The Hunt Is On

Here’s an interesting situation.  I have a job interview Monday afternoon and I’m excited about the prospect of taking a substantial pay cut! Ha! Yep. I’m interviewing for a position with a smaller library system in a neighboring town. If I would be offered this job I’d be making – at best – about $13K…

Management

Do any of you find that the least likeable part of your job involves the supervision of other employees?  That’s where I find myself. The public service portion of my career is wonderful. It’s both interesting and fulfilling. But being a manager is stressful and supplies me with no end of irritation. It would all…

Elegant Verbiage

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. But beyond that, his grasp of language, his ability to paint with words, makes me green with envy. It’s a thing that is almost diametrically opposed to how I write. My writing is sparse, workmanly, and more suited to the business letter than the novel. I think…

Feelings of Impending Doom

A new day is dawning, and I often find myself feeling a nearly irresistible urge to light things on fire. I’ll explain. I live in an area of the country that has an average high temperature of 32.8 today and an average low of 18.8.  We should be buried under over a foot of snow…

Libraries and Politics

We’ve entered a time wholly unprecedented in U.S. history. The current populist movement is openly hostile to intellectual pursuit. Education, libraries, and media are all under attack as either serving no purpose, or worse, surving a purpose that is at odds with this New Populism. Neil Gaiman has written (and spoken) extensively about the impact…

BitTorrent and Libraries

I wonder if any of you have had this experience. I was recently told by the IT Department of my library that I needed to remove the application “Transmission” from my laptop. They essentially told me that they were “doing me a favor” by telling me this (which is a thinly veiled threat if you…

This Made Me Proud Today

Today I read an article that made me proud of my profession. Librarians are working with coders and climate scientists to strip climate change data from government websites to store it on secure, open-access sites for future scientists because the incoming administration has already said that it intends to shut down climate research and purge…

My Library Branch

I’ve always intended to write this blog as anonymously as possible, so I’m not going to discuss specifically where we are located, but a little bit of background about my library branch is important to this story. I manage an urban library branch with holdings that run between 35,000 and 40,000 items. We are located…

Operation 451

Here’s a thing. I don’t have a lot of time for writing today but I wanted to drop this on you because of its timeliness. There is an initiative that serves as a response to our current political climate. Here is an except from the Facebook group by way of explaination. Operation 451 is a…

Let’s Back Up A Bit

Before we can have a proper discussion about public libraries, I think it’s important for you to know a little bit about my background. What I’ve done previously has had a great influence on my worldview and my approach to librarianship. I bounced around from job to job before I found something to consider a…