I’ll miss interacting with this group of students but at the same time — and I think they would agree — there’s something nice about hitting the home stretch. An awful lot of stuff has been compacted into a very short timeframe (eight weeks) during summer session.

I’m also looking forward to a faculty retreat to be hosted by the school at Allerton Park, a fabulous estate owned by the University of Illinois that is located near Monticello. It’s worth a visit just to see the gardens and the grounds, especially the sculpture scattered throughout. The retreat will be held over the course of two days in August and I have been asked to facilitate one of the sessions, a technology “show and tell.” I’m really looking forward to that.

Aside from the panic I felt in needing to be in two places at nearly the same time (NASIG in Phoenix, AZ and Urbana-Champaign for the on campus class session), everything went smoothly. I’ll write a bit more about my NASIG experience in a separate post. Fantastic location and great conference.

I love teaching. These people are really smart, ask challenging questions, think broadly about the role of technical services within the library organization. It is heartening to hear them tell me that they feel a course like this should be required, not optional in the library school curriculum. I’m biased but I completely agree, because I believe that what we call technical services is the very backbone of library service.

The theme for this year’s conference in Phoenix, AZ is “Taking the sting out of serials” and our presentation consciously tries to tie into that theme. We’ll be presenting on the topic of “E-Resource Management in the For-Profit World: Soothing the Sting.” There hasn’t been much in the way of past presentations that deal with serials and electronic resources management in special libraries that I can recall so I’m glad our proposal was accepted this year. As always, the coordination offered by the all volunteer efforts of NASIG members of the Conference and Program Planning Committees has been outstanding.

One aspect of our preparation that I wanted to highlight is the fact that Sarah and I have used Google Docs to work out what we want to present in terms of presentation slides, handouts, and outline. This has been the first time I’ve used Google Docs in a shared manner and it really has been easy and useful. What I would have given for such a collaboration tool when working on past presentations! We have definitely come a very long way.

One thing I’ve spent time on this weekend is preparing for my upcoming class for the LEEP program at UIUC GSLIS. I love teaching the course but it is a lot of work to prepare for it and to figure out how to make it fresh and new each time. And there is always room for improvement.

Then there is the online course I agreed last Fall to create for NASIG. That is due sometime in July. But even before that I need to complete preparations for my presentation at the upcoming NASIG conference in the second week of June. I’ll actually be co-presenting with friend Sarah Morris and we’ll be talking about managing electronic resources in special library settings.

All work-related projects seems to implode upon themselves at this time as well, and I am scrambling to keep up with lots of stuff there, too. One of my staff members left for greener pastures in March and he is strongly missed!

Sometime soon we will be going on a mini-vacation to do some fishing and enjoy the outdoors so that is something I’m really looking forward to. In addition, Keegan will be out of school soon.

This morning we went to church and I’m glad (as always) that we did, because we received refreshment and encouragement there. This afternoon we went to a few stores and mostly drove a bit in the countryside just north of us over the border into Wisconsin.

The next several weeks will be quite hectic but I know that our Heavenly Father will meet all our needs. Along that same vein, would you please pray for some people in my extended family and friends? My sister-in-law’s brother and his youngest son (age 11) suffered severe injuries and burns in an accident a week ago or so. They and their family need all the support and care they can get. Also, someone I wrote about some time ago, John Fawcett, who has battled a recurrence of cancer for several months, has decided to not continue any treatment. I imagine this means that he could die at any time and I know his wife and young children also desperately need prayer at this time. ]]> http://familymanlibrarian.com/2008/05/18/preparing-for-the-next-several-weeks/feed/ http://familymanlibrarian.com/2008/04/09/some-cataloging-history/ http://familymanlibrarian.com/2008/04/09/some-cataloging-history/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:48:22 +0000 FamManLib http://familymanlibrarian.com/2008/04/09/some-cataloging-history/ The other day I finally had a look at a site that I knew about for a while but had never visited: The Virtual Museum of Cataloging and Acquisition Artifacts, maintained by a library school professor (I think, at the Univ. of South Carolina). I entered the library profession in 1992 so a lot of this, you would think, would be unknown to me. Not so. At The University of Chicago, I well remember many such artifacts being used well into the mid-1990s and, for all I know, still being used today. I remember electric pencils, manual typewriters, the old Cutter-Sanborn tables, and much, much more. One of the things I vividly remember is the old, clunky integrated library system still in use there in the early days of my career: LDMS (stands for Library Data Management System). One of the things that will always stay in my mind when I think of LDMS were the copious staff notes made in serial records by a previous librarian there, Helen Schmierer. (I think Helen may still be active in the profession but I’m not sure where.) Then too, how can I forget the entirely paper-based serial record for active and inactive print subscriptions? And the large, clunky Dieboldt machine that housed the inactive journal subscription records? And the card catalog and the paper shelflist? And the many interesting old cards written in library hand? Yes, there were courses in library school that taught one how to write in “library hand.” And don’t forget the knowledge one had to have of various filing rules. Those were the good old days, may they never come again…

One thing I plan to do is add the link to this site to the list of things my students are to review this summer when I will be teaching Technical Services Functions online again at UIUC GSLIS.

Allerton Park Institute Proceedings(1954-1997)
Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (1963-1995)
Occasional Papers (1949-2004)

These are highly important publications in terms of recent library history, and it is great that they are now readily available like this. I know that the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in particular discussed important, cutting edge development around MARC and early integrated library systems (including NOTIS from Northwestern University Library and LDMS from The University of Chicago Library), and that you can’t get a complete picture of library automation history without reading papers presented there. Take a look at www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/154.

(Found out via message from Sue Searing, LIS librarian, to GSLIS faculty earlier today. )

Surely the next best thing would be to show and discuss this photoset in class or have students look at it on their own.  That would go a long way toward demystifying some of the physical aspects of this area of librarianship.  I’d love to see more such photosets crop up on Flickr or elsewhere.  Folks, let’s shed light on technical services in libraries of all sorts!  Bring “the back room” out into the open!  I think a lot of people, including our library users, would find such exposure fascinating and insightful.

I agree with her on this.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  When I look back on the past sixteen years of being a professional librarian and on what events or involvements I am most proud of, they all involved taking a risk.  I well remember how nervous I was when taking on a fairly major management position after only about three years of being a serials cataloger (which was my first full-time job, ever).  I literally lay awake at night worrying myself sick, wondering, what on earth had I gotten myself into?!  It was definitely a trial by fire.  There were significant conflicts and problems needing to be effectively dealt with literally from day one.  One of the mandates I was given was to completely revamp workflow so that my unit would not only be able to keep up with current receipts (i.e. no adding to backlogs), but to also reduce and get rid of longstanding backlogs, and do all of this with fewer staff than my predecessor.  Because of the quality of the people with whom I worked, these goals were met and a lot of progress was made.  But there was not one day that went by that I didn’t feel nervous or worried about my responsibilities.  It was all worth it, though.  I grew personally and professionally by leaps and bounds.

Then there was the opportunity to lead a major professional library organization, which I’ve talked about a bit in the past.  I had never dreamed it would be possible to be nominated, let alone elected.  Yet I went ahead and agreed to be put on the ballot, anyway, in spite of others whom I respect telling me that I shouldn’t expect to get elected given the caliber of the person I was running against.  I thought, why not?  If it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, well, it would be good experience either way.  To my delight and shock, I won.  I was the youngest elected president in NASIG’s history (I think I still hold that particular record); I had no prior Board experience; everyone else with whom I would be working was deeply experienced and significantly older than I was at the time.  I think the Board member (Carol Diedrichs, now Dean of Libraries at Kentucky) who was nearest to me in age was ten years my senior.  This is not a bragging session but rather a way to make clear just how big of a risk this was for me.  I was delighted, yes, but completely, utterly terrified as well.  It was one of those situations where you need to be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

A third milestone event involving a big risk on my part was agreeing to teach a class in the distance education curriculum at my alma mater, UIUC GSLIS.  This class had been taught before but I basically had to start from scratch to create the course.  Again (and honestly, this is no exaggeration) I was terrified.  I can’t tell you how many times I mentally kicked myself, saying to myself, “Why oh why did you ever agree to do this!”  The fear of failure was so all-consuming.  I lost countless hours of sleep.  I couldn’t eat sometimes, I felt so nervous.  And that was just before the class started.  When I had to do the class every week, each time was like the first time and I was nervous, self-doubting, and upset every time.  I would get home from work and after Michele and the children were in bed, I’d go and work on the class until two or three a.m.  I managed to survive for about five weeks of this, and then I became really, really sick with meningitis and ended up in the hospital, twice.  Because of the love and kindness of others who stepped in and helped me out, I was able to get better and finish the course.  I felt that I had done a terrible job but at least I had done it.  I went on to teach that course two more times.  It got a little easier with time but it still felt like a huge risk.

I have to say that there were other risks I took where there was significant failure on my part.  For example, one of my best library friends asked me to co-author a book with her, and I agreed.  Yet instead of fulfilling my responsibilities, I largely left her in the lurch.  I’m still trying to get over the guilt of that experience and it happened years ago.  Sadly, that isn’t the only example of failure.

Aside from this blog, I have largely withdrawn from direct, active participation in the profession.  My choice.  But I want to point out that risk-taking didn’t end there.

A tumultuous and highly risky decision I made in the early 90s was to leave the Christian fellowship in which I had been raised since I was a baby.  Repercussions of this decision exist even today and probably will bother me all of my life.  I completely left the society and “comfort zone” that I had known and functioned within all of my life.

There was more change to come a few years later.  Probably the riskiest thing I ever did in my whole life was to ask Michele if she’d go out on a date with me and then, within a short time after that first date, I asked her to marry me.  Incredibly, Michele (and Keegan, whose permission I asked for) said Yes.  As a result, in one fell swoop I took on the role of husband AND father, two things I had never done before.  These roles have dominated my life since, and I have no regrets at all.  Each additional child we were blessed with was yet another step into the unknown in so many ways.  Moving several times, taking new and different jobs, were all involved in the risks I’ve taken in recent years.

How grateful I am to have even had these opportunities!  Many of them were presented to me, but also, many of them were opportunities I actively pursued.

It’s not all been successful.  I have failed miserably more times than I can count.  But I have also enjoyed success (although I’d define “success” in a much more well-rounded way than some).  I have experienced things I would never experience if I hadn’t stepped out in faith and told myself, Give it a try!