THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

Attracting youth to the library is such a THING. Endlessly discussed across the ages, we as librarians want to connect positively with this elusive subset of the population - draw them in with our smiles and our warmth, instill in them a lifelong love of reading and be that “third place” that everyone was waxing lyrical about a wee while back. If only we could get them to start talking to us, if only we could get them to read a book or two, if only we could get them to see that we’re actually really cool! (and that my friends, is the problem right there 😆). Our library's youth space was about as inspiring as cold, one day old oatmeal, so we recently underwent a total revamp.  We now have funky chairs and bookend art, traditional games, gaming consoles and colouring stations - all these things have merged to create a much better vibe in that area, but has it attracted youth? Well yeah, but it's sort of attracting everyone at the moment because it's such a nice area ...

What the hell is a secondment? Some people I have chatted to have no idea what I'm talking about (and I also discovered that some spell-check utilities don't even recognise the word) so I thought I would clear the confusion by ripping a definition straight from Merriam-Webster: Definition of secondment plural -s : the detachment of a person (such as a military officer) from his or her regular organization for temporary assignment elsewhere. So if you just substitute "library services officer" for "military officer" you have an explanation of my situation! Being a qualified Librarian can take you in so many different directions. One of the reasons I chose the tag "Ambidextrous Librarian" was because I honestly had no idea which direction my career would go. I have worked in school libraries and the kids and teachers are abs...

Working in a public library means I am surrounded all day by books (duh).  Books are such pretty things - there is a reason why publishers spend big bucks on cover design, and that's because we pretty much ignore the old "don't judge a book by its cover" and happily judegy-judge away.  We can't help it, bright and shiny things attract us! So as I was standing at the circ desk the other day having a bit of a rest between patrons, I found my eyes drawn yet again to a book that was on display.  I had been gazing at it on and off all day, and I couldn't really make out the title but it was the dress that caught me, and the shiny peach converse trainers, and the pose, and the luxurious hair.  I decided that the universe was telling me I had to borrow it, even if I had absolutely no idea what it was about.  I took it home without even reading the blurb. The book was titled "This is just my face; try not to stare" by Gabourey Sidibe, the actress who s...

A few days ago, I had two people approach me in the library and ask me if there were any jobs going. This is not unusual, I probably get a couple of people a week asking about work.  I work in a pretty flash, modern-looking library (and it's a fabulous place to work) so I can totally understand why a lot of people ask about jobs. It made me think of one of my posts a while back about the importance of understanding yourself and the things you enjoy. This is especially true when it comes to choosing a career path.  I don't know if I ever mentioned that I used to be a scientist of sorts.  A Clinical Research Associate, which basically is a fancy job title for someone who manages human clinical trials for drug companies.  It was a great job for many years, but it was very stressful and I literally had no life outside of work.  The pay was outstanding and light years above my current salary; but did this make me happy? Nup. Not at all. So fast-forward a few ye...

A few weeks back I accepted a temporary secondment into an actual Librarian role at my workplace. My usual job is Library Officer (Programs and Support), and my day-to-day duties are to run programs and provide customer service without any of the "traditional" Librarian duties. Now that I have the title of Information Librarian, I have been gifted a few Librarian tasks, and one of these is to attend to the "Dead" and "Grubby" lists and get my weeding mojo on. Weeding is a very personal thing; even if you do have lists and statistics and hard numbers in front of you.  A lot of us would have chosen to become Librarians because we love books and yet here we are, forced to discard them on a regular basis. Into the skip they go, where they lay looking forlorn next to the folded cardboard boxes and old newspapers. I find it hard. Very. HARD. I did not expect weeding to be such an angsty experience (is everything about library work so emotional or am I just ...

... that is the question! I read an entertaining blogpost the other day from @restructuregirl, who was having a wee bit of a rant about obsolescence.  To summarise a rather first world problem, after much research into the various quirks and largely baffling features of new TV's she eventually settled on a selection to soon discover that the very feature she wanted had been made obsolete in the latest models.  What a total pain in the arse.  Tying it all back to the library sphere, she pointed out that we should really plan for obsolescence in our industry. I have to say I agree; particularly when you consider the speed at which anything related to information use and storage (i.e. our entire industry) is changing. This got me thinking of another article I read ages ago about how a small group of engineers had to laboriously reverse engineer machinery capable of reading super high-res pictures taken by lunar satellites in the 1960's: Lost lunar photos recovered by...

For those of you who have followed my story from the beginning (yeah, just me!) the whole idea of The Ambidextrous Librarian is that I am a newbie librarian working two jobs; one in a public library and the other academic.  I try to blog about my experiences and provide a bit of insight into each library environment, maybe provide other newbies with a bit of an idea what each is like.  My version of worldly wisdom and all that! But enough intro - I'm sure you're dying to hear my thoughts. Since the beginning of the year I have been getting a lot of shifts at the academic library. These were very welcome, not just for the extra bucks but because the job gave me interesting things to do - long term projects that require me to plan and create and research and present things. I've made it sound all very high-brow but let's not get too excited, it's basically just a Digital Literacy learning plan for struggling new tertiary students.  Still, I was part of a ...

It's wine o'clock on a Saturday night, and I am kicking back with a red and contemplating (with a not insignificant level of exhaustion) one of the most thought-provoking and emotional conferences I have ever attended.  It was called "Reading Matters", and it was a YA conference organised and run by the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It was politically charged and emotional.  I mean, I guess I kind of expected it to be.  A lot of librarians, teachers and writers are very socially conscious and are actively concerned about the multitude of injustices, inequalities and hurts that thread through modern society. More importantly, they want to talk to teens about this stuff.  They want to present realistic, meaty, honest narratives that tackle bullying and racism and poverty and mental illness.  They want teens to know that it's OK to feel strongly, to question, to look outwards and not feel alone, to walk in someone else...

Yesterday, I decided to kick start my blog writing again and I joined #blogjune.  I have been ignoring my blog lately and have been regretting it and feeling more than a little bit guilty.  My reasons have been very noble.  I have been working. Working, working, working - with a little bit more working on the side. You see, I was recently promoted and made full time.  It's only a temporary secondment, but hey, it's good experience and good for the CV yadda, yadda.  But what I didn't realise was how much this change in circumstance would totally take it out of me.  Like, I am completely knackered.  How did I ever work full time in my previous career?  How does anyone work full time at all!?!  I have tried to explain this phenomena to my friends who have seen less and less of me these last few weeks.  Librarianship is very tiring.  It's physical, what with pushing the carts around and running around the library and shelving heavy bo...

It's Saturday.  I'm at work. I work Saturdays - Saturday is my permanent shift and I gotta say I am used to working them now, it also helps that I don't have any other family routines to conflict with the concept of the weekend.  I used to think that one day was pretty much like the other.  The sun rises, you do stuff, the sun sets.  Turns out though the cultural attitudes and expectations that are associated with certain days (Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday), still linger quite strongly, even if your schedule is no longer based upon the routines that give these days their flavour. So now my Saturday is like my....  Tuesday.  Kind of.  Friday is Monday.  Monday is Friday.  Does that make sense?  Probably not.  Either way, working in an institution that is open every day is a little weird (and I'm also talking Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years, even if it just for chute clearing).  The entire year just morphs into a ...

Sometimes realisations will come to me in a flash.  Like someone has given my brain a solid nudge, and some loose piece of knowledge will finally settle snugly into its rightful place.  This happened to me the other day when I was serving a young man. He wanted to join the library, which was totally cool.  I love it when people join the library.  So I went through the usual spiel of asking for photo ID, proof of address, yadda yadda.  He gave me his Learners Permit.  Usually that's all you need. Except his Learner's only had one name, printed twice, and his birthday was 01/01/1996 or something like that.  I was a little bit suspicious.  "Do you have any other ID with your name on it?" I politely enquired.  At which point he gave me a couple of other cards, all with the same information.  I couldn't really question 3 forms of ID with the same info, so I just went ahead and created his library card with the details he had provided me....

There were a number of practical, on-the-job type things that we did not learn in Library School.  We did not learn how to repair staplers.  We did not learn how to navigate paper jams or troubleshoot WiFi on the millions of different devices that exist.  We did not learn the fine art of disentangling oneself from a patron who single-mindedly keeps telling you about their Telstra woes, even when they can see the queue of people growing behind them. And they did not tell us about the sickness. The sickness!  I don't have kids.  This is evidently my first problem.  My immune system has not been fortified by the varied and wondrous bugs and bacteria that kiddy-winks amass in their school years, happily sharing them with their folks.  My immune system has, up to this point, sailed through adulthood free of the stress of a constant barrage of public illness (even though much of my previous career was spent working with hospitals).  Ahhh but this t...

WHEN THINGS GET TENSE Not sure how to start discussing this one.  It was a weird night in the library.  And as the title of this post suggests, things got a little tense.  I guess I can expect to see this sometimes, or maybe more than sometimes.  When you're in an public space that's warm and inviting and entertaining and comfortable, people are going to want to hang out.  Unlike your lounge room though, you don't really have a say as to who that is.  Sometimes the odd person wanders in who is a little different, or perhaps has taken something they shouldn't have, and things get tense.  We are dealing with humanity here.  We're a diverse bunch. We had a young guy come in tonight who is known to staff.  He has his issues, whether they be mistreatment or a bit of neuro-diversity or maybe a bit of both, who knows.  He likes to pace and sometimes can be a little loud, but for the most part he keeps to himself.  Mostly.  I guess...

AN UNEXPECTED CASE OF THE FEELS I am a couple of months in to my time at one of the busiest (if not the busiest) and most needy libraries in Victoria.  I am loving every minute (I say this seriously), aside from the disconcerting feeling that life is flying by.  No longer do the work weeks drag or the afternoons push through molasses.  I come to work, I help lots of people, I go home and the day is done.  I will be planning my retirement before I know it. The other night it was a little quieter than usual.  I was in the non-fiction section, perfect ordering, shelf tidying, nothing too taxing.  A young girl who must have been like, 19 or 20 wanders in, with numerous double-bagged plastic bags full of what looked like text books and notebooks, a bulging purse and a sweet, cheery-faced boy of about 4 who happily followed her around, non-complaining, eating a jam sandwich and grinning. She looked harried, and let's be honest she looked like she had had a ...

THE GENTLE ART OF CONFLICT AVOIDANCE As part of my public library persona, I have to (unsurprisingly) deal with the public.   Being in one of the busiest and most diverse communities in Victoria I also deal with some interesting customers.  Thankfully, my employer is fairly insightful on this front and so recently arranged for us newbies to attend a full day of "Conflict Resolution Training". Our trainer was no slouch.  He seemed fairly laid back, but then casually mentioned that he is one of only four high-level hostage negotiators within Australia, and has trained in negotiation with the SAS and the FBI.  Not that I imagine a heated overdue fine discussion will ever end in a hostage situation, but I guess it depends on the size of the fine.  As with any typical training session, there was a lot of whiteboard writing and workbook reading and question answering - but what was most interesting was watching video snippets of previous students navigating their ...

PD IS NOT A CHORE. I am pretty new to this whole Librarian thing.  I only graduated in 2015 and can count the number of library jobs I have held on one hand - but my inexperience and untarnished idealism mean that I am keen to throw myself straight into the mosh pit.  I ain't afraid of getting few bruises, or perhaps a scuffed Dr. Marten in the chin. Having just gained employment at both a public and academic library, I have so many "Professional Development" options to choose from.  It's kind of overwhelming.  I'm not even sure which career path I wish to take; but I do know that I want to keep up and keep learning.  Drink my coffee in places where all the interesting stuff is going down, the ideas are fresh, the music is good and (most importantly) the coffee is decent.  But being new to the block, how do I know where to go? It seemed to me that the most obvious choice was to seek guidance from my professional association.  Enter ALIA (the Aust...

After a minor interruption to service, I'm back and I've installed an upgrade! For those of you out there who may actually read this blog (the one or two of you, hi Mum), life has been more than a little busy of late and has interfered with my ability to read, and to blog.  Basically, I have been experiencing a career crisis.  Actually that's a bit dramatic it wasn't really a crisis (I just like the familiar-sounding alliteration), it was more that I really didn't like my job.  Don't get me wrong, my colleagues were AWESOME and that counts for so much in a workplace, but as a new Librarian, the job itself was probably as unchallenging and backward as it could get.  A career cul-de-sac.  A dead end.  A career coffin.  A place of final rest. So what was the position?  It was at a school.  A lovely school of a certain educational philosophy that was rather anti-technology and fairly set in its ways.  I sort of knew this when I started,...