[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
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jenett, who does excellent library work in a most interesting place, wanted to know how to deal with a certain type of people that come into the library and try to monopolize the resources of the library and its staff for themselves.
It's a fairly easy dynamic for people to exploit - library workers are people who want to help others find information and achieve things that they thought they couldn't, or learn how to use things that will make their lives and workplaces earlier. Many libraries are also concerned for their fnding. It's a lot easier to see the value of fire, police, and emergency services in a city budget than it is to see library services, and county libraries are sometimes constrained by the referenda of persons who believe all government would inflate taxes to a soul-crushing level to fund their socialist agendas. (Thank you kindly, sir, for your guarantee that no library system will be able to keep up with the cost of inflation, and therefore we have to go to a vote every so often to ask if we can please actually fund ourselves to continue providing services to everyone. A vote that we have to put up significant money for to get on the ballot and then essentially get a supermajority of a supermajority to vote yes for. And that's only after there have been several good years of prosperity so that there's enough capacity between what we're levying now and our mandated maximum that it's actually worth our while to ask the voters to let us fund ourselves properly. I'm sure that you have fantasies tht you're going to be one of the elect in Galt's Gulch, but odds are good that if things collapse and we can blame you for it, we will.)
Ahem. It's fairly easy to appear desperate in one way or another, if you aren't sure whether you'll have enough money to stay open and staffed, and even more so if you're already in enough of a budget crunch where you have to close your branches for at least one day a week, as the local metropolitan system has to. Exceptional service will keep the library in people's minds, and so they'll remember to fund you when the time comes, and they'll check things out and use your computers and otherwise contribute to the quantitative metrics that have to be large enough to ensure your continued existence when a person who has no idea what value a library has asks for justification of why you should continue to exist. If you're lucky, maybe they'll even leave a comment or a letter that you can use as that almost-always elusive qualitative feedback and justification that the library should continue to exist.
Ahem. In search of things that will continue to give the library continued reasons for existence in the minds of people who don't work there, librarians are constantly looking for new services to provide, ways to upgrade their current services, and are routinely exhorted to give as much help as they can to someone, within the boundaries of what the library can reasonably be expected to provide. Of course, "reasonable" is a word that has a lot of room for maneuverability in it, and theree are people who are poised to try and take advantage of that, one way or another. They often come in a couple of forms.
Many of these kinds of conversations are things library school doesn't teach, because while they can give you a general sense of issues, topics, and the library position on them, you then have to deal with the actual policies of your organization, and the people who are writing those policies and looking at you to make sure you enforce them the way they want you to, regardless of what your own professional ethics might say about it. And library school does tend to assume that the people coming to ask you for help are going to be able to use it, rather than trying to get you to do it for them instead. Something about plans never surviving contact with the public, if I wanted to repurpose a quote for my own needs.
jenett, who does excellent library work in a most interesting place, wanted to know how to deal with a certain type of people that come into the library and try to monopolize the resources of the library and its staff for themselves. It's a fairly easy dynamic for people to exploit - library workers are people who want to help others find information and achieve things that they thought they couldn't, or learn how to use things that will make their lives and workplaces earlier. Many libraries are also concerned for their fnding. It's a lot easier to see the value of fire, police, and emergency services in a city budget than it is to see library services, and county libraries are sometimes constrained by the referenda of persons who believe all government would inflate taxes to a soul-crushing level to fund their socialist agendas. (Thank you kindly, sir, for your guarantee that no library system will be able to keep up with the cost of inflation, and therefore we have to go to a vote every so often to ask if we can please actually fund ourselves to continue providing services to everyone. A vote that we have to put up significant money for to get on the ballot and then essentially get a supermajority of a supermajority to vote yes for. And that's only after there have been several good years of prosperity so that there's enough capacity between what we're levying now and our mandated maximum that it's actually worth our while to ask the voters to let us fund ourselves properly. I'm sure that you have fantasies tht you're going to be one of the elect in Galt's Gulch, but odds are good that if things collapse and we can blame you for it, we will.)
Ahem. It's fairly easy to appear desperate in one way or another, if you aren't sure whether you'll have enough money to stay open and staffed, and even more so if you're already in enough of a budget crunch where you have to close your branches for at least one day a week, as the local metropolitan system has to. Exceptional service will keep the library in people's minds, and so they'll remember to fund you when the time comes, and they'll check things out and use your computers and otherwise contribute to the quantitative metrics that have to be large enough to ensure your continued existence when a person who has no idea what value a library has asks for justification of why you should continue to exist. If you're lucky, maybe they'll even leave a comment or a letter that you can use as that almost-always elusive qualitative feedback and justification that the library should continue to exist.
Ahem. In search of things that will continue to give the library continued reasons for existence in the minds of people who don't work there, librarians are constantly looking for new services to provide, ways to upgrade their current services, and are routinely exhorted to give as much help as they can to someone, within the boundaries of what the library can reasonably be expected to provide. Of course, "reasonable" is a word that has a lot of room for maneuverability in it, and theree are people who are poised to try and take advantage of that, one way or another. They often come in a couple of forms.
- The person who is utterly helpless without your help.
People are still afraid of technology, even if that technology has been around in one form or another for thiry years now. Some people are terrified at the idea of having to create a resume and submit applications to online job sites, because they last time they did anything of the sort, one used a Remington, or possibly a Selectric, to type up the resume and the application and then delivered it (or put it in the mail) to a person at the company one wanted to work for, who would review the application, cover letter, resume, and the like, and then make a decision about it. These days, there are more than enough stories about algorithms being used to screen the first round of applicants, automatically rejecting anyone who doesn't satisfy an unknown set of keywords that the algorithm is looking for in the documentation.
Other stories abound of people whose identities were stolen, or their computers destroyed, or otherwise everything going wrong with their life because they visited the wrong website or pushed the wrong key on the keyboard and everything was deleted without hope of recovery. I get that. I'm nervous about social interactions exploding irrevocably on me because of something I said or did that was the exact wrong thing to do at the worst possible time to do it. Some amount of experience, though, with things going kind of pear-shaped and getting recovered helps to tamp that fear down into something that's more manageable. And it's comforting to have a familiar person there to talk to in case things don't go as well as one might have hoped. However, it would be generally acknowledged as an issue, possibly even a disability requiring accommodation, depending, if I were to become the kind of person that couldn't go out and do social interaction without having a familiar person there all the time. If I were to become that kind of person, it would be unreasonable for me to expect a librarian to be my social companion while I was at the library trying to get things done. Because the librarian has other people to help, and other parts of their job to do, and is probably not trained in being a comfort companion.
Yet, there are people who will ask for how to get on to the Internet, and then will come back in a couple minutes saying the don't understand how to do it, and then a couple more minutes later after you've explained it saying they tried and they don't understand how to do it, and a couple minutes later after you explained to them and they were able to click on the icons to open the web browser that they don't know how to get to their e-mail from the library page, and couldn't you just do this for them because they don't know anything about computers and it would just be faster for you to do it anyway?
A person that does this might get away with it once, maybe twice, per staff person if nobody communicates, or we assume that the person was having an off day when they came in the last time. But library staff do talk with each other about the people who are likely to cause them difficulties, and while that person will not be turned away, as that would be denying access to something they may desperately need, there's a high probability that all of their pleading with staff to do it for them will come to no result as staff very patiently explain to this person over (and over) what the procedure is for them to do it themselves, as staff need to be available for the other people using the library as well. For the most part, though, this kind of person that wants staff to do things for them that they are capable of doing will learn how to have healthy interactions with the staff or will start bringing someone with them to help them achieve their goals. - The person that thinks the library should join them in their cause.
There are a lot of people who want to use the library to promote themselves or their organizations. Generally, we let anyone who isn't conducting commercial business use the library meeting rooms, and we have database access for those looking for segment data or demographics that will help them target their idea better to the audience that might be willing to purchase their good or service. We also maintain a bulletin board of things of interest to the community, which sometimes seems to have people advertising various services and classes as well as events by other non-profits in the area. We do information, after all, and our space is open to the public, and there's the very heavy disclaimer that stuff that appears as community events is not endorsed by the library nor sponsored by it. We do not take partisan political stances about anything, although we will advocate for ourselves to get funded and we will have official opinions on things that are within the purview of the library, like censorship, intellectual freedom, net neutrality, and whether or not the FBI has visited us seeking your records, barring gag orders and the like. Regardless of what our personal opinions are about groups, works, candidates, issues, and other such things, the public library is staunchly nonpartisan and committed to giving people accurate information about political goings-on and events in the locality, country, or the world. (See previous entry about what happens when someone wants the library to validate a worldview that is not supported by facts and/or does not have a corpus of writing that can be summoned.) We are also in the business of teaching people how to do this kind of information evaluation for themselves.
In any case, because of these stances, the library occasionally has to tell someone looking for an endorsement of their particular cause, their book, their material, or their community event that we don't do that. When we partner with a group, or hire a person in to do a program, we make our own publicity, we bill it as a library program (in partnership with or sponsored by another organization, if need be) and we try to make sure that it's not something that is going to unbalance our nonpartisan standpoint. Odds are, if you want the library t help you, you should make the case for working together to the appropriate people in the administration following the procedure that we have outlined, or talk to them at coalition and group meetings in the community that you are both a part of. Same thing for people who want the library to buy their book - there's a procedure to submit your book for consideration. Many people who come in looking for our seal of approval are satisfied with the community board and knowing where the steps are to request consideration or partnership or other working relationships. Some don't, but we have rules of behavior to handle those situations if they should escalate to having a need for them.
Many of these kinds of conversations are things library school doesn't teach, because while they can give you a general sense of issues, topics, and the library position on them, you then have to deal with the actual policies of your organization, and the people who are writing those policies and looking at you to make sure you enforce them the way they want you to, regardless of what your own professional ethics might say about it. And library school does tend to assume that the people coming to ask you for help are going to be able to use it, rather than trying to get you to do it for them instead. Something about plans never surviving contact with the public, if I wanted to repurpose a quote for my own needs.
