Library Alchemy

And by “A-Team,” I mean, of course, Team Alchemy.  I just love it when a plan comes together, though, and many things have blossomed this week.  Here’s a short progress report.

Collection Development

Got a compliment today – it was passed down from the coordinator of collection development, who appreciates the way Bonnie and I have worked out the ordering of pop culture/current events non-fiction. That’s really gratifying to hear, because we spend a lot of time making sure we’re not duplicating orders! Our LibraryThing account helps, and the rest of the staff in both our departments have been gracious about using it.

Refdesk

The question du jour concerned Slavic mythology. Do we have the best career, or what?

Virtual Reference

There’s a lot of rhetoric floating around about best practices and whatnot, so I’ll not dwell on this overmuch. Suffice to say, I think virtual reference is splendid for developing writing skills, and learning to adapt the reference interview to a text-based process is a never-ending course in professional development.

Of course, it’s also subject to Murphy’s Law: if I start conducting a reference interview, the patron asks for just a few quick links. If I start with links, the patron invariably reveals more info that cries for a reference interview. Definitely educational.

Eleventh Stack

In March the Eleventh Stack blog earned a record-high number of hits, and so far this year monthly visits are double those from 2008. On March 25th we were featured as one of WordPress’s top 100 growing blogs. Granted, we were only #98, but given how many WordPress blogs there are, I think that’s a pretty cool feat!

CLPicks

As of right now we’re up to 81 followers on Twitter, and our TwitterGrade has risen to 85. Again, not too shabby for a ragtag team of librarians trying something new. A goodish chunk of our followers are local people, too, not just my librarian friends/colleagues. Whew.

23 Things

Team Celery Stick (a subsidiary of Team Alchemy) opened up registration yesterday for our “23 Things ‘N ‘At” program – in one day we received 110 registrants countywide, so the bar is up there pretty high! Kelley, Ryan, Beth and I have risen to the occasion by setting up our wiki, creating the official program blog, and putting the final touches on our content.

Databases (CLP)

Working on 1st-quarter stats. Also spent some time doing scenario planning, in case of material budget cuts. It’s better to plan for things and not need them then vice versa, IMHO. And it’s a good exercise in seeing where you’re strong, collectionwise, in what formats.

Databases (countywide)

With much help from the committee, have set up four trainings for our suite of NetLibrary recorded books. They’ve just changed the interface and added iPod-compatible titles (hurray!), so we want to make sure the various libraries’ staffs are up to speed.

There’s more, but I think that’s enough for now. If I told you everything I did all day, you wouldn’t believe me! Although I wish I got more reference desk time, I’m really happy to be part of all the things I do on the daily. I definitely stretched out of my comfort zone with this job, and it’s taken me to places I never imagined I’d go.

From clerking to reader’s advisory librarian to nominal 2.0 person/reference librarian in 7 short years. Who knows what will happen next? It’s pretty exciting…

At any rate, I’ll be back next week with the results of the drawing for Slow Reading. Hope you all had a wonderful National Library Week!