What to expect from libraries in the 21st century: Pam Sandlian Smith at TEDxMileHigh
“Why do we still need libraries in the age of digital, real-time information? In this emotional talk, Pam Sandlian Smith shows how she works to use the library as a hub for community-based knowledge creation and discourse.”
Library people are just neat! We all know this is true, and many others do as well. There are a lot of comics out there that talk about the coolness (and foibles) of library people. Today we are looking at comics drawn by Chris Hallbeck and Gene Ambaum. Right now they are drawing a comic called Library Comic. They used to draw Unshelved, a very popular comic with a main character named Dewey.
Check out a recent comic:
(From Minitex!)
“March is often our busiest month in Minitex Resource Sharing. For staff responsible for retrieving and processing items at our many campus libraries, it is a daily sprint. On an average day in March our staff search for about 360 requests. However, on Monday, March 20, 2017 there were 668 requests waiting to be printed, retrieved, and processed at campus locations. This was not going to be our normal sprint, but a marathon! In order to maintain our 24-hour turnaround time, staff from other areas of Resource Sharing pitched in.
Resource Sharing has four satellite offices, in addition to Andersen Library, located across the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota:
There are twenty-three different library collections connected to these four satellite offices. At the campus libraries, staff are responsible for printing, retrieving, and processing the requests. In some libraries, we do this three times a day. The busiest location is Wilson Library where the staff is responsible for retrieving materials from ten collections. On March 20, 2017, over 60%, or about 400 requests, were sent to the Wilson office.
For the month of March 2017, our campus libraries staff filled 93% of all requests they received. In our Wilson Library office 75% were filled with loans, and in our Bio-Medical Library office, 75% were filled with copies. This is reflective of the types of materials held by these libraries. In addition to working with technology to print, scan, and update requests, the library assistants develop working relationships with subject librarians whose assistance makes it easier to locate obscure or hard-to-find items for our patrons.
We survived and processed the deluge of 668 requests! Who knows what that tomorrow might bring?”
I love newsletters, and I love reading through them in my email! One of my favorites is a pretty bare-bones setup, called Data is Plural.
(As a researcher, it always make me chuckle, because this is a standard way new grad students can set themselves apart from non-researchers by pretentiously saying “Actually, it’s ‘data are’ not ‘data is’ to show you know what you are doing. You need a few pretentious tools when you are a scared, brand-new researcher!)
This weekly newsletter is produced by Jeremy Singer-Vine. He gathers together all kinds of interesting databases, each filled with information that would be very useful to you – sometime, in some situation. There is always something fun to browse, and I enjoy just looking at things that I never knew were being collected!
This is a link to one week of the newsletter, with these topics and a link to sign up for it yourself:
Looking at the Socialization of LIS Students
Through a Pop Culture Lens
This is a little bit of self-promotion, but the fun kind! A few years ago my research partner and I wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns; but we had very demanding jobs that required us to be working all the time. So we had to work out a way to make watching Buffy into work.
Reader, we did it.
We both like pop culture, and as professors we frequently used pop culture images and ideas to illustrate points in library work. Students would identify with pop culture material, and use it to help incorporate the ideas we were discussing in class into their own professional images they were developing.
We wanted to find out how common this was, so we did a survey of library students across the country to find out what kinds of pop culture images they like, that they shared with others, and were using in their professional development. You can flip through our article to see what all we found; one of the biggies was how very cool students are, and how much pop culture they knew!
Libraries, as well as archives and museums and other information-focused professions, are very well represented across all sorts of pop culture images and ideas. So be proud, and seize your own professional identity ideas from the wide range of pop culture images out there!