I had a doctor’s appointment last week and managed to read a New Yorker article written by Tina Fey on things she had learned about producing from Lorne Michaels. While I’ll never have to ask an actor if she’s comfortable fake breast-feeding a grown man she’d only just met, some of the points she made resonated with me and my managerial struggles, particularly this week. Coincidentally, I’m also listening to Bossypants on audiobook and I wish I could listen to it always. I basically want Tina Fey as my managerial Jiminy Cricket. But I’m sure she has better things to do so let’s get to it.

Being Disappointing for the Good of the Organization: I think Ms. Fey said something like “being the producer means crushing the creativity of others.” She meant it in the way that if you ask for a bran muffin and the props department gives you a hugely decorated bran cake, you have to kindly insist on the muffin. At some point in your life, saying no will make the shift from “sticking it to the man” to “crushing someone’s dream kindly.” Or just being disappointing. What I mean by this is if you work with fantastically creative and passionate people, as I do, sometimes the vision gets a little out of hand and it falls to you to reign it back in to workable, feasible or suitable proportions. As one of the “creative types” this happens to me frequently. That is, I get reigned in. When it doesn’t, sometimes it’s because everything has been correctly anticipated but sometimes I realize the mistakes that I’ve made in scope or content or whatever only too late and things turn out not-so-good. I think a trait of a good manager is to recognize the difference between when trusting staff with their intuition and when to impose a bit of your own. The fine line between letting them dream as big as they can and identifying the point where it becomes unattainable or will potentially be unsuccessful. Encouraging risk-taking and protecting the library. You get it.

Owning Your Disappointments: The flip side to that coin is owning your decision to crush people’s dreams. This bit of advice that I got from my husband, who is a legitimate Leader in Our Profession. Although I’m sure Tina Fey knows this, too because she’s just the best. Once you disappoint people, you have to stand by your decision. Essentially: Own your shit… like a BOSS. When I was a baby librarian and was confronted with an uncomfortable decision to make or bad news to give, I tended to reference the overriding authority of others or tried to ignore the problem until it goes away. Needless to say it’s caused me a lot of guilt, anxiety, and trouble. In the intervening years, this has evened out a bit, but the act of letting others down is extremely distressing to me. This week I had to deliver disappointing news as a result of being “disappointed for the good of the organization.” As a side note, the interesting thing about wearing two hats at the same time on my maiden supervisory voyage is that sometimes these things are done to me as a employee and sometimes I have to inflict these things on others. It keeps me honest, to say the least. Anyway, I was agonizing over this and Nick basically advised me to own my shit. So I did and it felt… awful, yet like I had made the right decision in the end. On the other hand, I suppose any real manager would tell you that you don’t do these things so YOU can sleep well at night. So let me rephrase. You do these things so that your staff have a clear understanding of why you make the decisions you make. You want clear lines of communication and honesty and transparency are far better managerial currencies than being everyone’s buddy. And to be honest, the idea that I won’t always be the Good Guy makes me INCREDIBLY uncomfortable, so I know I have to keep working at it. So there you have it. Not quite Bossypants, yet, but good start.

Fast forward three years and 11 months and I’m told that my Branch Librarian (supervisory w/o being the Branch Manager) has been seconded to work on a special project and would I like the job in the interim? I said yes, with trepidation. It was only a month, so how much could I screw up the branch? Not too badly. I worked in this position pretty blithely – most of it was Christmas vacation. It wasn’t a walk in the park by any means, but hardly as daunting as I expected. In the meantime, a permanent opportunity for that position came up. To my surprise, I applied. And I got an interview. But it wasn’t a surprise when I didn’t get the job. Coincidentally, my boss-hood has been extended for another few months and I think it would be a good chance to learn from this experience and better prepare myself for these nebulous future positions, should they arise.

I’ve been told that I have “leadership potential” which, I think, is to say that I’m not there yet. I would have to agree with that assessment. I’d describe myself currently as an independently motivated follower, and a good librarian, but not yet a leader. It’s become clear that yes, there is a difference between leadership and “volunteering to do all the work.” What that nuance is, I haven’t quite figured out. Toward this end: I thought I’d write a series of posts about what leadership at a branch level actually means (to me) and what I think being a leader is at all. So, kick back, relax while I librarian LIKE A BOSS.

During one particular session at OLA “Is the Medium the Message? E-Readers in the Classroom,” curriculum developers for the local school board recounted success stories of using e-readers in school to encourage students with learning differences to read. One boy used the zoom feature to create enlarged sections of text that were easier for him to focus on and was proud of himself when he read “20 pages” really quickly.  Other librarians reported purchasing Kobos in order to entice reluctant readers into book clubs.  More interesting, at least from my early-literacy-loving point of view, is how e-content is effecting the way that reading itself is changing. How we have moved from the reader deriving meaning from text as a static object to decoding text that is laden with other layers of meaning that is programmed into what you are reading. Don’t know what a word means? Look it up in the handy dictionary linked to the text file on your e-reader. Want to reference another article that’s readily available online? Link to that reference and your reader is a click away from a deeper understanding of context. On Kindle – readers can annotate portions of the text, but also have available to them the notes of other readers of the same text! This gives readers the unique opportunity to compare their ideas and sections of import with people from around the world (in theory). I am not a teacher, but my knee-jerk reaction was “SWEET. Let’s get right on it! Let’s make it part of the curriculum! Let’s make a comparison assignment based on the notes you find in a Kindle text!” But the majority of the more vocal teacher-librarians in the room were skeptical if not downright hostile to this type of reading. But what happens to education when some children are reading texts that are inherently richer than others based on what they are able to do?

In my personal experience, exposing children to e-readers doesn’t necessarily have to be an either/or scenario – we can love books just as much as we love e-books. We can introduce children to one format by way of another. Your reluctant reader might not love books, but loves gadgetry – e-Readers or Tumblebooks might be a better avenue to introduce literacy than a book. Conversely, your avid reader might not want to take 50 lbs. worth of print on a vacation – easy solution – the e-Reader.  “Finding the right tool” for any given child should be the goal in order to make reading meaningful, and we should embrace whatever format motivates children to read. But whether or not you agree this is a useful feature is not entirely the point – I think the discussion around whether electronic texts are changing the very act of reading is significant when viewed through a social lens.

How will this impact the future of the education of my non-existant children???  According to a teacher in the session (who, admittedly, I only half-heard), a local enormous school board has supposedly made the commitment to provide their textbooks at the not-so-distant future in (primarily?) e-format. And how will the children get access to these lovely e-format materials? Furthermore, if e-readers truly are the ticket to encouraging reading in those who have difficulty or lack desire then how do we ensure that children in at-risk communities get the tools they need to succeed in school?  What about the communities who can’t afford the technology, the administration or teachers who are wary of it or infrastructures that don’t support such items? Are we relegating children to second-rate educations based upon a trend?

While I understand educational institutions being more cautious with the “wait and see” game – after all, do we want to experiment with technology with the future success of children at stake? – do libraries have to be so conservative? I would say – of course not. After all, in addition to helping frazzled parents with last-minute assignments on pioneer village life, we also have an obligation to try to provide access to information and technology. We can be the hip substitute teacher that swoops in à la Jaime Escalante and LouAnne Johnson and teaches the class of misfits to be information literate using rap! Okay, well maybe not rap. How about e-readers? Oh, and actually make sure that people have access to the technology in question. I’m currently making a request that as part of curriculum I’m developing for Summer Reading book clubs that the participants be allowed access to the iPads that the library bought for the purpose of training. While children in my branch generally are very well-off and could possible have iPads of their own, this experience might be something that the customers at the at risk branches in the system would really value. We’ll see what happens, but you don’t know until you ask. ”Come learn about iPads at your library.” “Come borrow an e-reader and see if you like it.” Once again, we have the opportunity to be a institution turned social equalizer and we should seize it.

Here’s a brief outline of what I did each week. But “brief” I mean the craft and one of the books or rhymes… I can’t remember them all!

Week 1: Leaf necklaces (Materials needed: Leaf-shape cut outs, yarn, things to decorate with, glue)
Debuted my new song Who’s My Pretty Baby,(I learned it from Elizabeth Mitchell’s album You Are My Little Bird), with success. Goes like this:

Who’ll be my baby
Who’ll be my pretty little baby?
You’ll be my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
Hey, hey, pretty baby
Ho, ho, pretty little baby
You’re my, my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe.

Who’ll be my little man?
Who’ll be my nice lady
Who’ll be my funny little bunny
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
(lather, rinse, repeat first verse)

Week 2: Monkey paper bag puppets (Materials needed: brown paper bags, pink oval shapes for the face and brown oval shapes for the ears, glue)
The book Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett, (who I laude copiously throughout this blog), worked phenomenally well for Family Storytime! Babies enjoy the simple rhyme and pre-schoolers enjoy reading it as a “read along.” You read a line and they repeat it back. For extra fun – act out the animals!

Week 3: Butterfly straw puppets (Materials needed: Butterfly-shaped cut-outs, straws, crepe paper streamers, markers, tape)
The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O’Connell. I love, love, love this book. Babies enjoy the theme and the “baby’s day” aspect of it… toddlers like helping you make the onomatopoeias. It’s easy for parents to help you out – everybody wins!

Week 4: Paper plate flowers (paper plates, tissue paper or crepe paper cut into pieces, glue)
Is Your Mama a Llama (Deborah Guarino) – One little boy liked this so much he took it home with him!

At the end of the hour, several of the mothers came up to tell me how much their children enjoyed the storytime and promised to be back in the fall. In light of all of the extra administrative /off-desk and hands-off type of work I seem to be doing lately, it’s the ability to interact with customers, especially in an environment like storytime, that makes my job worthwhile.

Saturday in the Life: The Day of Good Intentions or The day where e-mail happened.

9:00: I get to work expecting a delicious day off-desk during which I will surely achieve all of the prep-work for the end of the month reports, etc.

10:00: Summer Reading Club reporting hours begin. I say hello to the volunteers and go back to e-mail.

10:00: A lovely young woman shows up for a proctoring appointment. Good news: I totally know what she’s talking about! Bad news: Between her virtual educators and the library, someone has managed to think a “9″ is a “4″ (or vice-versa) so, here she is, ready to take and exam on the 24th instead of the 29th. The study room we usually use for proctoring has been booked all day, so I put her in my manager’s office since she’s not here and it’s a really nice office. I type in the password for her online exam and she’s off!

10:20: Volunteers are bored. So, I give them project to do, then of course, that’s when people show up to report. Volunteers are un-bored.

10:30: Sit down at my email again, remember that the chess instructor needs yet another white board because the dry-erase surface on the big white board on the wall has somehow lost its capacity to … er… dry erase. Basically, it’s borked. Carry another white board upstairs. Bump into a lot of things.

10:40: E-mail.

11:15: Proctoring person says her exam crashed. I log her back in.

11:30: Prepare registration materials for all classes running in the next week…

The afternoon was really a blur. I don’t even remember what I ate for lunch. Basically, I got through my e-mail and that was my major triumph of the day. Buh. “Oh well,” I thought (foolishly), “there’s always Sunday!”

What did happen on Sunday? I should give you a little background. Shortly before I was hired, Markham Public Library created a new kind of classification system. It’s called Customer Centered Classification, or C3™ for short. It basically limits the call numbers to four fields, and arranges the books by subject headings which are, we hope, more intuitive for customers to find. The arrangement facilitates browsing and the shorter call numbers is supposed to make it easier to find, shelve, and shelf-read the books. It even won an award this year. Before anyone asks me questions, I should mention that I don’t work with C3™ since my branch hasn’t been converted yet. We’re still living in the days of Dewey, which is fine by me since I don’t know Dewey very well, yet, and it’d be nice to learn before we switch to the new system.

I mention all this because my main activity on Sunday was to conduct some testing with Dewey using some volunteers from the Teen Advisory Group. I can’t really get into the nature of the tests, but at 9:59 am, I realized that I needed to select about 90 more random titles for volunteers to work with. This involved pulling all of the books, writing down their titles and call numbers and re-shelving them. And the volunteers were due at 11:00. I’m happy to say that I can re-shelve 90 books in 20 minutes never having worked as a page, but by the time we were ready to begin, it was 11:20. I did bring them Timbits, so I was mostly forgiven. As I’ve mentioned – I can’t describe the tests, but I will say that after I told the volunteers what they would be doing, they looked a little bleak. “This, uh, sounded much more fun in the e-mail.” one of them said.

Flash forward to 2:30 p.m. The volunteers have left, shakily agreeing to take part in the second part of this test. I sit down to type up their response sheets and I realize – I’ve forgotten to have them do the last part of the test. Ah, well. They didn’t have it in them to get up on the Dewey Decimal System for 4 hours straight, anyway and really neither did I.

2:30 pm: Oh right, lunch. I should mention that Sunday was the Deli Duel, where several awesome local delis faced off to win the title of best smoked meat sandwich. Several of my friends attended to eat various sammiches. I was… not there. I had cold pizza.

3:00 p.m.: I now find I’ve lost the will to do any actual, thinking work. So, I turn to my crafts for storytime, which I had originally been saving for the volunteers on Monday. I am making snake puppets. After tracing about 35 of them, I realized they look distinctly sperm-like. Hopefully the parents won’t be offended…

5:00 p.m.: Stumble out of the building, into my car and make it home in time for the 6:20 show of Inception. Which was spectacular.

Old Spice Guy Talks about Libraries

The following day, my twitter feed yielded this library promotion gem:

New Spice

The Harold B. Lee Library has harnessed the Old Spice Guy’s single-shot internet fame and used it for a hilarious way to promote libraries. Of course it won’t be recognized (the joke, that is) in 15 years or so, but I was really pleased that this library was savvy enough to jump on this popular ad campaign and work it in our favour. Monocle smile.

Also did I mention that I’m a bit of a potty mouth?

Then Library Day in the Life Round 4 happened, and I used Twitter for most of the week because I didn’t have a lot of time to blog properly. I gained some extra followers from the library community at large – I was pretty surprised. After awhile, though, I realized that this is not professionally prudent. Now, I also feel the need, as so many others have, to separate personal from professional in the realm of social media. Why? I want people who follow me because we’re in the same profession to have a stream of relevant information (not that mine is the best professional Twitter feed ever) but also spare them the mundane facts of everyday life. Like what I had for breakfast, where I’ll be for the afternoon, etc. Also, I want to be able to drop the occasional F-bomb or talk about the strange colour of my pee post-ingestion of B50 complex vitamins if I feel so inclined without worrying about being viewed as immature or unprofessional (although sometimes I am both ) on a day to day basis.

The Plan: Slowly but surely starting up my “official” library Twitter feed ( @garz4lib, bien sur!). Then I’m probably going to lock up my personal feed because you never know when Library of Congress is watching.

The creators say that we are in need of YA graphic novels! Non-superhero esque, that is. Eva Volin (the librarian on the panel) has the answers… of course the librarian has the answers. Check her out!

Even though it seems like graphic novels have generally been accepted into the greater canon of literary works in their own right, (see graphic novels receiving literary awards previously won by text-only books and a graphic novel presence on recommended reading lists), really we have to get more people to hop on the bandwagon

When your colleagues and customers are hopping on the bandwagon sometimes they do so with skewed views of comics. Graphic novels are NOT just a “gateway to ‘real reading’” as so many people think – they are a valid reading experience in and of themselves. Volin says that she’s actually counted the number of words in a graphic novel and a text-only novel of the same length and found them to be more or less of the same word count. Not to mention the visual literacy involved in reading graphic novels. Some panelists argued, truthfully, that people have no problem with kids reading picture books, which are essentially the same thing, so why all this resistance to comics books? Pictures help readers decode language so to integrate images and words for readers of a certain level, it does a lot more for them in terms of success in reading, rather than a text-only format. I would also argue that graphic novels do what picture books are meant to do, but on visual steroids. Yes – they also provide visual clues to what is going on in the text, but picture books have one image to illustrate what is being described in the text on that page. Graphic novels have, or should have, all sorts of imagery from which the reader can extrapolate meaning from the image alone. This is a wholly different skill that we need to cultivate in our readers.

Graphic novels, especially for children, are at risk of not being published as frequently because they are extremely expensive to publish and also because of scanlation, they are being ripped off via the internet so while they may have a lot of readership, it may have nothing to do with how many copies they actually sell. Stacy King, a YA novelist who also works as the marketing manager for Udon Publishing, (and a friend of mine), actually had to explain this phenomenon to me after the panel was over.  (And I apologize if I mess it up, now…) In the history of manga publishing, it used to be that you had these manga pages in Japanese that people would scan post online and then also have a translated file for each panel so you could read, look, and laugh along.  This became such a big thing with such a dedicated following that now manga lovers have the option of reading pre-translated works (put out by people like Udon). Hooray, right? Well, as the technology has advanced, so has the amount of scanned works that are ripped off as bit torrents and downloaded by children (and everyone else) everywhere! This is problematic for publishers, obviously, but it also is problematic for the creators who are sometimes contracted to write or draw a certain series of graphic novels, but because of the scanlation phenomenon, publishers may choose not continue to produce the work.  I think, this is very obviously where the library comes in. We need to advocate the true value of graphic novels to parents, teachers, and yes, other librarians in our community. We need to make sure we have a wide selection of graphic novels from the commercially popular to the quality (and yes, sometimes they are one and the same). We need to continue to market ourselves as a free service and tell our customers that they don’t need to be dependent on downloading to get what they want to read for free, because … we have it! We also need to teach our customers that downloading is illegal, and hurts a lot of people in the industry of creation. So, in conclusion – Hooray graphic novels! And I will get down off my soapbox, now.

(A big thanks to Toronto Comics Arts Festival (Christopher Butcher in particular), the panelists and moderator for making this possible.)

Programming: I’m still trying to find best practices for programming, but it’s helped a lot that MPL has started conducting programming planning by committee. Also MPL is restructuring the programming itself (more on that later) and ideally this will standardize the programming delivered across the system. I have finally found some one-off programs that have worked, though! Over March Break I ran Very Merry Un-Birthday Party and Pizza Extravaganza and they were a huge success! Well – at least the kids had fun, and I felt distinctly less chaotic and stressed than I did for the Anne of Green Gables program last June. So progress, no?

Collections: I still have a LOT to learn about collection development, but to be honest it’s not as interesting as I thought it would be. I love to read, of course, and you definitely don’t have to twist my arm to read anything in the Juvenile department, but the actual mechanics of knowing what’s what, ordering, reading, weeding, and suggesting… OHhhhhhhh the suggesting, feels like a chore, no doubt. Reader’s advisory still sends me into little tiny butterflies of panic and I tend to suggest books that I’ve read as a child and enjoyed. This might be due to the fact that I abhor the pop-lit that a goodly portion of kids read (Hannah Montana and Pokemon, for example) but more likely it’s because I haven’t yet done the legwork to really learn about reading levels, my collections, popular titles and authors, etc. So – I find I remain fairly ignorant. To remedy – I’ve started on a mission to read more books in my collection. It started off with Neil Gaiman as a compromise of my sensibilites – Coraline and The Graveyard Book (both FANTABULOUS reads – I’m so, so happy he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Graveyard Book!!!). Now I’ve moved on to others, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things and Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything (both by Lenore Look) were great as well. ALSO Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time by Lisa Yee – the not quite a sequel to Millicent Min, Girl Genius (which won the Sid Fleischman humor award) – was phenomenal. Most recently, but not least – I’ve started reading the Joey Pigza books by Jack Gantos (starting with Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key), having been turned on to him by his novel for adults The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs. Whew… so I’m hoping this will help with my collections knowledge and hopefully I’ll sit down and write proper reviews some day soon…

Management (Time and otherwise): Hahaha… with my wedding (last November) out of the way I’ve gotten marginally better at not being completely rushing around like the proverbial decapitated chicken, but I still have a ways to go. This isn’t really helped by the fact that all job descriptions are currently under review in terms of responsibilities and committee work, etc. BUT it should all be worked out soon and then I’ll have a better idea of how much I need to freak out about various deadlines on a daily basis, haha. People management – still not very good. Because I can’t stand doing it! Especially since the people I’m … well not “managing” per se – but delegating, suggesting, requesting, etc. are mostly a few decades my senior. I just don’t feel comfortable telling people what to do. I even feel like I should be paying the teen volunteers! Argh. Well that’s just my temperament – I’ll work on being bossy this year. Probably…

Story Time: Story times, I think, are my biggest accomplishment of the year. I think I’ve grown a lot as a story teller and a performer, and I think it shows. (The ABC Canada rep said I was one of the best readers of Robert Munsch he had seen this year!!!) I’m definitely not as nervous as I was December 10, 2007 when I gave my very first story time, haha. I was… petrified. I’m an out-in-the-open champ, more or less… and I’ve also just about conquered the Baby Goose Beast, too!  So I guess it’s safe to say it’s taken about a year (a little less) to hit my stride in story time. But there’s always more to learn!!!

So that’s it – my year in review. A little bit of good and a little bit of “needs improvement” – but when are we ever done? We’re 3 months into the next set of adventures in librarianship and we’ll see how it goes!

So, what are people looking for easy readers really looking for? I’d say… levels. In assistance to us, most publishers of “easy readers” have split their books up into various levels of reading development from “see spot run” to full paragraphs of compound words that still retain a certain size of type and no indentation (or so I’ve been led to believe). Usually they number these levels 1-4 – (Frog and Toad fall into about a level 2-3, to give you an idea) – but different publishers have tried to get a jump on the competition by formulating different crafty gimmicks. There’s Green Light Readers from Harcourt, the funnily named “Bananas” series from Crabtree Publishing, and the list goes on. Some have 3 levels, some have 5… some just have colours! So it makes it a little difficult for the ambitious librarian really find crosswalks to make decisions on what colour of banana counts as a Level 3 read, (I personally think it’s Red Bananas, though others may disagree). So this is my project, if the Children’s Services Committee chooses to accept it – making navigating Easy Readers more intuitive for parents and children. We’ll see how that goes.

As a final side note: For older readers just graduated from Easy Readers, the Nibbles, Bites, Chomps series is a good, canned way to help parents guide their kids along the road to reading without much serious readers advisory effort. This recommendation is kid-approved (it was, after all, a kid who brought the series to my attention), and librarian tested.