Fiscal responsibility or failure to understand?

I'm not sure if anyone's heard about Bert Chapman's recent blog. Obviously I have problems with what he has to say. But I'm not going to waste my breath on them right now. It's the same crap people say every day, and despite their rampant craziness, most people don't pay them too much attention. Instead, I'd like to comment on a response to this blog post that was printed in my college newspaper. Below is the letter I sent them after reading Kevin Casimer's poorly researched response to Chapman:

I recently read the Exponent's mention of Bert Chapman's explosive blog post about the economic sense of homosexuality, which itself requires a response, but I'm sure there are thousands of others hotly debating his points at this very moment. Instead, I'd like to point out a problem I had with one of the student responses to this post. Kevin Casimer suggests that getting rid of a staff of overpaid librarians would make good fiscal sense. Perhaps slashing those few librarian jobs left would save the state some money, but the $80 billion he has in mind? Probably not.
First of all, those people checking out your library materials and re-shelving books? Those aren't librarians. They generally make minimum wage or just above it, and, in the case of Purdue's library system, are often student workers. The actual librarians are the trained, degreed professionals that make the library function. Their jobs are myriad and difficult to outline, because they vary from position to position, and from library to library. They create complex sets of metadata that make the catalog of books (the one on the computer, not the old card catalog) find the right titles; they can manipulate a database to bring up exactly the right article for a patron who has spent hours weeding through irrelevant results; they manage large numbers of staff, often with a high turnover rate; and they go through the often painstaking process of developing a useful collection that meets user's needs under a very tight budget (those databases are expensive!). This is only a short list of some of the jobs a librarian might do. The list is, in fact, much longer. There is no "Replacing librarians with minimum wage workers to put books back on the shelf and assist people with self-checkout" because those jobs are not done by Librarians.

Another misconception is that these librarians are well paid for what they do. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics may cite the average salary for a government librarian is over $80,000, the same cannot be said for public and school librarians, especially in a low Cost-of-Living state such as Indiana. When I began my job search after completing my Master's in Library and Information Science last year, I was lucky to find opening that paid more than $35,000 a year. It is traditionally one of the lowest paid professions requiring an advanced degree. Most public libraries, however, are so under funded that they can't manage to pay too many people this piddling sum, and as a result, smaller public libraries rarely have more than one or two degreed professionals on their staff, and sometimes none at all, which, as Casimer politely points out, means a decline in service.
On top of all this, libraries, despite a popular misconception, are actually still bustling, busy places. They're not just stacks of unread books, but information and technology centers, and those librarians have degrees, not just in the Dewey Decimal System, but in technology, knowledge they use daily as they attempt to help their patrons, who often have very little experience with computers. Far from dying out, libraries are seeing their biggest boom in years, and finding new ways to help their communities every day. Far from being a waste of government funds, they are a shining example of how to get a lot accomplished with very little means.

What I like about my job

A comment on an earlier post asked me what I like about my job. I was going to respond directly there, but then realized the response was long enough to be a post in and of itself! I know I sometimes complain about things, but I think that's because, when I'm enjoying myself, I don't think to write a post about it! Whereas when something frustrates me, I feel the need to vent. But I thought I would respond to the question question with a truly positive post:

One of my favorite things about my job is managing the collection. I love searching for new materials, and get very excited when I come across a book that's perfect. Yesterday while reading my Library Journal, I found a book that's coming out soon on John Maynard Keynes that's perfect for our colletion, and the incredible dork in me got really excited.

I also like that, for the most part, the reference work I do is intense. I never have to tell anyone where the bathroom is! Though I occasssionally want to ask people if they've ever heard of Google, I usually get questions that really require me to dig deep and utilize a bunch of resources.

Lately I've been working on putting together a strategic plan for the library. This is requiring me to really look at my services and resources critically and figure out what to improve, and, more importantly, how to improve it. This is the type of stuff that I feel confident about doing. It's the stuff that I think I'm pretty good at, too. So I'm enjoying putting that together.

I won't lie. I do wish I had more intereaction with people. I get a decent number of reference questions, but most of them are sent through email. I miss working with people face to face. I also miss the sense of the unexpected that comes with working at a public desk. You never know what you're going to be hit with on a given day!

But despite that drawback, I do enjoy my job, and I feel much more on top of things than I did when I started. Now, if I could just get people interested in user instruction sessions, I'd be set!

You can't please all of the people EVER

Due to budget cuts, I have recently lost a significant portion of my storage space, which has left me in somehting of a pickle. I had previously used that space to hold back issues of the institute's in-house publications. They took up about as much space as my living room. The communications director has worked out a system with our printers where they will store back issues for us and we can order more as we need them, which should work out. The only thing is, the section of the library that generally holds a few of these publications is looked at as an all-you-can-take sort of buffet. People regualrly come and clear out entire stacks of publications to send to their friends or give to visitors or start small fires in their office because the heat's so low.

In order to counteract this, I put a simple policy in place. I left a list of all the publications at the end of the aisle and asked eveyone to just mark how many copies of something they take. That way I can keep an eye on how many publications remain and re-fill as needed, without having to go and count everything every day, which is not only time consuming, but incredibly tedious.

But apparently my policy wasn't simple enough because I recieved an angry email telling me how stupid it was to expect well-educated adults to inform me that they've removed something from the library. Silly me, expecting people to be responsible for their own actions.

I'm actually not upset about it. in fact, I find the situation quite funny. And the truth is, I didn't expect many people to follow my policy. Which begs the question: why bother with the policy? Just because librarians love rules?

Maybe.

But really, I think it has more to do with the concept that, while 15% of patrons won't follow the rules, the remaining 85% who do make up for it. I remember in the good old days at the public library, when I had a problem patron who refused to accept their fines, or the limit of items they could request through ILL at one time, I was constantly reminding myself that, while this guy may really annoy me, I'll have ten patrons who think the library is wonderful, and thank me for doing whatever it is I do.

So sure, a few of the library users here will never let me know when they take a publication. They'll gleefully empty the shelves and expect me to magically refill them. But if 85% of the users let me know when they take things, I'll be that much more on top of keeping this section of my library useable.