Category: Experience

Rookie Librarian: Pro Tip

Heather (she/her)

Every day for a month, I’ve come to work excited about it! I have my own desk with a plant. Our members are still congratulating me on my new role. I’ve already pitched two ideas that I’m currently working on bringing to fruition with my library director’s support and my colleagues’ collaboration. I have the kind of job that allows me to wear heels, to carry a briefcase bag, and (within a range) to dress either up or down depending on my mood. I get (most) evenings and weekends off. Certain parts of my job include using InDesign to publish newsletters and learning Drupal to make websites and analyzing/organizing statistics and reading books and reading about books. People ask me questions and I can almost always answer them right away. My coworkers are interesting and amazing people. There’s a farmer’s market across the street every Thursday. What’s NOT to be excited about? I love this job!

But that’s not to say there hasn’t been a learning curve. The first day of work, I reported to the library manager to get the skinny on how to approach day one. When I did the same thing on day two, along with a report of the previous day’s progress, she very politely explained that unless I ask her for help on something, she’ll assume I’m doing fine, i.e., I don’t owe her an account of how I spend my day accomplishing my work. On day three, I found out that I wasn’t supposed to be reporting to her at all. The library director is my boss, not the manager.

I’m sure that those already in professional roles might indulge in a huge eye roll at my naiveté, but I previously worked jobs which involved the boss telling you where to be, when and for how long, and what to do in that time/place. At the public library, for instance, there’s an hour-by-hour schedule posted for each person, every workday. It worked really well for the kind of work we did in that role. This is the major difference I’ve found between paraprofessional work and professional work: paraprofessional work in a library setting is typically task-based, whereas professional work is project-based.

This work environment might be a bit disorienting for library school students and rookie librarians like myself. We’re accustomed to getting feedback from classmates on discussion boards or from professors in the form of grades. But in another way, library school well-prepares one for taking on professional work — in that it, too, is project-based. I have a cache of skills to draw on when I’m tasked with managing the library’s fiction collection, for instance, partly because Wayne Disher, my stellar professor of collection development, assigned projects like evaluating library communities in terms of both current and potential users, building budgeted purchase plans, generating circulation statistical reports, and advocating for our collection needs by developing oral presentations.

During my first week, I worried (just a bit) that I might run out of tasks. Week two, I decided that instead of worrying about it, I’d make more work! I’ve taken on added responsibilities, proposed a couple of new ideas, started learning new tools, offered my skill sets to help colleagues, and I’m figuring out how to make my new projects my own. Because of the work I did in grad school, it hasn’t taken me very long to acclimate. There is liberation in working with people who trust that you know what to do and will succeed at the work you put your hands to. That’s probably where this daily euphoria about starting my workday originates. A job that makes a person happy is one that affords a measure of autonomy, allows you to use your existing strengths, and to gain new skills.

Me & this librarian thing? I think it’s going to work out!

Rookie Librarian: Mechanics’ Institute Library

Heather (she/her)

It’s official: beginning August 3rd, I will be the Public Services Librarian at Mechanics’ Institute Library. I’ll be maintaining library statistics, co-administering book groups, scheduling classes, and co-designing library displays. I’ll be assigned collection management for certain subject areas as well, but these haven’t been ironed out yet. I’m looking forward to working with all of my colleagues, learning new skills, putting my education into practice, and transitioning from my paraprofessional library roles to this professional one.

Tomorrow is my last day at SFPL, and over the two weeks while I’ve been working there knowing I’ll be leaving, I’ve had a few moments of “I’m gonna miss this place” pre-emptive nostalgia. I’ve gained insight from my co-workers at SFPL, and developed more patience and empathy while working with patrons.

With my first professional position in sight, I admit that my anxiety is kicking in — a crisis of confidence, of the “what if I’m not good at this” variety. My brain knows I’ll do well in my new role, but my inner perfectionist has to be reminded that yes, I might will make some blunders — especially at the start. The key is to know that I’ll make mistakes, take them in stride when I do, and engage in post-mortem analysis to glean lessons from each misstep. That anxiety, of course, is mixed with a lot of eagerness. I attended my first librarians’ meeting yesterday (just before working my last Library Assistant shift at MIL — !!), and came away feeling enthusiastic to work with this intelligent, engaged, and interesting group of people.

nervous + excited = ready!

2015 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award

Heather (she/her)

I’ve been named the winner of the 2015 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award. The piece, “Reference is dead, long live reference: electronic collections in the digital age,” was adapted from a paper I wrote last semester, kind of an intersection of collection management and reference services.

It’s an argumentative essay of sorts, suggesting that there is a false dichotomy between electronic and print reference collections, that — contrary to what seems to be a worry about the impending irrelevance of library reference services — there is no cause for alarm: choosing reference sources based on user preferences and information needs is as paramount as it’s always been. I argue that the proliferation of digital reference sources is a positive development in provision of up-to-date, accurate reference information. I specifically address issues like access, reliability, and user preference.

The paper is forthcoming in Information Technology and Libraries, a peer-reviewed publication of Library & Information Technology Association. I am particularly excited about this award and publication because I plan to continue working and writing in the information/library field going forward, and this win is another step in that direction!

100 Days: Craft & Process

Heather (she/her)

#100DaysofHaiku

The 100 Day Project is “not about fetishizing finished products — it’s about the process,” i.e., showing up, trying, learning, and improving skills via dedication to making something — anything.

Participants will post their daily practice via instagram, and follow one another’s work as they go. I’ve decided to participate, taking this opportunity to learn more about writing something I’m not in the habit of writing: haiku.

luna-so-now-what

Illustration by Elle Luna from The Crossroads of Should and Must

Allure of the Unknown

The perceived simplicity of the haiku — 17 syllables, in the western form 3 lines flat— is a deception. As in all poetry, the condensation of language into a tightly wound ball of meaning is much more difficult than it might appear. It’s like distilling a thing to its essence — a process of squeezing, separating, boiling an idea down to its purest form.

Among other things, I’m a writer, and this form is something I’ve always wanted to try. My expectation is that learning to write haiku will build my capacity for revising, for choosing the best words to convey meaning, and as an added bonus, will require me to pay attention to the things I see, experience, and feel in order to develop these poems.

Modus Operandi

The traditional haiku uses a kiru (“cutting word”) as a kind of punctuation which illuminates the relationship between the two images or ideas juxtaposed in the text. The seventeen syllables are split 5/7/5, and there is a seasonal reference, e.g., “frog” referring to spring, which was traditionally selected from an extensive list of seasonal words called sajiiki.

Modern haiku do not necessarily adhere to the 17-syllable rule or the 5/7/5 format. In terms of content, the classic nature reference has been superseded by direct observation or everyday occurrence. I plan to refer to several books on writing and studying haiku, as well as reading the masters, in order to develop and hone the craft.

Declaration of Intent

In the next hundred days, I will write 100 haiku. The haiku I write may not be good, but every beginner starts by not doing the thing she’s beginning very well. The way she ends depends on her persistence and attention to craft.

Your mother always said practice makes perfect. As it turns out, practice can be its own reward. Celebrating the process of learning and doing is the goal of this project. Join in, follow along, and see what happens.

Shelf-Reading Chronicles Part I: A-C

Heather (she/her)

Shelf-reading — I’ve never met anyone who loves doing it, but it’s an essential collection management activity. Making sure that every book is in its proper order on the shelf ensures that patrons can access the materials libraries purchase for their use. If the catalog directs a patron to the book she wants on so-and-so shelf in such-and-such order and it’s not actually there? UGH. It makes everyone cranky, and rightly so.

Shelf-reading (looking at every book on the shelf and putting those that are out of order back into order) is an unenviable but necessary job, so I never mind doing it. I much prefer it to having to let a patron know that the book they want should be on the shelf, but just isn’t.

Added bonus? Every time I read the shelves, I find books I’d like to read. Granted, I find more than I can reasonably read in a lifetime, but now and then I find one that becomes a favorite. It’s how I found both David Levithan and Cormac McCarthy — two very different authors, who’ve written some of my favorite books.

I’ve been reading the fiction shelves at one of my libraries in 30-minute increments in the last month, and I’m halfway through the C authors. Here are a few books the publishing industry isn’t necessarily rushing out to promote that I’m adding to my “To Read” list.

I, City

  • Between two seas / Carmine Abate ; translated by Antony Shugaar / The photographer Hans Heumann travels to southern Italy in search of the light that has long attracted artists. There he meets Giorgio Bellusci, who dreams of rebuilding the south’s most famous inn. The dark secret behind Giorgio’s obsession will change the course of both men’s lives.
  • The king of trees / Ah Cheng ; translated by Bonnie S. McDougall / When the three novellas in The King of Trees were published separately in China in the 1980s, “Ah Cheng fever” spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships.
  • Cellophane / Marie Arana / Don Victor Sobrevilla, a lovable, eccentric engineer, always dreamed of founding a paper factory in the heart of the Peruvian rain forest, and at the opening of this miraculous novel his dream has come true—until he discovers the recipe for cellophane…A hilarious plague of truth has descended on the once well-behaved Sobrevillas, only the beginning of this brilliantly realized, generous-hearted novel.
  • Skylark Farm / Antonia Arslan ; translated by Geoffrey Brock / A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915. Antonia Arslan draws on the story of her own family to tell the story of Skylark Farm. She has transformed the “obscure memories” that are her heritage into a novel as lyrical and poignant as a fable.
  • A kind of intimacy / Jenn Ashworth / A darkly comic tale, A Kind of Intimacy is an offbeat and ironic study of misunderstandings. It traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry, and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster.
  • The Yacoubian building / Alaa Al Aswany ; translated by Humphrey Davies / All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed “scientist of women”; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires. These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion.
  • I, city / Pavel Brycz ; translated by Joshua Cohen & Markéta Hofmeisterová / I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally relocated to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their appearances in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite—though noiseless—appearance.
  • My mother never dies : stories / Claire Castillon ; translated by Alison Anderson / Nineteen stunning, disturbing short stories delve into the complex relationship between mothers and daughters. In My Mother Never Dies, the literary provocateur Claire Castillon dissects the darkest aspects of the relationship between mothers and daughters. Stunning, shocking, unflinching, and ultimately tender, My Mother Never Dies forces us to look at the worst and best of mothers and daughters. Like the work of Miranda July and A.M.Homes, Castillon won’t let us avert our gaze from the terrible and true any more than from the beautiful and true— because it all reveals the depth of our need for each other.
  • And let the earth tremble at its centers / Gonzalo Celorio ; translated by Dick Gerdes / Professor Juan Manuel Barrientos prefers footsteps to footnotes. Fighting a hangover, he manages to keep his appointment to lead a group of students on a walking lecture among the historic buildings of downtown Mexico City. When the students fail to show up, however, he undertakes a solo tour that includes more cantinas than cathedrals. Unable to resist either alcohol itself or the introspection it inspires, Professor Barrientos muddles his personal past with his historic surroundings, setting up an inevitable conclusion in the very center of Mexico City.
  • How to be a good wife / Emma Chapman / Marta and Hector have been married for a long time, through the good and bad. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself.
  • Green mountain, white cloud / François Cheng ; translated by Timothy Bent / In a medieval abbey near Paris, in a room piled high with old Chinese texts, lies a manuscript gathering dust. Though ordinary in appearance, it first captures the eye of the narrator of François Cheng’s novel. Then, once he begins to read, it captures his imagination and his heart. The book dates from the mid-seventeenth century, during the twilight of the Ming Dynasty. Barbarian armies are massing along the Empire’s Northern borders, and a vast and sophisticated civilization — during whose heyday China had begun to emerge from its long isolation and undergone an explosion in the arts equal in its way to Europe’s Renaissance — teeters on the brink of monumental and perhaps catastrophic change. Yet rather than filled with lore of military heroism, or with tales of palace intrigue, or with nostalgic memories of better days, the book tells a simple and very powerful love story.

*attribution: book summaries taken from publisher blurbs via Goodreads; some have been truncated; image of I, City sourced from alibris.

Reading Lessons; Leading Lessons

Heather (she/her)

Facilitating a book group can be daunting. So, naturally, I wanted to try it.

I submitted a proposal for a short stories book group six months ago, and my library thought it was a good idea. I designed a flyer, wrote a blog post and newsletter blurb to introduce the group, and selected six books for the reading group’s trial period.

  • The Progress of Love / Alice Munro
  • Fragile Things / Neil Gaiman
  • Vampires in the Lemon Grove / Karen Russell
  • A Better Angel / Chris Adrian
  • The Dog of the Marriage / Amy Hempel
  • This is How You Lose Her / Junot Diaz

I made several mistakes, but during the book group’s introductory period I’ve learned much about supporting readers in a group discussion setting. Preparation is key, but the right level of participation and the right book are equally important aspects of a flourishing fledgling book group.

Preparation

The leader needs to prepare by knowing the basics of the author’s biography and developing open-ended questions that pique readers’ interest. It goes without saying, the discussion leader must have read the book. If there’s time to read it twice (once for pleasure, and one close reading of the text), forming questions will be much easier. It’s essential to read reviews of the book — at the very least those in major sources like The New York Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, and New York Review of Books. Many ideas about theme, character, and plot will surface in the reading of reviews — and these elements formed the basis of every list of questions I developed for my group. When developing questions, think in terms of how a reader interacts with a book. When learning how to devise questions for a book group, I started with LitLovers “How To Talk About a Book” article.

Participation

The discussion leader’s role is to get group members talking to one another — asking a variety of questions, interjecting when a theme is being touched on by several group members but isn’t explicitly recognized by any of them, and/or turning the conversation when one member begins to dominate. It’s important to adapt the discussion to the group — considering the group’s size, members’ interests, previous reading experience, et cetera.

My major rookie mistake was assuming that I needed to have answers to all of the questions I posed, and to contribute those opinions to the discussion. To avoid developing a pedagogical tone for the group, the leader should hang back, let the readers drive the discussion, and steer mainly when it veers off topic. The leader should be flexible with the question list — favorite topics may not garner the enthusiasm the leader might have hoped for, the group may not even get to all the questions on the leader’s list, and members may come up with insights very different from those the facilitator has anticipated.

On the other end of the spectrum, the leader should always be prepared to discuss the work in depth, one on one. I once had a single member show up for the group — it was a rainy night, there was a popular event happening in the adjacent room, and parking in the Financial District was especially bad. Though intimidated, I approached the situation as if I were meeting a friend for coffee to talk about a book we’d both read. I posed a single question to get us started, and a true tête-à-tête ensued from there. It was a successful meeting despite an attendance of one.

Selection

A word on book selection: choose materials with broad appeal, especially for the introductory period. My members’ favorite collections were those by Alice Munro, Karen Russell, and Junot Diaz. On the other hand, it’s also worth keeping in mind that even if everyone hates the book, a good discussion might ensue. Don’t shy away from challenging your group with something they may not find accessible. For example, Amy Hempel is one of my favorite authors, but the readers who attended the discussion of The Dog of the Marriage announced immediately that they did not like the collection. I asked pointed questions as we dissected the book story-by-story, and as the hour progressed, attendees talked at great length about the stories’ complexity. At the end of the discussion, one member asked whether I liked the book; when I revealed that it was one of my top ten favorite books of all time, the group reacted with shock and awe. From my perspective, it was a coup that they couldn’t tell what my opinion was throughout the conversation — and that we had engaged in a sophisticated discussion of the themes and details of Hempel’s delicate work despite the group’s collective “dislike” of the book.

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The most important thing I’ve learned about leading a reading group is to think of it as a discussion, because that’s what it is — an exploration of the worlds contained within words. Each meeting will be different based on who’s in attendance and the book on the table. Strong familiarity with the book, respect for each members’ contributions, a willingness to let the discussion unfold, and the ability to adapt to readers’ interests are essential in building a thriving reading group.