Library Alchemy

If that subject header had you scratching your noggin, click here for elucidation.  For the rest of you, on with the story!

For the past few months, my workload rose to such a pitch that half-joking plea for an intern had become part of my regular rotation of requests.  Call it manifestation or plain old nagging, but when an opportunity appeared mid-summer, yours truly was given an intern…er, 1/2 an intern.  In Solomonic fashion, Tanya split her time here at Main between the stacks and shelving department, and helping me with tasks in Ref. Services.

Having her around has been educational.  For one thing, Tanya’s not planning to make librarianship a career, though she was intrigued that there were such things as medical libraries and librarians.  Working with her has forced me to re-examine everything I do, because I know I’m going to have to explain/justify it to a non-library person.  It’s also forced me to be even better organized, because I want to make her time here useful and educational – that means having tasks ready, and not just tasks, but a variety of tasks, so that she gets a well-rounded experience.

On top of that, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to model that one behavior I hope to someday perfect–the art of dropping everything and paying attention to her when she has a question–as well as other behaviors worth having in the bag of tricks:  patience, a sense of humor, problem-solving skills, diplomacy, flexibility and creativity.   We had a teachable moment just this morning, in which I was having difficulty exporting data from Millennium Create List, and I had to ask one of my peers for a reminder/refresher on the spot–not sure if that was more educational for her or for me!  But still, the point was made:  even the nominal leader gets stuck, and needs to ask for help.

Here are some of the things Tanya’s helped me with so far:

• mass mailings
• weeding (literal and digital)
• creating digital booklists
• creating displays
• database evaluations [seeing how a non-library person perceived our electronic resources was insanely valuable]
• collection development (print and digital)
• searching for missing items
• shadowing at the reference desk

She also wrote a very nice Eleventh Stack post describing her internship, both at Main and at the Carrick branch, where she spent the first part of her summer. If the point of internships is to educate folks on just how important library service is to the community, I’d have to say “mission accomplished” on this one. I can’t really take the credit for that, per se, but I’m glad I played a small part in helping her have a good library experience.

As for me, I was a lot more comfortable in a leadership role this time than I was last time, when I supervised the Help Desk workers. Funny what time and, hopefully, a little maturity, can do! I am still not 100% convinced it’s the direction in which I want to take my career, but I now know that I could become a good manager if I were willing to work at it. So the real question is, what would make me happy?  Although I’m pro-money, and fond of regular meals, I’m a little more concerned with other levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at this point in my life.

If and when I ever get a handle on that, I’ll let you know. And if that last paragraph shocked you, you should hear about my backup plan just in case this whole librarian thing doesn’t work out. No, not the goat farm – that’s the retirement plan.

I have a few writing topics I’m going to defer until September, as they revolve around specific timed events.  There are a few things saved in my newsreader that I want to warble about, but for now, let’s leave it open-ended.  Your alchemist also takes requests, so if there’s something you’d like me to write about, do leave a comment.