readings for week 8

Staffing Shifts at Orlando Library: This article looks at the controversies that occurred at Orlando's public library when the new director put funds and emphasis into renovations over being sure the library was staffed by qualified librarians.

It seems like a tough situation to me. In some ways it appears that Hodel is a new person in the director's position, and has new innovative ideas for what she wants to do with the library to hopefully attract more patrons. It also seems like she's done a fantastic job of pissing off the library worker's union- and that's a big problem. Whether it's because she really doesn't have any regard for hiring MLS qualified librarians, or just hasn't done a good job of meeting with and explaining her decisions to the union of her library I can't really tell. But either way she needs to figure out a way to appease the union.

Assessing Staff on the Competencies: This article outlines in detail useful ways to assess library staff.

I like how it went into such detail, informing us that we should use multiple choice questions, and ask multiple questions about what they're trying to achieve. I somewhat had an issue with folks not being able to use the internet to look up how to do something, I certainly have used google a few times to get me through a reference request or two. I also felt like this article left a few things out: like patron assessment. I think sending in reference and circulation testers to make sure that workers can handle not only common problems, but to make sure staff is acting with full professionalism towards patron's of color, homeless patrons, and queer patrons.

One Model for Creating a Career Ladder for Library Support Staff: This article looked at how as librarians are doing more and more of their work outside of the actual library the support staff is taking over many of the jobs traditionally done by librarians, more importantly this article looks at how to make sure you effectively transition support staff to take over those roles.

I thought this article was great. I was really excited that it looked at the possibility of training library workers in house. I'm going to be real, I think getting a master's degree to be a librarian is kind of insane. I think that complainant people could be trained in libraries to become great librarians. I kind of have a dream of starting up a librarian apprenticeship program. Most working librarian's I know say that the vast majority of what they know about being a librarian they learned working, that the MLS is just something you go through.

Working Knowledge: This editorial suggested that librarians need to talk to their supervisors and let them know what they want to do.

I feel like this problem probably runs rampant among librarians! Since I started interning at Bloomfeild I've been over whelmed by people's passivity. Certainly it's with slightly different circumstances, but I think having a lot of soft spoken people doing a job that has a noble calling is pretty problematic. Whether it's librarian's not getting to jobs they want to do, or librarians being completely (silently) over worked, or librarians not feeling like they can change the furniture in their teen room- we are meek, we must fight this within ourselves!