Rolling 2013 librarian/library assistant thread

Hi there.

Okay from La Lechera on the other thread:

--

hey librarians i have a question for you

how does a person either watch or find or find and watch old forgotten educational films, ones like these?
the only ones i've found are black widow and secret life of 118 green street

Battle of the Bugs
Black Widow Spider -- found this one, it is great
A Night out with Mr. Toad
Life Cycle of the Monarch

National Geographic

Animals and Amphibians
The Hidden World of Insects
Secret Life of 118 Green Street -- haven't watched the whole thing yet, but certainly will

reposted from chicago thread because i thought i would broaden my search even though i am not skilled in librarianship, i know to ask the pros. ps there are library of congress listings but that's all i can find.

― passion it person (La Lechera), Monday, December 10, 2012 12:45 PM (4 weeks ago)

I just posted to the other thread, but worldcat might be a possibility. It would at least show if any libraries own the videos.

yeah we told LL about worldcat on the chicago thread

hi!
basically here are my questions:

1) where can these films be found?
2) once i've found them, is there a way i could watch them?

seems like a pretty simple question, but i thought i would defer to the experts for the best way to accomplish these two things.

thanks in advance for any assistance!

Oh, okay -- I don't look read the Chicago thread. xp

it's one thing to be like "hey this filmstrip is being housed in a library in rural indiana, thanks worldcat" but i really want to SEE them! and i don't know how to do that.

I would think that your best bet would be to contact the library(ies) that own and find out if the film is requestable (some are, some aren't), and if they are request them via interlibrary loan at your local library.

I think you really need to go talk to your local reference librarian. Generally the only way to get an item from another library is through your own library.

xp!

Ok. That sounds like a plan. Thanks, librarians!

sorry, wasn't implying everyone should know about stuff we talk about on the chicago thread.

we had a burst pipe in my library a month ago, over the weekend of course - we're on the 15th floor and the building didn't find out about it until someone on the 12th floor complained, so the saturation was obv pretty bad. miraculously none of our books or computers were damaged but the space is so fucked that we had to move all the books out so the floor could be dried with big industrial cleaners. now the floor is dry but we have to wait for the building to repair our floor, recarpet it, repaint, etc. and now apparently the building's insurance is disputing the claim (on what grounds i have no clue). so the library's been closed for a month and will probably be closed at least through january. still answering reference requests via email and phone but having no physical library is making me feel like not much of a librarian.

Yikes, that sounds awful! I'm glad your computers and collection weren't damaged.

it could have def. been worse. and we had been planning on some redesigning/remodeling so this is just pushing that process forward. that's the silver lining.

La Lechera, if you're looking to see stuff online, here's a start:

Prelinger Archives
A/V Geeks

(Both of those collections are broader than just educational films but you should find a lot in there.)

There are also some linked through the companion website for Learning with the Lights Off.

Ok -- I'll check there for the specific films I'm looking for. I already found the Black Widow film on archive.org, but there didn't seem to be any others. I think I am going to have to enlist outside help.

Ah, sorry, I didn't catch that you were looking for those titles specifically--thought you sought more like those.

Meantime...

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/09/jstor-offer-limited-free-access-content-1200-journals

This might be the wrong place to post it but are we talking about this anywhere? It's all over my Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23PDFtribute

A committed advocate for the freedom of information over the internet, Swartz had been facing a trial over allegations of hacking related to the downloading of millions of documents from the online research group JSTOR. Swartz pleaded not guilty last year; if convicted, he could have faced a lengthy prison term.
...
The trial was due to begin next month. He faced 13 felony charges including computer and wire fraud. Prosecutors accused him of stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and making them freely available.

Aaron Swartz's family condemns MIT and US government after his death

The whole situation is very saddening. Martyrology created by others in the wake of a tragedy does not appeal to me and some of the more thoughtful comments have indicated that he wrestled with demons in general, but this whole thing was very poorly handled by the institutions and the government, and JSTOR's decision to finally allow some kind of limited access is horribly belated on a number of fronts.

This whole thing is very sad. Ned OTM re martyrology/demons, but this was undoubtedly a lot to have hanging over him and kind of crazy given that JSTOR declined to press charges.

Is anyone going to ACRL this spring? I will be, and Henry Rollins being one of the keynote speakers is still pretty lol to me.

huh. that program looks great.

anyone know anything about implementing pr1mo d1scovery? had like 1000000 stupid conference calls about this dumb system but they haven't provided any useful information yet, except that they don't know how to work our link resolver. googleproofed for fear of angry ex l1br1s employees.

We just did this earlier this year! However I was just involved in researching the various discovery search products different libraries were using and how satisfied they were with them, but I had nothing to do with the tech end of it.

i'll likely be going to SLA, which will probably have more boring speakers but at least will be in san diego and not in indianapolis

I know. If only Pawnee was real, that would be fun.

The Music Library Association conference I went to in Indy was fun, but I had a local friend that took me out and stuff.

My library uses pr1mo but I've had nothing to do with it and our main pr1mo guy just left last week so we're all panicking about what the hell to do if something breaks

that said some other people in my office spent quite some time tinkering with the display and weighting search results etc so if you have any questions about that side of things I may be able to find someone who knows something.

(huh you have to pay to be in the users' group, I didn't realise that. I was going to suggest it as a way to find some contacts but I've no idea what the North America one is like as I'm in the UK. Not sure if the UK one is worth the price of admission either as I've never been to any of the conferences, which I guess are the main point of joining, as the UK mailing lists are pretty dead.)

Just another day

http://gawker.com/5990763/lewd-act-gets-man-banned-from-all-the-libraries-on-the-face-of-the-earth

So apparently the the head of the Urbana Free Library ordered the weeding of all nonfiction books published before 2003?!?!?

http://www.smilepolitely.com/culture/do_you_ever_read_any_of_the_books_you_weed/

what? more importantly will there be a sale?!

That story was horrifying and that library director should never be allowed to work at that managerial level in a library again.

library administrators are all hopelessly incompetent

that is, in my (admittedly limited) experience, totally untrue. Most of the public library directors around here (suburban Chicago) seem to be bizarrely competent.

BTW I will admit to being an incompetent library administrator, though probably not hopelessly so.

you are not hopelessly incompetent! neither!
also are they having a sale and if so when is it? would road trip.

Per the article, I think they just shipped all the books away, so no big sale.

I am getting more competent with each passing week, so presumably at some point in the coming years I will be a superstar.

The saga continues:

http://www.smilepolitely.com/culture/voices_from_urbana_city_council/

;_;

We were told that there are 66,000 volumes of books in the nonfiction section, half of which are more than 10 years old. That means 33,000 books, if we sold for $1 at the Urbana Library sale, just $1, that’s $33,000. At $2, that’s $66,000. But these were bought for a lot more money. Say, $10, that’s $330,000 worth of books. But some books were $300 worth. So, we are throwing out hundreds of thousands [of dollars] worth of books and sending them away for nothing. I don’t think this can be allowed. What I’m here for is to ask that we have a much bigger oversight how public money is spent, especially at times when money is extremely restricted.

God, I should take a drive down for the special library board meeting tomorrow night, that is going to be a par-tay.

AJ do you know of any local librarian networking/socializing groups/events that aren't based around the major associations? There used to be Chicago Deskset but they haven't been active in a long time.

I guess I could post that on the Chicago thread. Or just email you. But basically I'm just feeling very isolated as a solo librarian these days.

There's the Chicagoland Library Unconference: http://cluncon.org/. Run by a group of young, hip trendsetters out in the burbs. Mostly publics, but could still be helpful. Though now I see that you've already liked their Facebook page, so I dunno.

I went to their event last year but it doesn't look like they have another one planned. But yeah that's the kind of thing I need.

Presented without comment

http://gawker.com/texas-man-arrested-and-jailed-for-overdue-library-book-1456763218

that's horrible and absurd.

i'm a librarian i'm probably as bad as anyone else as far as returning books goes. i'm also of the mind that all fines should be forgiven if the person returns the book.

there are just so many stupid policies on loans. huge fines, very short loan periods (one week for a cd? fuck that), no renewals on certain items (e.g. my current library has NO renewals on media items).

the last few places i worked gave faculty, staff, and graduate students really wonderful loan periods, like 3 or 6 months with up to 8 renewals. i had books checked out for years, it was great. i've always felt that folks could just recall something that's checked out if they really want it.

There's this thing about librarianship as a sector that weirds me out, which is this really intense boosterism that librarians do, where everyone is really passionate and really believes in the importance of libraries. It's great but there's also obviously an undercurrent of defensiveness under it, like librarians constantly feel criticized or like people look down on them so they have to be really hardcore about their passion in order to preemptively contradict this perceived persecution. It seems like when librarians occasionally admit their doubts and fears, there are others that jump on them and imply they are "bad librarians" for feeling that way. And that doesn't really seem good, because it implies that there are scary truths about the value and importance of libraries that librarians don't want to confront. I can't tell how much of this is real and how much of it is maybe just built into my personal perceptions and doubts.

This feeds into a lot of online library spats that I see, including people freaking out over anything that Annoyed Librarian says and the Librarian Shame hashtag/Twitter account.

see every other professional do-gooder identity. i think there can be a lot of tension between the library-as-institution and what librarians like to think of themselves as doing. i feel like this is where more 'real' organizational leadership, very specific goals in library plans etc., can make a difference.

i work in a library that has been in this weird organizational grey area for decades, with no specific library plan or mission statement that i'm aware of (i've been here for a year, so has a new director who hasn't really done anything to remedy this other than fling a bunch of random stuff around to see what sticks), and it's allowed otherwise good and smart people to stagnate and create an extremely bogged-down institutional culture, where people (my boss) can play-act being librarians or w/e for the few hours a week they see each other, but basically they don't really seem to have much of an impact on anything at all. i mean most of their (my boss's) time is basically creating work for works sake and then playing these facile political cards with it. i think the other librarians have better intentions but may not have much more of an impact because really it's an institutional problem imo. it's all about envisioning what exactly you want to do for someone outside your institution and doing it (not like that is exactly easy or anything). i don't think years of 'we have books so we will transform u" have been helpful in this regard.

when i was in library school, at LSU, which is a truly shitty program and i hope everyone involved with it dies in a fire, they told us that librarians are "professionals," it's a "professional degree," like doctors or lawyers and the fact that we wouldn't get paid like doctors and lawyers is a mind-boggling travesty.

Yeah I think def some of it stems from MLIS programs having to sell themselves to students in a shitty job market. And then people who get the degrees having to justify their decision to themselves.

from the academic perspective i think it also stems from librarianship as a discipline being a circle-jerk/echo chamber because your research and publications don't matter one tiny bit except as lines on your CV. since library research is entirely anecdotal/observational/platitudinal no one ever disagrees with anyone else on any fundamental, meaningful level, leaving no opportunity for the shit-talking that keeps the rest of the academy from totally calcifying.

Almost finished with my MLS. Just three more assignments.
Glad to see that the job market is opening up a little bit.

is it?

(i honestly don't know.) best of luck!

I'm seeing more opportunities for the kind of work that I am interested in.
We've been hiring new people at my current library this year. There had been a hiring freeze in effect previously.
Several librarians retired this year, as well. It just seems like things are cycling through a little bit more than they had been for a few years.

i'm a librarian i'm probably as bad as anyone else as far as returning books goes.

i'm a "systems librarian" (stupid name for someone who probably doesn't have a librarianship degree or a CS degree monkeying around in your ILS database trying to remember which numbers are which when the cataloguers phone up going "my 880 tags look wrong on the OPAC!" or the desk staff phone up going "why can't a status 37 book be requested to reading room 24??") and i am the worst at returning books, seriously, the worst

or, since i'm occasionally asked for a report of x category of overdue books and go "we have books with a due date of 1990?", possibly not quite the worst

nurturing a theory that 'librarianship' is among other things a front for pathological narcissists and control freaks the same way pedos are often found in the protecting arms of public school bureaucracy.

ALA has issued a code of conduct. (Having apparently never done so before.)

http://ala14.ala.org/statement-of-appropriate-conduct

it appears to mostly pertain to not harassing speakers at conferences? i thought the whole point of the ALA conference was to facilitate weird librarian brony nerd orgies?

the BL has put A MILLION images from its collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century books online:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html

Glad to see that the job market is opening up a little bit.

― Trip Maker, Friday, November 8, 2013 2:26 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

curious to hear what areas you think are opening up more. maybe it's the kinds of listings i look at, but i feel like there are a lot of opportunities for librarians with software development skills? they seem like really really hard searches to fill. no good candidates, and there's a serious need for them.

also seems like if you want to be a small-town library director you have 1,000,000,000 options. those are kind of thankless jobs though

OTM I see a lot of part-time entry level hourly stuff and a lot of director positions and not much in between.

maybe it's the kinds of listings i look at, but i feel like there are a lot of opportunities for librarians with software development skills?

this is what i do, where are you seeing these listings?

haha code4lib, all the other jobs are filtered out

so many jobs. thanks!

sure thing

And a last fun story for the year: the chief subject is a good friend of my sweetie:

http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-librarian-collects-ephemera-left-behind-5097100.php

Late November '14: this ol' 'brary just keeps rolling along:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2ns2tb/i_am_ferguson_public_library_director_in_ferguson/