St. Dorothy or the necessity of promoting your academic library.

Dorothy Parker ( Parker, Dorothy, 1893-1967 , per LOC authority file), of the famed NY Algonquin Round Table, is a Saint in my personal literary cannon. Acerbic, funny, morose, depressing, sad...she's probably one of my favorite female writers.

Anyway, one of the quips popularly attributed to her, when reputedly challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence goes something like: "Horticulture. You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." (play-on-words; horticulture = 'whore to culture').

Likewise, you can lead your students to your well stocked library and top-of-the-line databases, but you cannot make them READ (or think, for that matter). It won't do to simply point to the campus library and say "there's the library." and leave it at that. The Academic Library today has to engage in just as much self-promotion and raising reader awareness as the very best of our Public Libraries do. One of the things that always drove me up the wall about my last job is that my request(s) for certain or other print serials in Naval Science (mostly US Navy and US Coast Guard pubs) were shot down with the remark "we have that available online through vendor X"; Yeah, but do our PATRONS know that? We seemed to have all this great content online, but at most the outreach effort seemed confined to updating faculty, and leaving it up to them to pass the word along to their students--or not.

We did at least have a New Books shelf in the library, and a New Books search tab in our Voyager OPAC. These are absolute essentials for an academic library of any size, I think. The New Books tab is not a built in feature of the Voyager ILS, however. It is a well done hack by library leader Michael Doran, of UT-Arlington, whom I had the distinct pleasure of meeting at EndUser2006 in Chicago this year. I'll talk more about my personal highlights from EndUser2006 in a later post.

Public Services needs to be pro-active, and I'd say even a small academic library like the one I worked at needs at least 2 Reference librarians, one to cover the usual 8-to-5 day shift, another to cover afternoon/evenings and weekends. Maybe they could swap out from month to month. And they should be REQUIRED to sit AT the actual reference desk, accessible and out in the open at least a set number of hours per week, per day, and not hang out in their office all day and request students see them by appointment only. To be fair, the last public services librarian did at least help our students when they came to him for help; I saw students in his office often enough, getting help, etc. But I know he was so focused on electronic resources that the books were being neglected. Really, it wasn't my place, as Tech Services Librarian, to worry about that. It should've been the back-up Reference librarian's job. But there WAS no back-up Reference librarian, so I was it, and I *did* worry about it. The collection hadn't been weeded for...nobody could say how long it had been exactly. Now, I know that for the pure sciences, some of the basic stuff doesn't necessarily age that rapidly. But some of the stuff in the collection seemed embarassingly old/outdated. Likewise, browsing through the section on German history, I noticed the majority of what we had was about Hitler, the Nazis and the earlier Kaiserreich and that was just about it. I added some titles about former East Germany, since we had nothing on that topic at all.

I'm grateful that these books got displayed on the New Books shelf as soon as they were processed, but it seems to me the library could reach out beyond its walls and be a little more pro-active about advertising new books and new journals to students...how about fliers, how about a broadcast email on the campus Intranet? Something, at least.

Library displays are also important, but you have to keep them relevant and updated. In my last library, we had a display up for "Constitution Week", September 17 through September 23. It was still up when I was hired 24 October 2005. It was still up when I was dismissed 24 April 2006. Like a broken clock, it will be correct at least one week out of the year. I personally thought this made us look like fools, but I didn't raise a fuss because I was new and didn't want to step on any toes. Maybe most patrons didn't notice--or care, but any one who did think about it and looked up the actual dates for Constitution Week...well, what does it say about the library?! Sends the wrong message, to say the least.

Students did regularly clamor for a coffee bar, and while I'm not against it in principle, I am against just throwing one together without much thought or budget, as the main library at the university where I went to library school seemed to do. Is the coffee bar actually cozy, and conducive to reading, but also offset enough to not bother other patrons, yet still feel a part of the library? Is the lighting warm and subdued, like a real cafe? If it's normal, artificial fluorescent lighting, your coffee bar project is in trouble--trust me on that. But you also have to make extra sure to control for trash, uneaten foodstuffs, etc, because that will lure in insects and other pests and could cause you a preservation nightmare, giving your archivist(s) and/or special collections librarian and preservation librarian(s) a headache or heart-attack, depending on how much (or how little) forethought goes into the project. It's nice if the coffee bar generates a little extra revenue, but that ought NOT to be the primary motive for building one in an Academic library. The overarching university institution should be willing to run such an establishment at a net loss if it still ends up enhancing library services in non-tangible ways. This, I think, was the mistake made by my alma mater in northern Texas, and it was an assumption that guided the design and management of the coffee bar, which I really didn't like all that much. Sterling C. Evans Library, on the main campus at Texas A&M, has a really pleasant, well done coffee bar. It looks like it has a really nice atmosphere. I do happen to think it is perhaps a little TOO segregated from the rest of the library, but that may have been driven by preservation concerns, too. At least you can check out a book and then take it in with you to read. It's so popular, though, that the line can be quite long, and unless you get up pretty good and early, it can be tough to get couch space. Like the Yogi Berra-ism has it, "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."

I know that hard core catalogers would probably detest having the responsibility for it, but I think it does catalogers some good to get them out from behind their cubicles and plop them at the reference desk every once in awhile. Face it, nobody knows how to query the OPAC better than the catalogers do. It would give catalogers a chance to interract with the public that they are ultimately serving a little, and maybe get some feedback, without having to always rely on the regular Reference staff. I don't know about other catalogers, but I for one would welcome a chance in my next job to put in part-time behind the reference desk. There's this stereotype about catalogers being misanthropic and not working well with others (and I've met plenty of living examples so far who are closer to this stereotype than not), but I for one don't fit this stereotype. Then again, maybe I really am a misplaced reference librarian and don't belong in cataloging at all. But I felt I had to get a job first in Technical Services, because what they taught us in library school barely scratched the surface of the cataloging world, and I think a background knowledge of how cataloging is done and how it works is essential to the education of a competent Reference professional. In my cataloging class our professor asked rhetorically aloud "why don't more reference librarians use LCSH!?", and a Reference person blurted back "because patrons don't know it or use it". I kept silent at the time, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have jumped in and shouted back "No, but YOU should (and you should show your patrons HOW you are using it as you help them)."; Which brings me to another beef about library service and bibliographic instruction. It's all too often presented in an either/or fashion...e.g. Don't do it at all, just get the patron what they want and send them on their merry, or, show them the tools they need to use to find what they're looking for, then let them have at it, checking back in about 20 minutes to see how they're doing, etc. I happen to think BOTH of these approaches are wrong. You DO get them the information they ask for, right away, but AS YOU'RE DOING THAT, you SHOW THE PATRON exactly WHAT you are doing, so that they can repeat the steps themselves at a later time. There's a strong push in some library circles to do the first of the previous two approaches, because of the perceived power and status it gives the librarian as a guardian and gatekeeper of secrets, but this too me goes against the spirit of public service that is at the core of what Librarians and libraries should be all about. The 2nd approach goes too much the other direction, often leaving patrons feeling frustrated or embarassed that they are unable to do their own original searching as well as the librarian can, and feel frustrated that s/he is not helping them more. Keep this up and they will stop asking you for help altogether and just grab something easier off the Internet without you, which may be ok, or maybe it dumbs down scholarship just that much more, and needlessly.

Lead students to the library by all means, but then engage them once they're there.

I finish with another Dorothy Parker quote:
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
Amen to that, and thank goodness for libraries.