[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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redsixwing wanted to know what's the best thing in a library that I've ever seen. While there are a lot of rally neat things that I've seen in libraries, picking just one of something that I've seen someone else do, or that I've read about, would be like playing favorites with a child, and I'm sure that as soon as I wrote what it was, something else would happen that topped it or reminded me of some other cool thing, and then I would either need to edit or be bummed out that I didn't remember the Cool Thing.
So, instead, I'm answering the question in a way that allows me to sidestep what someone else has done and instead talk about myself. Because frankly, just about everything a public library does for their people is the best thing in a library that I have ever seen, because they're probably doing it better than I can, and I'm jealous of the fact they're doing it and we aren't. Even though budgets and staffing and all the other things that you wave away when you're in the throes of "but I waaaaaaaant it." (Support your library, friends.)
So, this particular story is all the way back at the beginning of my library career, as the freshly-minted librarian takes the first people who have said yes (on the strength of the story that I told them in my video interview, apparently, as I found out this year.) and is at their first all-staff day within a month of joining the library system. (All-staff days would disappear as the economy went to splat, having first been recast as learning in-services days, before coming back a year or two ago, still as a learning in-service day, and then a nearly-all-staff meeting this year.) This year, the library has brought in some entertainment for the staff to balance out all the work that's being done in telling us all about the high-level, systemwide things that are coming for us. The entertainment for this year is an improv comedy group from one of the major metropolitan areas within a day's drive of our location, and they're quite good at what they do, and at knowing their audience.
The time comes in the show where they improv group is looking for a volunteer to join them on the stafe and participate in some of the comedy. Now, this year, it turns out, our organization has hired on a new second-in-command to the library system, and while there's nobody that's willing to volunteer, they are all of the opinion that the new bigwig is the perfect target to be volunteered onto the stage to participate in the routine. This sounds like a good plan, except for one tiny thing.
After a little bit of this suggestion, the improv troupe reveals one of their rules about volunteering: "If you volunteer someone else, you volunteer yourself." Cue crickets from nearly all of the audience. And one librarian, realizing that the group isn't going to get their preferred person in place, that most of the people there are not willing to risk their own embarassment for some laughs, and that they're not particularly worried about it, because, hey, they're new anyway, decides to exercise their comedic timing by loudly volunteering the new bigwig, and saying yes, they volunteer when asked by the comedy guys if they're serious about doing it.
The game itself is fairly easy - a square of four people is made, and each of the pairs of people are each given a particular scene to act out, when their pair is up front. The person in charge of the game will randomly call for the square to rotate, putting a new pair up front and immediately changing the scene to whatever the new pair was given at the start. So, really, there's only two scenes to remember - the one where you're the person on the left and the one where you're the person on the right. Just keeping with the flow of the scenes, and being able to make call-backs to other things that have happened makes it funnier.
The game goes off perfectly well, with no major flubs and a lot of laughs, and at the very end, the professionals call for a round of applause for the volunteer.
And that's how I got to see the best thing I've seen that library school never prepared me for - how to make an unforgettable introduction that has the library system clapping for you at an all-staff day.
It's entirely possible that my introduction will end up being the best thing I've ever done at the library, in terms of recognition and applause, and that everything I've done since then has been downhill from that auspicious start. Not to mention that more than a few people who saw me that day have since gone on to other jobs, retirement, or haven't really met me past that day, because they've been working at locations that I don't get to go to all that much.I realize that the idea of the rock-star librarian is setting people up on a pedestal, which is a bad thing to do, but it would be nice to be recognized in a way that's not just the "yay, go you" things that we can send to each other for good things that happen in the system. Might help someone who has been scared in their previous times feel a little more like the library system recognizes them for the good things they've done.
Because here's a secret - like most customer-service professions, we rarely get commentary from people when we're doing our job wonderfully and people leave completely satisfied with their experience. We do get comments from people who have bad experiences. You have to be intrinsically motivated for library work, because the external feedback just isn't there. So if you want to make a library worker's day, when you've had a good interaction, document it, name names, and send it in. We get so precious few of them from the public that we tend to really like it a lot when they happen. That might very well be the best thing that we see all year.
redsixwing wanted to know what's the best thing in a library that I've ever seen. While there are a lot of rally neat things that I've seen in libraries, picking just one of something that I've seen someone else do, or that I've read about, would be like playing favorites with a child, and I'm sure that as soon as I wrote what it was, something else would happen that topped it or reminded me of some other cool thing, and then I would either need to edit or be bummed out that I didn't remember the Cool Thing. So, instead, I'm answering the question in a way that allows me to sidestep what someone else has done and instead talk about myself. Because frankly, just about everything a public library does for their people is the best thing in a library that I have ever seen, because they're probably doing it better than I can, and I'm jealous of the fact they're doing it and we aren't. Even though budgets and staffing and all the other things that you wave away when you're in the throes of "but I waaaaaaaant it." (Support your library, friends.)
So, this particular story is all the way back at the beginning of my library career, as the freshly-minted librarian takes the first people who have said yes (on the strength of the story that I told them in my video interview, apparently, as I found out this year.) and is at their first all-staff day within a month of joining the library system. (All-staff days would disappear as the economy went to splat, having first been recast as learning in-services days, before coming back a year or two ago, still as a learning in-service day, and then a nearly-all-staff meeting this year.) This year, the library has brought in some entertainment for the staff to balance out all the work that's being done in telling us all about the high-level, systemwide things that are coming for us. The entertainment for this year is an improv comedy group from one of the major metropolitan areas within a day's drive of our location, and they're quite good at what they do, and at knowing their audience.
The time comes in the show where they improv group is looking for a volunteer to join them on the stafe and participate in some of the comedy. Now, this year, it turns out, our organization has hired on a new second-in-command to the library system, and while there's nobody that's willing to volunteer, they are all of the opinion that the new bigwig is the perfect target to be volunteered onto the stage to participate in the routine. This sounds like a good plan, except for one tiny thing.
After a little bit of this suggestion, the improv troupe reveals one of their rules about volunteering: "If you volunteer someone else, you volunteer yourself." Cue crickets from nearly all of the audience. And one librarian, realizing that the group isn't going to get their preferred person in place, that most of the people there are not willing to risk their own embarassment for some laughs, and that they're not particularly worried about it, because, hey, they're new anyway, decides to exercise their comedic timing by loudly volunteering the new bigwig, and saying yes, they volunteer when asked by the comedy guys if they're serious about doing it.
The game itself is fairly easy - a square of four people is made, and each of the pairs of people are each given a particular scene to act out, when their pair is up front. The person in charge of the game will randomly call for the square to rotate, putting a new pair up front and immediately changing the scene to whatever the new pair was given at the start. So, really, there's only two scenes to remember - the one where you're the person on the left and the one where you're the person on the right. Just keeping with the flow of the scenes, and being able to make call-backs to other things that have happened makes it funnier.
The game goes off perfectly well, with no major flubs and a lot of laughs, and at the very end, the professionals call for a round of applause for the volunteer.
And that's how I got to see the best thing I've seen that library school never prepared me for - how to make an unforgettable introduction that has the library system clapping for you at an all-staff day.
It's entirely possible that my introduction will end up being the best thing I've ever done at the library, in terms of recognition and applause, and that everything I've done since then has been downhill from that auspicious start. Not to mention that more than a few people who saw me that day have since gone on to other jobs, retirement, or haven't really met me past that day, because they've been working at locations that I don't get to go to all that much.I realize that the idea of the rock-star librarian is setting people up on a pedestal, which is a bad thing to do, but it would be nice to be recognized in a way that's not just the "yay, go you" things that we can send to each other for good things that happen in the system. Might help someone who has been scared in their previous times feel a little more like the library system recognizes them for the good things they've done.
Because here's a secret - like most customer-service professions, we rarely get commentary from people when we're doing our job wonderfully and people leave completely satisfied with their experience. We do get comments from people who have bad experiences. You have to be intrinsically motivated for library work, because the external feedback just isn't there. So if you want to make a library worker's day, when you've had a good interaction, document it, name names, and send it in. We get so precious few of them from the public that we tend to really like it a lot when they happen. That might very well be the best thing that we see all year.
