http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib217.html

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians sponsored by
our bulk mail
provider,
WillCo

#217, June 18, 2004



SUBJECT INDEX to Past Issues

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/archive.html

* * *

Neat New Stuff I Found This Week

* * *

My resume

http://marylaine.com/
resume.html
Or why you might want to hire me for speaking engagements or workshops. To see outlines for previous presentations I've done, click on Handouts

* * *

My Writings

http://marylaine.com/
resume2.html
A bibliography of my published articles and columns, with links to those available online.

* * *

Order My Books

Net Effects: How Librarians Can Manage the Unintended Consequences of the Internet, and The Quintessential Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint.

* * *

What IS Ex Libris?

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/purpose.html

The purpose and intended scope of this e-zine

* * *

E-Mail Subscription?

For a combined subscription to Neat New Stuff and ExLibris, please click HERE, complete the form, and click on "subscribe." To unsubscribe, use the same form but click on "unsubscribe." To change addresses for an existing subscription, unsubscribe from that form and return to the page to enter the new address.

* * *

Highlights from Previous Issues:


My Rules of Information

  1. Go where it is
  2. Corollary: Who Cares?
  3. The answer depends on the question
  4. Research is a multi-stage process
  5. Ask a Librarian
  6. Information is meaningless until queried by human intelligence
  7. Information can be true and still wrong
  8. Pay attention to the jokes

* * *

Guru Interviews

  1. Tara Calishain
  2. Jenny Levine, part I
  3. Jenny Levine, Part II
  4. Reva Basch
  5. Sue Feldman
  6. Jessamyn West
  7. Debbie Abilock
  8. Kathy Schrock
  9. Greg Notess
  10. William Hann
  11. Chris Sherman
  12. Gary Price
  13. Barbara Quint
  14. Rory Litwin
  15. John Guscott
  16. Brian Smith
  17. Darlene Fichter
  18. Brenda Bailey-Hainer
  19. Walt Crawford
  20. Molly Williams
  21. Genie Tyburski
  22. Patrice McDermott
  23. Carrie Bickner
  24. Karen G. Schneider
  25. Roddy MacLeod, Part I
  26. Roddy MacLeod, Part II
  27. John Hubbard
  28. Micki McIntyre

* * *

Cool Quotes

The collected quotes from all previous issues are at http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/cool.html

* * *

When and How To Search the Net

* * *

Wanna See Your Name in Lights?

Or at least on this page, anyway? I'd like to print here your contributions as well as mine. As you've noticed, articles are brief, somewhere between 200 and 500 words -- something to jog people's minds and get their own good ideas flowing. I'd also be happy to run other people's contributions to the regular features like Favorite Sites on _____. I'll pay you the same rate I pay me: nothing.

* * *

Drop me a Line

Want to comment, ask questions, submit articles, or invite me to speak or do some training? Write me at: marylaine at netexpress.net




Visit My Other Sites


BookBytes

http://marylaine.com/
bookbyte/index.html
My page on all things book-related.

* * *

How To Find Out of Print Books

http://marylaine.com/
bookbyte/getbooks.html
Suggested strategies, resources, and finding tools.

* * *

Best Information on the Net

http://library.sau.edu/
bestinfo/default.htmThe directory I built for O'Keefe Library, St. Ambrose University, still my favorite pit stop on the information highway.

* * *

My Word's Worth

http://marylaine.com/
myword/index.html
an occasional column on books, words, libraries, American culture, and whatever happens to interest me.

* * *

Book Proposal

Land of Why Not: an Appreciation of America. Proposal for an anthology of some of my best writing. An outline and sample columns are available here.

* * *

My personal page

http://marylaine.com/
personal.html



NOTE: One of the ways I learn about things that interest me is to invite my readers to write articles about them. A couple of things I'd be interested in learning more about, especially if you see library applications for them, are smart mobs and wikis. If any of you are interested in writing on these topics, let me know. And of course, I'm still collecting stories about your finest moments as a librarian; this will be a continuing series.


DAMN, WE'RE GOOD, PART II: MORE LIBRARIANS' PROUDEST MOMENTS

Leslie A. Norman, an MLIS Candidate, SCILS, Rutgers University, says:

I worked for four years as a news researcher for a financial company. I earned four byline credits of which I am very proud. I was always able to find information that the other researchers could not find.

But my proudest moment was working as an Information Assistant at Douglass College, Rutgers University (NJ) as an MLIS student. I usually told students where the restrooms were, how to find a book, how to print out digitized journal articles.

One day, a young African-American woman asked me to help her find websites that would help her write a resume and I referred her to the Subject Research Guide on job hunting. Several days later, she came back and said she need help writing the resume. Since the workflow was very slow and I thought she just needed some help with the computer, I found her an empty computer.

The library computers only had Wordpad and I found out she couldn't use the computer lab because she wasn't a student. So I showed her some tricks like centering text, using different font sizes, and adding in information she forgotten. My shift ended but I stayed to help her. Her story came out as I wrote her resume. She was a single mother with a misdemeanor conviction and she just wanted a job at a drugstore. She really didn't need a resume for a retail job but she wanted to make a good impression. She had overcome odds that I couldn't imagine as a white middle-class women with an intact nuclear family and a new loving husband.

She finally haltingly told me about her brush with the law when I told her she couldn't lie on the application about a police record. But she didn't need to lie because the job application only asked about theft, fraud, and felonies; her situation didn't require answering "yes" to these these questions.

She only had $.75 so I lent her money to copy the resume and then I realized that the computer file would be lost. I gave her one of my disks with the resume file on it.

Helping that one woman gave me more joy than helping all the middle- class college students that I saw over one semester. She was appreciative and started to cry because I gave her money and a disk. I'm not rich but I could afford to get more disks and earn more money.

My philosophy about librarianship is that the objective is about access to information, even when that information is within the librarian.

Donald T. Hawkins, Information Technology & Database Consultant at Information Today, Inc. (my publisher), offers this:

I well remember one of my most satisfying moments as a budding online searcher. It was in the early 1970s (I'm betraying my age here!!), and I was working as an Information Scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, doing literature searches for the technical researchers.

My neighbor where I was living was a physicist researcher at Bell Labs, and he and I used to trade work experiences over the fence, so he knew about online searching. One day at work, he came to me and told me he had an infrared spectrum with a strange peak at one frequency (for purposes of illustration, let's imagine it was at 7639 Angstroms). Having a Ph.D. in a physical science (in those days, the Bell Labs library management had the enlightened policy of hiring people with the Ph.D. degree for their high-level online searching service), I knew what that meant. My neighbor told me what he thought the substance was and asked me if I could find anything about this strange peak on his spectrum. I could have tried to find articles on the substance , but instead I took a long shot, logged on to the Inspec database on Dialog, and just searched on the frequency of the peak: SELECT 7639. Lo and behold!! Up came about half a dozen articles discussing the same spectrum with the same peak. It was simple, quick, and easy. My neighbor was amazed -- in less than a minute he had all his questions answered and went away very happy. Even after all these years, I still remember the glow of satisfaction that I got from that search.

Judy Pitchford, of the Government Information Locator Service, Office of the Secretary of State (WA) Library Division, tells this story:

My first library jobs were working with special populations - at risk students while a school librarian and inmates while working in a prison library. It is difficult to pick out only one moment where I felt I had really impacted someone since pretty much every day brought that feeling.

The schools I worked in were the ones where many of the children were reading on the Kindergarten level in 5th grade. Our main mission was to motivate them to read. Little things worked wonders - like the library gold card I would give to students who achieved specific goals in our reading program. It was just a business card edged in black and gold that I would print their names on with a laser printer and then used special foil to make their names appear in gold. They pushed themselves to be the proud owner of that card and would run into the library grinning from ear-to-ear, waving the proof that they had earned their "Gold Card" - and would remind me daily if I was slow getting it to them :>) And then proudly using that card to check out more books - my book circulation numbers jumped through the roof during that program.

While working in prison, at least one inmate a day would express how grateful he was to have the library. "I don't know what I would do without the library" or "The Library helps me keep my sanity" where common statements from my patrons. I can remember the inmate that slipped me a note that said "I have HIV. My counselor said you could help me find books about it" and his appreciation when I quietly went about getting the books he needed. And the inmate with Huntington's Disease, when I found information to help him better understand his future. Basic information, that we take for granted "on the outside", is difficult to obtain "on the inside" so each time I was able to help my patrons was a proud moment for me.

David Isaacson, Asst. Head of Reference and Humanities Librarian at Western Michigan University's Waldo Library, offers this:

One of the things I'm most proud of as a reference librarian is the people I've helped to teach, on the job at the reference desk, to choose reference as their life's work. This was a lot easier to do when we had a library school at our university: library school students got paid for working as assistants in our department and got apprentice training at the same time.

Since 1985, when the library school folded, the graduate and undergraduate students we've hired to help us almost always have another career goal in mind. But every now and then a student worker becomes a protegee. The girl who thought she wanted to be a social worker or the guy who thought he was going to be a lawyer suddenly wants to have the more romantic job of reference librarian. I'm not the only one in our department to enjoy the privilege and to try to live up to the responsibility of being a role model to these librarians-to-be. It's neat to see some of these kids all grown up, serving the public in ways we older librarians like to think we helped them learn.

* * * * *

COOL QUOTE:

Curiosity sends us out
To a world both larger and smaller
Than what we know and believe in
With a passion for finding an answer
Or at least understanding our questions.

That road is paved with librarians,
Bushwhackers, scouts with string
Through the labyrinths of information,
Helpers who disappear the moment
You reach your destination.

Excerpted from Julia Alvarez's poem, "Why I Am in Love with Librarians."

* * *

You are welcome to copy and forward any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2004.

[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]

Please do NOT copy and post my articles to your own web sites, however. Instead, please copy a brief excerpt and link to my site for the remainder of the article.