Mentoring

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is to give back to the profession that has been so good to me. Over the years, I've talked to several people, hired a few, who were thinking about going back to school for an MLIS. I've helped train both adult and children's librarians.

My primary advice to anyone thinking about entering this profession is to get experience in the library, any experience. The degree is very important, but library experience is just as important. Although any public service experience is valuable, library experience, especially while attending library school, is critical. It provides a means to implement and reinforce what is learned in library school. And in my opinion, the lack of library experience is the main obstacle new graduates face when entering the job market.

It is the responsibility of all librarians to help promote and develop the profession, to pass on the tools of the trade, and to share the wisdom that comes with experience. This does not mean that we need to adhere to the old ways of doing things. Just the contrary, we need to continue to develop and adapt to new ideas and perspectives. This is what keeps libraries alive. Out of these new ideas, come great revelation and change.

If you stop to think about it, the very idea of a free library was a dangerous idea. Many thought the masses would not be able to grasp the value of knowledge and books. Some thought that educating the masses would be the downfall of society. We are still here. The masses did learn the value of knowledge and books and society hasn't fallen, yet. Libraries have been instrumental in education, and are still so today. We are seeing a rise in library use as economic difficulties rise.

As a member of this profession for 32 years, I've seen the end of the card catalog, the implementation of computer into every aspect of libraries, and will probably be here for the end of the Dewey Decimal System. All these changes were or will be faced with great anxiety, but each one brought libraries to newer heights. Each has been more beneficial that we ever imagined. Libraries have always been on the cutting edge, each year brings change and growth. As a mentor it is extremely important to listen to the new ideas of the newest generation of librarians. Society and technology change, so do libraries. We as librarians need to continue to grow and change, too. Mentoring is a two way street. Both the mentor and the mentoree learn and grow from each other.

Going Green

The new buzz word in libraries is "Green." With the current economic crises in the world economy, Going Green makes even more sense. It's one of the cost effective things we can do in the library, as well as, at home. I just heard on the news today that the price per pound of recycled items has dropped drastically from last year. This may be due to the greater interest in recycling and I expect will continue to drop as the amount of recyling increases.

At the El Toro Library we have recently partnered with with city of Lake Forest to recycle used batteries. The staff is collecting bottles and cans for recycling. We are looking into recycling paper. There are several options on this. I haven't explored all of them or worked out the feasiblity. Do we want to recycle office paper, cardboard, magazines and phonebooks, hardcover books or all of them or part of them? Do we go with the county waste management services, look into private services or check into local services at the college or other institutions? Can we do this for free or how much are we willing to send? There are many options when it comes to paper and I feel that the amount of waste paper generated will steadily decrease during the coming decade.

I would like to have a Green Officer at the branch. This is a voluntary position, like a safety officer, responsible for monitoring our recycling efforts and education or assisting the public in their Green efforts. This officer would be responsible for displays in the library on Going Green, recycling, and conservation. Fliers, handouts, and bookmarks on Going Green tips can be created to give away in the library that would benefit people interested in doing more at home. The scope could be enlarged to include bibliographies and webographies, and even programming and speakers.

Much can be done with Going Green and there is much yet to do. It's time that we think a little more about what we are doing and how we can be more Green doing it. All of us can start with one small thing. It the small things that add up, just like a drop in the bucket will added up to a full bucket one drop at a time.

Holiday Morale Boosters

As we enter into the holiday season, it is time to think about ways to acknowledge the staff, both individually and collectively. I like to take time to reflect on the accomplishments of the past year, which has been full of major changes at the El Toro and Laguna Woods branches. Both branches have had a change of command and new direction. We have implemented a new digital phone system. We had two major renovations, the repairing of a damaged wall and a new HVAC system. By the end of the year we will have trained eight extra help staff and two new staff members at El Toro and trained three staff members in procedures at Laguna Woods. We cross trained one staff member in clerical duties. The Laguna Woods Branch has a new Friends of the Library. We implemented a rotation between the El Toro staff and Laguna Woods staff. This gives the Laguna Woods staff time to work on back up duties and projects and the El Toro staff can brush up on procedures at the Laguna Woods Branch.

Orange County is currently going through reorganization and OC Public Libraries is now part of OC Community Resources. This has not directly affected the public, but there has been a rearranging of staff between the four departments of OC Community Resources, OC Parks, OC Community Resources, OC Animal Care and OC Public Libraries. It will take some time to settle into the changes.

If I have to choose one word to sum up 2008, it would be CHANGE. Change is good. Change is necessary to life. Anything living is constantly growing and changing. Change is life. If something is not changing, it is not living. OC Public Libraries is a living, growing organization, progressive in technology and library services. But I digress. Our staff has weathered these changes and maintained a high standard of service.

So how do I acknowledge this? I usually take the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas to ponder the contributions of each staff member. I look over personnel files and make notes to be included in future personnel reviews. As we near the holiday season, I make out a Christmas or Hanukkah card with a personal note of appreciation for each person, including the library pages. These are given out at the annual Holiday Breakfast. When I can I include a gift with the card. I like to make gifts usually from one of my hobbies, cooking, gardening and sewing. Each year I can the fruits of my garden and I also enjoy making jams and jelly. But the gift can just as easily be a gift certificate or movie pass tucked into the card. The important thing is to recognize and acknowledge what each of us has contributed.

It is extremely important for team building to spend some recreational time together away from work. I try to have a holiday staff party at my home every other year. I will try to do this, unless another staff member would like to host, this year. We also have the holiday breakfast before work. And I try to include an outing either dinner or the theater or concert at some other time of the year. These are optional and not mandatory in any way. Usually if a staff member is hesitant to participate, the glowing reviews of the participating staff is encouragement for the next event.

These are little things, but they knit the staff together. I try to get staff participation in planning and executing these functions from the smallest potluck or farewell to the larger extracurricular activities. We have come together as a team this year.

Update at El Toro

The last few months have been very busy with interviewing and training personnel. Two of my favorite things about my job are giving someone a job and giving someone a raise. Even interviewing and making a decision on who to hire is enjoyable. As one of the extra help coordinators, the staff at El Toro has been busy hiring and training two new extra help Library Assistants and two new extra help Library Clerks. Next month we will assist in training one more extra help Library Assistant and will be interviewing for an open regular part time Library Clerk for the El Toro Library.

It is never ending, one thing after another here. But I like it that way. We are getting ready to do more shelf reading and weeding, I have several presentations coming up, two in October and one in November. There is always something new to learn or a skill to hone. This is why I have been in this profession for nearly 32 years.

There are two committee on which I sit. The Volunteer Committee is in the process of updating the Volunteer Manual brining it into the computer age. This is a great learning experience, my first policy and procedure committee work. The other committee is the Reader's Rally Committee. Going into its third year, Reader's Rally is a system wide open house with each branch choosing a day during the two week period to hold special events. There are chances to win prizes at the branch level and countywide.

The coming months will be even busier with the holidays coming up. It is hard to believe that nearly a year has already come and gone. It has been a great year at El Toro. Many challenges have been met and conquered and I'm looking forward to what 2009 has to offer.

Staff Shelf Reading Sweepstakes Completed

We completed the shelf reading in six weeks, a record. Normally it would have taken three months to completed what was done in six weeks. The incentive was a good one and inspired several of the staff to shelf read when they would have used the time on other nonessential tasks. Others were not motivated to increase their shelf reading, but all but one participated. And I feel that it was a success. I tried to motivate the staff and make an uninteresting but necessary task more appealing. It worked in most respects.

Looking back at the Fish! concepts. I chose the attitude to tackle an unpleasant task. The El Toro Library is a very busy branch. It is easy to get caught up in the pressing business of the day. We needed to let our hair down and introduce some fun in the day. I provided a game with incentive.

We played the Sweepstakes game. One staff member did 28 hours of shelf reading. Second highest amount of hours was 19. The number of hours dropped drastically after that to 12 and 9. Most of the the staff did 7-5 hours. A few did one hour and only one person did not participate.

I was present shelf reading along with the staff, putting in 6 hours. It was difficult for me to get these hours in, but I made the effort to make sure the staff realized that I was not asking them to do anything I would not do. It also showed them that I thought this was important.

To make their day, I treated the entire staff to a sandwich luncheon, with homemade lemonade and a chocolate bundt cake. I asked the other department heads to bring fruit, chips and salad. So everyone had a nice lunch. Before leaving for the day I commended the staff on a job well done and announced the winners of the Sweepstakes. The grand prize winner choose a $50 gift certificate to JoAnn's. I awarded two prizes for the most hours. Each received a coupon for a box of See's chocolate. And I surprised two of them with a third prize of a $10 gift certificate to Golden Spoon Yogurt for the next most hours. The staff was not expecting a third prize.

Results: The staff is more connected. We accomplished the task in record time. It gave staff a break from the regular routine. It added a little fun and motivation. From a supervisory and managerial perspective: It is going to be hard to be as creative for future projects, but I'm confident that this can be accomplished. It is my deepest wish to make the El Toro Library a better place to be both for patrons and staff.

Correction

Thanks to Mike for the correct title of the video "Fish!". I have corrected he posting for July 3rd.

Could shelf reading ever be fun?

Many people have the old stuffy misconception of what a library is. They picture a librarian named Marion with a her hair in a bun and pencil behind her ear shushing everyone. This is such and ancient concept and far from our libraries today. It is often hard to find a quiet spot to concentrate. Throughout the day there is a steady stream of people, people of all sorts with many different reasons for coming to the library.

Our goal is to have something for everyone. One of my goals is to make each person's visit more than a pleasant one. There should be fun and adventure in there, too. In order to make visitors to the library happy, we first must have happy staff. All levels of library employees should be happy to be here and happy to serve the public.

So how do we do that? Fun is a very personal thing. What is fun to one person, may not be fun at all to the next person. While pondering some ways to boost staff morale and to lighten up the atmosphere, I remembered a great video called "Fish!" about the famous Pike Place Fish Market. The staff at the market are all comedians and do all kinds of whacky and entertaining things. Fish are tossed around, fish sing, fish do amazing things. Tourists come from around the world go to see the fish antics at the market.

We can't toss around books at the library, it's too dangerous. We can't create too much of a ruckus since people are reading and studying. We can make a tedious task more fun. Everyone likes to win. How about a self reading contest complete with a great prize? Thus the Staff Shelf Reading Sweepstakes was born.

After walking through the collection, I divided the collection into small segments that could be shelf read in an hour or two. We concentrated on just non-fiction for this segment of the sweepstakes. Then I made a stack of old index cards into sweepstakes tickets by marking one segment on each ticket. The staff was told that this was entirely optional. I would like everyone to do at least one ticket, but if we all did three the job would be done. They can do as much as they want until the tickets are gone. Each person was handed a ticket and asked to shelf read that segment. When it was completed, sign it, turn it in and get another ticket. I told them that I would be spot checking. When all the tickets are in there will be a drawing for the prize. They were told that there regular duties can't be neglected, so I have offered to cover desk time up to 20 minutes to allow, especially the part time, staff to have some time to shelf read without backing up regular duties.

We are still working on this and I hope to have the non-fiction completed in a week or two. You may be asking so what is the prize? The prize is a $50 gift certificate of the winner's choice. This will be donated by me, so no funds from any agency or organization will be used. I look at it as a gift of appreciation to a staff that works hard. There will be a few surprise prizes, too, like one for the person who has shelf read the most. I may come up with others before the project is completed.

We will see if shelf reading can be fun.

Library Link of the Day

After moving to South County, I learned about Library Link of the Day. It has been a great source of professional literature and interesting topics to think about. Each day I find in my email inbox an article from a worldwide professional journal or an article about libraries or of interest to librarians from another resource. They range from library architecture, to innovative services, to cutting edge technology. All are interesting and thought provoking.

Library Link of the Day can be accessed at http://www.tk421.net/librarylink or find it by googling Library Link of the Day. It just takes a few minutes out of your day and provides cutting edge information that can really vitalize service in your library.

One recent article that really hit home was and article from the May 31, 2008 Wall Street Journal, by Luc Sante called "The Book Collection the Devoured My Life." It's located at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121217626838633437.html Each of our personal book collections, our personal libraries, are a reflection of our lives and even stages in our lives. The same could be said of all library collections, as well. Each library has its own special personality. Sante mentions that book collections are living reflections of us. Check out his article, it's one of the best I've read in a long time. Check out Library Link of Day, too. It has been one of my great discoveries this year.

Juggling Pots

Now that I'm more familiar with my new library, I have spent several weeks evaluating all the pots that I juggle through the month. Using the SWOT method, I've identified ten pots (areas of management.) At first it seemed that there were many more than ten, but after looking at each one, some could be grouped with others.

1. Customer service includes adult services, children's services, service to teens, circulation, programming and customer service development and continuing education.

2. Staff and personnel issues includes personnel reviews, meetings, communication, scheduling, safety training, hiring and training, and continuing education.

3. Outreach to our service area includes publicizing the library, outreach to the community, outreach to schools, outreach to government, use and scheduling of the community room, and outreach to organizations like Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club.

4. Friends of the Library includes meetings, maintenance of the bookstore, and working with them to promote books, reading and the library.

5. Managing our satellite branch at Laguna Woods. This is small technology branch and I have been working with the city of Laguna Woods to outreach to the community, begin to build a Friends of the Library, programming, collection development, and to begin working on a new facility that would allow the branch to grow in a separate branch that can fully serve the needs of the its community.

6. Maintaining the building and facility of the El Toro Library. This includes regular building inspections, making sure needed repairs and maintenance are completed, maintaining the landscaping, making sure the parking lot is good shape, requesting the FOL to make purchases to enhance the use of the building, and security.

7. Collection Development includes, building the collection, weeding the collection, maintaining the collection (Cleaning, mending and labeling), location and maintenance of special collections, and shelf reading.

8. Professional Development includes professional literature, keeping up with system changes and databases offer at OCPL, learning our new phone system, keeping up with other technologies as they apply to the library (Web 2.0 & Library 2.0), attending training and workshops, participation in system wide committees, working on my personnel review requirements, working on outreach, programming and publicity, and writing articles to promote the library, and eventual publishing professional papers.

9. Budgets, includes monitoring several budgets and payroll, working on ways to conserve money when needed and to spend money when there is some to spend. These budgets are materials, supplies and extra help (substitute staff.) Also included are all money handling at the branch and payroll.

10. Reports are required from various departments, some are my responsibility, but it my job to make sure these reports are completed and submitted on time. These include the Branch Managers Monthly report, mileage claim forms for the staff, monthly statistical reports, janitorial inspections, safety inspections, training log and donation log, and our new Customer Care reporting.

Literary Orange is here

The second annual Litery Orange is this weekend, April 5th. This is the large author festival sponsored by the OC Public Libraries in partnership with the Univeristy of California at Irvine and the California Center for the Book. It is a great experience. This year keynote speakers are Elizabeth George and Janet Fitch. 36 authors and people in the industry will be speaking. Please check out the website by going to www.ocpl.org and click on the Literary Orange logo.

I apoolgize for the long absence. Since my last posting, I have transfered to a larger branch in the OC Public Libraries. I am back home at the El Toro Library. The El Toro library is much bigger and busier that the Mesa Verde Library. Although the library and staff are very familiar to me, it has taken some time to slip into the routine of the branch. In the next few weeks, I plan to update my personal information and post new picutres of the library.