are expected to produce and analyze a truly bewildering array of data. Not only are there monthly stats to collate, but I am always working on several additional statistical queries-- some of them long-term projects to improve turnaround times or save our operations money, others of them quick questions from my higher-ups that can't be answered with the numbers that we regularly report.

To better address all of these needs, I've marked off every Monday afternoon as the exclusive domain for stats work, and as it turns out I'll need every minute I've set aside today, as a couple of my garden variety Microsoft Access queries are spitting out numbers that I know are way off just by looking at them. It takes me a couple of hours to figure out what the anomaly is and re-write the queries so as to account for the weirdness, and it makes for a pretty frustrating afternoon. Fortunately I'm able to punctuate this slog through the data by checking on my colleagues on Twitter while I copy long sets of numbers from the live Access database. Most of my friends on Twitter are fellow librarians, and I am able to make sense of their communications by using a program like TweetDeck to search for specific library or conference-related hashtags-- for example, #alamw10 for the recent ALA Midwinter Meeting here in Boston.

It's through Twitter and my online librarian colleagues that I realize it's Library Day in the Life, so I make a mental note to write up this post on my train ride home. After a long day of data-wrangling, indulging in this kind of summary is exactly what Melvil Dewey ordered. I leave work on Monday feeling exhausted but somewhat exhilarated, as I feel that my new weekly schedule blocks are going to be a huge help in getting things done. It's also nice to see students criss-crossing Harvard Yard again, soggy though it may be this rainy and unseasonably warm Monday. My chief Borrower remarked that calling it "Spring Term" is an extreme form of optimism in these parts, but as I pick my way through the puddles of melted snow and ice on my way back to the subway and my commuter train home I'm feeling a bit optimistic myself.

Conference debriefed

ALA Midwinter has come and gone once again, and my head is spinning after meeting so many people, absorbing so many new ideas, and just generally having a great time! Although my Monday conference plans were thwarted by six inches of wet snow early this morning, I feel like I accomplished quite a bit over the past several days. And yet, mindful of the Set Sail For Fail discussion I participated in on Sunday at the Networking Uncommons, I have the urge to examine my conference experience and see what wisdom I can offer for future ALA attendees:

1. Put everything in your planner. Even if you're only tangentially interested in something, or you are already double or triple booked for that time slot, don't omit anything from your conference schedule if you think it might be worth going to. Plan for the unexpected, and be sure to have readily-accessible options in case your day radically changes on you. Although ALA does a great job of making the information available both in print and online, trying to figure out where you should be next when you're wandering around the convention center is more difficult than you'd think.

Next time around I'm going to load up my Google Calendar with everything I might possibly want to do (and, just as important, where everything is taking place!) so I have a quick reference wherever I go...

2. Don't be afraid or serendipity. No matter how well you've planned your schedule, you'll run into a million different opportunities that you hadn't even considered before you shipped off to the convention. You'll run into a colleague you haven't seen in ages, or stumble into an interesting program in progress. I know that many of you are here for specific purposes (some of them pertaining to committee membership, some of them work-related) and there is often little margin for happenstance, but try to be open to it if you can.

Over the past several years I have swung between going to ALA with a completely open agenda and overprogramming my time here with section-related meetings and other business, but this time around I seem to have struck a nice balance between the stuff I ought to be doing and the stuff I want to do. For example, I made sure I made the time to meet up with several librarians I only know from Twitter and other virtual correspondence. Not only was it great to put names to the faces, but I can't wait to see them all again at the next conference.

3. You will not be able to do it all, but you'll love every minute of it nonetheless. Going to ALA is a lot like visiting Disney World- there is no way to ride every ride, see every show, and eat every churro. Due to the fact that the conference was in Boston this year and I needed to be mindful of both the logistics of my commute in and out of town and the fact that I had a family who wanted to see me at least once or twice during the long weekend I knew that I was going to have to make some sacrifices about what programs I could attend and how many people I could see.

Instead of obsessing about what you can't do, be sure to enjoy what you're doing! I may not have been able to see everyone I know who was at this conference, and I'm still kicking myself over some of the meetings, events, and receptions I missed, but I did a lot of things. I caught and Tweeted some excellent presentations (including LITA's Top Tech Trends), met with some excellent colleagues-- such as Andy Woodworth and JP Porcaro of 8bitlibrary.com-- and even won a $25 gift card from Barnes and Noble for sharing my sad tale of Fuzzy Bunny Fail.

Needless to see, I'm already looking forward to my next conference- safe travels to all of you who made the trip to Boston, and see you in Washington D.C. in June I hope!