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silveradept[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.]
redsixwing asked how many functions a library has. The true answer to that question is "however many people the library serves," because each person uses the library in their own personal way. Now, you can group those people fairly broadly (and we do, based on the anonymized usage data we collect) according to the general form of their primary usage, but really, each person uses the library in their own individual way, in what works best for them.
The first group are the scholars, those that use the library to advance their knowledge and use the library as "the people's university", or to find what they need to get their homework done. These are the "original" library users, the people for whom the Carnegie libraries and many of the dead white dudes that are part of history promoted the public library. These days, we have a lot more than homework help available for people to learn with, much of it digital, but plenty still in books. And a public library doesn't have the resources of the academic and school library to specialize a collection of things that will be helpful to the students.
There are, then, the entertainment folks, who come to the library because we're certainly cheaper than any streaming or rental service, and definitely more so than cable. They don't mind the artificial wait times imposed on us but studios for movies and television, and they make good use of us as a way of trying out things along with keeping up on their favorite shows, especially the ones that air on the premium cable channels and are about time-traveling women who get married in the past and future. There are also the readers, who do much the same as the entertainment folks, just with books instead of movies.
There are grownups accompanying and attempting to shape the reading decisions of children, with varying degrees of success, who often come to the library because it's a lot cheaper to use the collection that's already been bought than to buy up every book that a child wants to read at anywhere from seven to twenty dollars a book. They also bring the smallest ones to storytime, which not only lets the grownups talk with each other about parenting and other shared interests, but also provides the little ones with positive experiences in social settings and with rhyme, song, and text that will be crucial to helping them get ready for reading and schooling. (Storytime is very important for everyone, and is often the first experience a person gets of a library.)
There are teenagers and after school people here because they can't go home yet and they're not participating in anything that will keep them at school or elsewhere between school and when they can go home. Many of them game, draw, do homework, or check their social media sites with their access.
And then there's a group that, most broadly, has been affected by an outside force in their lives, and needs to adjust to the new reality. The low-stakes version of this is the person who has received a technological gadget, usually as a gift, and is now in a much higher-tech world than they were before, often without choosing to engage in it. A lot of people are concerned they will break the device, or that they will end up doing something that will cause their personal information to be stolen by nefarious actors. They don't know that devices these days are often locked to the point where it's really difficult to break them permanently, and that many of the things you can do to protect yourself are learnable. The library contains people who are generally closer to their age and who can explain the new device, offer the basics in how to use it, and provide context on what kinds of things can be done with it, including what the library offers for their new devices. Without sounding like these people are somehow less intelligent because they're not completely up to date on the latest tech.
There's a higher-stakes version of this group as well, and they tend to appear when the economy goes down, or if you're in an area that's not particularly affluent. Job-seekers use the library a lot, because we have internet access. Most job applications are online, and a person who last had to apply for a job when typewriters were the accepted technology is often lost trying to navigate creating job agents, profiles, recreating their resume, having an email address to receive replies to, and using networking and social media to source prospects, do research, and otherwise navigate the way the job world works now.
And then there's the unemployment insurance system to make sure that someone doesn't end up starving or homeless while they are looking for work. (Actually, libraries in general have a lot of people who are homeless and need a place to stay during the day when the shelters aren't.) And paperwork that someone might need to fill out for immigration purposes, or because they found work and have to get all those forms in. Or they're taking classes online and need someone to proctor their examinations so they can get a(nother) degree and find different work.
And that's the one that come to my location. Someone else may have a completely different mix of people and tasks they want to accomplish. Each library is composed of and reflects the community around it. Until you're in the middle of the community, you won't understand it fully. Library school gives a good go at what you can generally expect, but it often assumes that the people you're working with are going to be as good at things as you are...or that they know nothing at all, and neither of those options are really true.
redsixwing asked how many functions a library has. The true answer to that question is "however many people the library serves," because each person uses the library in their own personal way. Now, you can group those people fairly broadly (and we do, based on the anonymized usage data we collect) according to the general form of their primary usage, but really, each person uses the library in their own individual way, in what works best for them.The first group are the scholars, those that use the library to advance their knowledge and use the library as "the people's university", or to find what they need to get their homework done. These are the "original" library users, the people for whom the Carnegie libraries and many of the dead white dudes that are part of history promoted the public library. These days, we have a lot more than homework help available for people to learn with, much of it digital, but plenty still in books. And a public library doesn't have the resources of the academic and school library to specialize a collection of things that will be helpful to the students.
There are, then, the entertainment folks, who come to the library because we're certainly cheaper than any streaming or rental service, and definitely more so than cable. They don't mind the artificial wait times imposed on us but studios for movies and television, and they make good use of us as a way of trying out things along with keeping up on their favorite shows, especially the ones that air on the premium cable channels and are about time-traveling women who get married in the past and future. There are also the readers, who do much the same as the entertainment folks, just with books instead of movies.
There are grownups accompanying and attempting to shape the reading decisions of children, with varying degrees of success, who often come to the library because it's a lot cheaper to use the collection that's already been bought than to buy up every book that a child wants to read at anywhere from seven to twenty dollars a book. They also bring the smallest ones to storytime, which not only lets the grownups talk with each other about parenting and other shared interests, but also provides the little ones with positive experiences in social settings and with rhyme, song, and text that will be crucial to helping them get ready for reading and schooling. (Storytime is very important for everyone, and is often the first experience a person gets of a library.)
There are teenagers and after school people here because they can't go home yet and they're not participating in anything that will keep them at school or elsewhere between school and when they can go home. Many of them game, draw, do homework, or check their social media sites with their access.
And then there's a group that, most broadly, has been affected by an outside force in their lives, and needs to adjust to the new reality. The low-stakes version of this is the person who has received a technological gadget, usually as a gift, and is now in a much higher-tech world than they were before, often without choosing to engage in it. A lot of people are concerned they will break the device, or that they will end up doing something that will cause their personal information to be stolen by nefarious actors. They don't know that devices these days are often locked to the point where it's really difficult to break them permanently, and that many of the things you can do to protect yourself are learnable. The library contains people who are generally closer to their age and who can explain the new device, offer the basics in how to use it, and provide context on what kinds of things can be done with it, including what the library offers for their new devices. Without sounding like these people are somehow less intelligent because they're not completely up to date on the latest tech.
There's a higher-stakes version of this group as well, and they tend to appear when the economy goes down, or if you're in an area that's not particularly affluent. Job-seekers use the library a lot, because we have internet access. Most job applications are online, and a person who last had to apply for a job when typewriters were the accepted technology is often lost trying to navigate creating job agents, profiles, recreating their resume, having an email address to receive replies to, and using networking and social media to source prospects, do research, and otherwise navigate the way the job world works now.
And then there's the unemployment insurance system to make sure that someone doesn't end up starving or homeless while they are looking for work. (Actually, libraries in general have a lot of people who are homeless and need a place to stay during the day when the shelters aren't.) And paperwork that someone might need to fill out for immigration purposes, or because they found work and have to get all those forms in. Or they're taking classes online and need someone to proctor their examinations so they can get a(nother) degree and find different work.
And that's the one that come to my location. Someone else may have a completely different mix of people and tasks they want to accomplish. Each library is composed of and reflects the community around it. Until you're in the middle of the community, you won't understand it fully. Library school gives a good go at what you can generally expect, but it often assumes that the people you're working with are going to be as good at things as you are...or that they know nothing at all, and neither of those options are really true.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 07:30 pm (UTC)One thing a lot of people don't realise is that a lot of social service access has moved solely online - and there are still a non-trivial number of people who don't have broadband access at home (and phones don't work well for long forms or many things which require evidence submitted in a particular way.)
The Pew Internet Research factsheet from January 2017 says 73% have home broadband in the US, and that number is only about 50% for people over 65. Here's additional data from them from September 2016.
In terms of other kinds of libraries, here's the ones I've worked at:
Independent school library:
Used by students (during free periods and during scheduled classes), a chunk of our use at that time revolved around managing laptops and computer lab schedules. (They went to a 1:1 computer program just after I left.)
Mix of personal entertainment reading, materials for class projects/papers, and videos/dvds for use by teachers, plus random stuff like a classroom poster and map collection, and about 40 magazines.
Small state university system campus in a very rural area:
Student and faculty use for course materials, but also non-trivial use by local community members who wanted computer access (I left there 2.5 years ago, and it was still very common not to have 'Net access at home if you lived more than a mile or two outside the center of town.)
We were down the block from the local public library, but had more computers, longer hours, and more staff than they did, so...
(One of the challenges for librarians with this kind of set up is figuring out how to send boundaries of what you help with and what you don't, because some of the community patrons would suck up as much time as you would give them, repeatedly. And on one hand, they needed it.
On the other hand, the state paid my salary to do specific things for students at that campus, and faculty and staff, and my time was not infinite. There's also a complicated dance of 'having one staff member help with a tech issue makes some patrons feel any staff member can help with that kind of thing, which is not great for anyone when only one or two staff members are able to do that out of a dozen')
Current job: Research Library attached to an institution that includes a school.
75%+ of our questions come in by email, about 5% by phone, and most of the rest are staff who wander in looking for a book. It's a really weird job in that we deal with a niche topic (the thing the organisation does, basically), there are few other libraries anything like us who deal with the topic, and yet, we get questions from everything from 4th graders to professionals in the field to academic researchers.
One of the complicated things my library school did not prepare me for (but other volunteer work not in libraries did, fortunately) is how to handle the people who are sure they have an amazing thing, but develop Saviour Tendencies about it, and keep pushing you to do a thing.
(My email this week included someone pushing about someone else getting back to him, about establishing a project literally half way around the world, for a specialised thing that even the US is not handling particularly elegantly right now. I totally agree it's a thing that needs more help! But the way to do that is not to badger people who already have a bunch of other things going, and especially not when I've explicitly said "I've passed your message on to X, but I know she's travelling a lot and in the midst of a big launch for Y")
Anyway, that kind of topic management, not a thing my library school did a lot with, and I'm curious about your experiences there,
no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 09:49 pm (UTC)Most of our time-takers are the people who will stare at the computers, so afraid of them that they're convinced they know nothing and that anything they do will cause the computer to eat their work and they'll have to start over again. It can be frustrating when you know that the person you just helped will be back in three minutes because they saw you help them with a specific thing and now they need to do this similar but not exactly the same thing and they didn't grasp the general form of what you are doing, even after you helped them through four or five of the specifics.
Our pushiest people are the ones who have their own book and very blithely assume that because they're local and they have a book, that we'll fall all over ourselves to buy it and put it in the library. (I realize that your current workplace has different collection development priorities, and so that might, in fact, be true for you, if it fits within your scope.) The selectors have foreseen this, however, and have a very nice instruction sheet that we can give to someone that explains what they can do if they want us to consider buying their work.
I'm not sure what you mean by topic management, though, in the last sentence. Could you clarify that for me so I can give a coherent response?
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 01:25 am (UTC)We do in fact collect self-published stuff if it otherwise fits in our subject area (which explains why I looked at a self-pubbed book - that I think is fiction but it is not entirely clear - about someone who has the impairment that we collect about, and his abduction by aliens and went "You know, I bet we're the only library on the planet where this explicitly fits our collection guidelines." We don't seek those out, but if they get donated, we'll add them.)
Re: topic management - I meant the 'how to handle the people who want to insist on you helping with things outside the scope of the library's services and/or manage the people who want all your time for services you do provide in moderate amounts.
(Or things like the thing a lot of public libraries have, the person who calls the reference line persistently. Sometimes they're just lonely and want desperately to talk to someone, and ask sort of absurd questions to keep the conversation going, but sometimes they get creepy.)
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 05:33 am (UTC)I do find it a bit interesting that your library is open to collecting everything on its particular topic or on people related to the institution. I'm sure the archivist also attached to the institution has a few headscratchers on some of the things on offer that are still within the collection development policy for artifacts.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 01:18 pm (UTC)But the archives are much newer (they were only officially formed in 2011) so their collection policy was much more deliberate than the Research Library, which grew out of 'let's buy everything vaguely relevant on the topic while we're travelling!' (See also: 19th century, oh, 19th century...)
Which on the one hand means we have all sorts of random pamphlets and small booklets that no one else kept, but on the other hand means that I feel like continuing the collection with an eye to having the same kind of representation of material for the research librarian 50 years from now about now means adding the occaisional book about alien abductions written by an alum.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 07:37 pm (UTC)I tend to focus on the unemployment / social uses of a library, so it's really cool to see a wider perspective.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 09:34 pm (UTC)We have a community group that uses our meeting room to hold an interfaith discussion, another that focuses on relatives raising children, and plenty of HOAs hold their business meetings in our rooms, too. There's a tremendous amount of community activity that goes on at the library on any given day.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 09:07 pm (UTC)Also: +1
no subject
Date: 2017-12-06 09:28 pm (UTC)