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.

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.

3 years ago this March, I started working as an intern at Bloomfield Township Public Library in the Children’s Department. She had recently retired from this particular library, but still worked occasionally as a substitute. We joked about now actually working at the same library… I was given the nickname Garza 2.0 the day I began that job. Inevitably, we worked a shift together and it was … well, it just seemed natural. “Meg! What are you doing here?!” “Oh… I just work here.”

Thank you, mom, or being amazing and supportive and for everything. Love, Megan

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!

Anyway, this time we’re reading:

Snowballs by Lois Ehlert

A Winter Day by Douglas Florian

and Ten in the Bed by Penny Dale (board book form).

As well as the standard reference rhymes and songs. A particularly cute one I pilfered from my coworker:

Where did you get that little red nose? (point to nose)

Jack Frost kissed it, I suppose (nod head)

He kissed it once. He kissed it twice.

Poor little nose! It’s as cold as ice!

So… we’ll see how this new season 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.

I usually have  problems explaining to kids (as well as parents) the concept of a “database.” Parents have been taught by most teacher that print = good, electronic = bad. While kids and teens also need convincing that an article from, say, ProQuest is, in fact, an authoritative resource and will “count” towards their homework assignment as “not a website.”

As a side note, in a public library heavily used by university students (York University, Ryerson, and University of Toronto are within spitting distance… not to mention Seneca College) I often get frustrated by the teacher who assign complicated, multiple-source assignments, but say “print only.” We simply don’t have that many print resources, and those we do have are easily depleted. Yargh!

But I digress…

 So, my goal is to convince them both that what they’re doing is not quite the same as “the Internet.” My latest try: “imagine crumpling up an encyclopedia… and then putting it in a computer!” didn’t quite make it through translation. Trying to explain the concept of “e-resources” to a 9 year old is sometimes very hard. So tonight I tried “the library is a database, too… but one you can walk into. The ones on the computer are like little tiny libraries in the computer.” seemed to get the message across better and I was starting to get excited, but then the little enthusiastic one said “So like Google?”

o_0