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Oh yeah the style guide I have, I've read it up and down. I even looked up how to use a grid in graphics design. Well, I found out that you do.DeadFatDuckFat posted:Nobody reads signs, lol
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Mar 24, 2021 14:40
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My Lovely Horse posted:Oh yeah the style guide I have, I've read it up and down. I even looked up how to use a grid in graphics design. Well, I found out that you do. I'd do weirder things to get unfettered access to the University library in my town for sure.
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Mar 24, 2021 14:49
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My Lovely Horse posted:Oh yeah the style guide I have, I've read it up and down. I even looked up how to use a grid in graphics design. Well, I found out that you do. Once we had a fire at my library and the firefighters had to stop people from trying to get in.
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Mar 24, 2021 14:53
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When we were getting my library ready for demolition, all books had been moved to a temporary site. It was an empty hall full of trash and discarded furniture. Some windows were missing. We still had punters force their way past signs and tape, then just gormlessly wander around looking for their magazines or whatever.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:02
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The_Other posted:Once we had a fire at my library and the firefighters had to stop people from trying to get in. My university had an evacuation alarm (it was a chem building, I think it was due to a bottle of acetylene, a very flammable gas, falling down and spewing gas everywhere). The librarian in there was an older, short man with an even shorter fuse. He had to be physically restrained from getting into a fistfight with some brat that said he had left his laptop in the library and he was going inside to recover it, firefighters or not. The dean was not amused. Shellception fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Mar 24, 2021 |
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Mar 24, 2021 22:28
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Once in a conference the head of a branch library had just said "right, on to the next point: our fire safety protocols" when the fire alarm went off. One of the policies was "in the event of a fire, ask people to leave, but if they insist on staying, move on sooner rather than later and be sure to tell the fire department, but don't endanger yourself on account of a stubborn patron" which I thought was exceedingly sensible and completely in line with what I would have done no matter the policy, so good thing that happened to align right there.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:07
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Today a guy waltzed right in the closed library, first case since December when we went pickup only. And when I say waltzed in it wasn't like "oh drat didn't even realize" but like "what if I just sneak past you guys" - "well, my colleague will come after you" - "yeah, I don't think so" waltzes in. Only to use the restroom, too. Hope that was worth the four week ban our director is drawing up. If we were feeling really spiteful I bet we could absolutely get him on some kind of coronavirus prevention ordinance too. Slight catch is that with that attitude he naturally refused to show any ID so we have to pretty much rely on recognizing him and then other desk staff recognizing him by our description. He's probably gonna get away with it. My boss got the gist of the exchange over the phone and commended me for using the Authoritative Voice, but in hindsight what I really should have done was go "well shucks mate, you've been in now, you might as well get the book you came for, knock yourself out"; "oh there you are, just the one? I'll need to see your library card please" e: the really annoying bit is that he's gonna be all "the library banned me for using the restrooms!" when it's really the library is banning you for demonstrating you won't listen to staff instructions, what are you going to do in an actual emergency or what indeed keeps you from walking out with a stack of expensive art books or w/ever going YEAH I DON'T THINK SO COPPER at us My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 19:22
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My Lovely Horse posted:what indeed keeps you from walking out with a stack of expensive “art” books Maybe that’s why he went to the bathroom? In college the library was three stories and the third floor was all study rooms. There was a single toilet male/single toilet female bathrooms, rarely ever used. My roommate worked at the library and said that every couple of days the janitor would have to mop and clean out all the “art,” “photography,” and gymnastics magazines (three of them! WTF!) beforehand. I’m pretty sure the staff knew who it was, but I think the decision was made just to let it slide because at least he wasn’t being creepy to the ladies there and never seemed to make a mess. The janitor used to work in a hotel and had horrific stories of cleaning rooms and stripping bedsheets, according to my bud, and seemed like English butler type of unfazeable. Like he’d seen some poo poo in his day. Also he said the people he worked with were all sweet and as this was in the day of card catalogs they were ready to help everyone 👌🏼.
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Mar 31, 2021 21:06
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Apr 1, 2021 15:49
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LOL IRL
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Apr 1, 2021 17:15
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My library is having an online livestream to officially open the redesigned reception area, they're going to show off all the new perks like the huge info screen, and I'm sitting here toying with the CMS login thinking I could goatse the whole lot of you
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Apr 27, 2021 10:11
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They took all the boring admin work off my desk and gave it to someone else so I would be able to devote more time to making videos and doing design stuff and such. I'm supposed to make a list of expensive A/V equipment I need and it is my understanding this will be purchased and handed over to me more or less without question. I know everyone gets impostor syndrome but at some point someone's gonna catch on that I really am in no way qualified
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May 4, 2021 20:13
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I've been working on making a zine again, with part of the plan being dumping some in the many Little Free Libraries around here. Welp, know what I'm putting on the cover now
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May 4, 2021 20:27
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My Lovely Horse posted:They took all the boring admin work off my desk and gave it to someone else so I would be able to devote more time to making videos and doing design stuff and such. I'm supposed to make a list of expensive A/V equipment I need and it is my understanding this will be purchased and handed over to me more or less without question. This happened to me and my supervisor when I was still at the library - imposter syndrome hit hard but.. this is how you get those skills. I've now transitioned into a job where I regularly edit videos and sound as part of my normal routine. Just go for it, you're going to do a great job.
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May 4, 2021 22:11
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My Lovely Horse posted:They took all the boring admin work off my desk and gave it to someone else so I would be able to devote more time to making videos and doing design stuff and such. I'm supposed to make a list of expensive A/V equipment I need and it is my understanding this will be purchased and handed over to me more or less without question. You'll almost certainly learn, and yeah after a year you'll go back and cringe at your first one but relax. You'll be fine!
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May 4, 2021 22:42
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Midjack posted:after a year you'll go back and cringe at your first one  Thanks for the pep talk!  Yeah realistically I've been doing Photoshop stuff for longer than the library thing, I should be alright. Probably should learn some technical basics like I dunno colour grading or whatever. But they're all very supportive (insistent, really) about me receiving additional training, too.e: also turns out as of today my job makes me eligible to receive the covid vaccine, going in in 2 weeks 
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May 5, 2021 10:31
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My Lovely Horse posted:waaay ahead of the curve, the sound is terrible and it's 90% stiffly talking to the camera Sound quality > video quality. Spend appropriately. It's massively important and a lot of people really regret overspending on V at the expense of A when they eventually bite the bullet down the road.
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May 7, 2021 09:33
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Also, lights will make a much bigger difference than camera for image quality at the beginning. Try and figure out how to best set up your lights in the spaces available and you'll notice a big improvement right away.
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May 7, 2021 10:49
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In the long term, feedback from your patrons is also going to be more important than feedback from your coworkers/bosses. Do what you need to to keep your bosses off your back, but at the end of the day the people who actually consume what you produce (and create your library's metrics) are the real acid test.
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May 7, 2021 14:00
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Sooooo... been very disgruntled with my restaurant job of late, and oh hey! Looks like the libraries are re-opening! And looking for staff. I'm 47, my body's falling apart, and working 10 hour shifts with no breaks in a sweltering kitchen for $10/hr ain't cutting it. I could be making $13-$22 with such luxuries as air-conditioning, a 30 minute lunch, and holidays off! And this crazy thing called "paid sick time"? (this one's really killing me; I had to take four days off this week to go get my boob cut open, which means my next paycheck is gonna suuuuuck) oh Jackie D the books, the books are calling...
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Jun 11, 2021 19:06
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We just spent the last ~5 months having a new air system installed. Air filters, powerful air conditioner, the works. Day 1 of full reopening to patrons, and it doesn't work in half of the building.  JacquelineDempsey posted:I'm 47, my body's falling apart, and working 10 hour shifts with no breaks in a sweltering kitchen for $10/hr ain't cutting it. I could be making $13-$22 with such luxuries as air-conditioning, a 30 minute lunch, and holidays off! And this crazy thing called "paid sick time"? (this one's really killing me; I had to take four days off this week to go get my boob cut open, which means my next paycheck is gonna suuuuuck) drat, best of luck on a swift recovery
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Jun 11, 2021 19:42
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Sooooo... been very disgruntled with my restaurant job of late, and oh hey! Looks like the libraries are re-opening! Books are for nerds! (Get that library job back and I hope you are feeling better soon!)
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Jun 11, 2021 19:47
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Wudz posted:We just spent the last ~5 months having a new air system installed. Air filters, powerful air conditioner, the works. Haha, if I'm in a writing mood later I'll regale y'all with boring stories about our perpetually wonky HVAC and patron complaints. Thanks to you and Wudz for the well wishes. Hopefully it's nothing major, but it does have me thinking of a career shift. Right now I'd take min wage to shelf read over 75 cents more an hour to brutalize my body and soul.
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Jun 11, 2021 20:06
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Adventures in video production: after painstakingly setting up a recording session for an online library introduction talk and testing it multiple times, everything worked like an absolute charm except for the actual recording, which turned out to be completely unusable, and I had to reshoot, and ask the other participants to reshoot, the whole thing as an asynchronous Q&A session with our cell phones. Cell phones being pretty decent these days I'm actually quite pleased with the result but man that was two days of completely unnecessary stress. actual library work is taking more and more of a back seat. e: also I have another terminology question. What do you call the area of a library with publically accessible shelving and study spaces? I've looked around a bit and it feels like anglophone libraries don't tend to call that anything in particular. I need a term to express things like "you will find this book in the _____" (as opposed to the closed stacks, in our case), but it also needs to stand on its own. "Open collection" seems more organizational than referring to a space and plus feels more like a directly translated than a native term, "reading room" seems to imply study spaces only, "open stacks" seems to imply shelving only. I've also come across "open access area" but I don't think I like the potential confusion with "open access" as in publishing. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 08:39
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My Lovely Horse posted:Adventures in video production: after painstakingly setting up a recording session for an online library introduction talk and testing it multiple times, everything worked like an absolute charm except for the actual recording, which turned out to be completely unusable, and I had to reshoot, and ask the other participants to reshoot, the whole thing as an asynchronous Q&A session with our cell phones. Open collection is the book heap, closed is the book hole (not the returns hole). Taking it seriously, when you say “closed stacks” are you referring to something like a rare book section? My context is more dealing with universities and research institutions than public libraries, but most people seem to call the bit where you can wander around and get things “the library” and distinguish the bits where you say “I want the Psalter of Charlemagne” and someone brings it out by calling that something like “rare books” or “access by request” etc.
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Jun 14, 2021 10:58
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I'm actually looking for the university/research context, too Closed stacks as I've always understood it is the area off limits to visitors where staff has to retrieve books from on request (aka the "forbidden heap"). Which does include rare and valuable books, but it's mainly regular items. At our place and many others I know you can request the regular items to borrow and take home, but the rare stuff is reading room/appointment only. Well anyway three different dictionaries said that I should probably call it the open access area so I'm gonna go with that until I come across something better. Personally I think we shouldn't even throw that many library science terms around, but I only translate the screeds, I don't write them.
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Jun 14, 2021 11:13
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'Realm of the Proletariat'
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Jun 14, 2021 12:47
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:'Realm of the Proletariat'
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Jun 18, 2021 18:39
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An interesting proposal came in from a student collective who want to know if we could set up a special queer literature shelf to increase visibility, and kindly sent us a list of some 30 books to go with it. I'm slightly torn. Part of me says, gently caress yes, awesome, we're doing this, we're redoing signage right now anyway I'll personally paint a rainbow on the one on y'all's shelf, library gay so what. And it's Pride Month as well. (It is here. I'm aware there's some confusion around the world.) We do this and hell any other collectives that want a shelf can suggest the same and if one of them is the Conservative Student's Union who wants Art of the Deal or Jordan Peterson we tell them to get bent. The librarian part though says, hold on. We're a very specialized university and the library therefore has four narrowly defined main subjects, none of which is gender studies; we're more than happy to get all the queer literature they suggest and in fact already have some of it, but in terms of running the library it makes more sense to put say the queer art books in the art section. And in fact it seems like it might slightly impede students who aren't necessarily coming at their topic from a queer perspective first and foremost, and who would approach the art (or whatever other) section and find that deprived of the queer aspect. Especially so if other collectives come along and also pick the collection clean for their own special shelf. Tricky business. I wonder if we could make a suggestion that a collective with triple digits members could well pool some money and gift us books for that shelf, i.e. extra copies of ones we already have so we could put one up in each spot. I'm definitely gonna argue broadly in favour of the idea but with said reservations. What's your take?
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Jun 28, 2021 20:10
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also slightly odd that the e-mail went specifically to - the directors - the department heads - me, a frontline grunt someone in that collective has me personally pegged as the right person for this, where do they get their intel
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Jun 28, 2021 20:15
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The university library where I used to work always pulled a few books for special displays. Not 30 though, more like 5 with a poster and maybe the location of more books. You're just a grunt though, right? Shouldn't this call be on someone else?
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Jun 28, 2021 20:32
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They keep asking me for input on stuff, not sure why We only have new acqusitions shelves. Those are in a good prominent location though. Maybe we could designate The Queer Shelf and like, rotate what's on it on a monthly basis, keeping placeholders in the regular shelves saying This Queer Book Is On The Queer Shelf. Little placeholders with little rainbow flags sticking out. I'm volunteering for the job of maintaining it aren't I
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Jun 28, 2021 21:46
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There is a perennial argument about separating versus interfiling of a lot of subjects/genres. The two sides are a) if it has its own shelf, the people who are looking for those types of books will find them more easily and find other books that they might like/be interested in all in one place and b) if they're interfiled with other books, people who aren't looking for them specifically might find them, enjoy them and expand their reading horizons. Whereas if they're separate they would never go to that shelf and so it reinforces their reading preferences. The solution for many libraries is, as Mr. Prokosch said, displays. They can be ongoing with the same type of books or they can differ depending on what of interest is going on that month, but displays are generally pretty prominent and you can include other resources on the shelf. If you have a bibliography of other titles that may be of interest, you can include those call numbers. You can have a poster listing local events happening on campus. You can recommend other books about the same topic with further information. There are options! Finding aids are also helpful. I like the idea of rainbow flags sticking up. You can have a list of all of the flagged books (though you'd have to make sure they were still there every once in a while probably). Those get people's attention as they're wandering the stacks. So that even if they aren't looking for that, they might pick it up anyway to see what that's about. And yes, the only way to get things done sometimes is to say that you will be the one to do it. If people making decisions know that they don't have to be responsible or find someone responsible, they're more likely to give the thumbs up.
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Jun 29, 2021 00:48
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So for the past several years (since at least 2018) the library I work at has been undergoing renovation, with a major part of that being the expanding and upgrading the children's room. It's taken longer than they said it would of course, between the usual construction delays, the fact that the town fired the contractors about half-way through the job, and of course COVID. I used to joke with the patrons that the construction would be completed sometime after Brexit. However, earlier this year they did finish up (pretty much) and we were able to open up the new and expanded children's room. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I went in and found the children's room blocked off. It seems about an hour before I went in a 92-year-old man in the parking lot had lost control of his car and rammed into one of the new windows. Nobody was hurt as we hadn't opened to the public yet, but it looks like the children's room will be closed until we can replace the glass. Here's a photo from the inside:  and one from the outside I took after we closed that evening. You can see the skid marks from the tires in the grass. 
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Jul 20, 2021 18:22
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In the "could've been worse" department, that column next to the window looks like part of the roof support.
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Jul 20, 2021 18:48
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I haven't been to a library in years but one of the things I miss the most is looking at the books out on display, evaluating them, shelving them correctly if they suck, and replacing them with a better book. I also miss arranging series in order instead of alphabetical. How much do you all hate me now lol? It was really neat to watch all the Anthony Burgess books go away and come back after I seeded the recs with his non-Clockwork Orange stuff, which is pretty universally excellent. I just kind of buy books these days are there good library charities? How can I give back to a system that gave me so so much?
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Jul 21, 2021 00:17
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You... go into libraries and rearrange the books? What? Why?
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Jul 21, 2021 00:19
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Desert Bus posted:How much do you all hate me now lol? To quote your rap sheet: What the gently caress is wrong with you? Grow up and move on. You clearly have a problem and deserve pity, not hate.
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Jul 21, 2021 00:25
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Desert Bus posted:I haven't been to a library in years but one of the things I miss the most is looking at the books out on display, evaluating them, shelving them correctly if they suck, and replacing them with a better book. I also miss arranging series in order instead of alphabetical. Boy I hope you weren't doing that with libraries that tag display as the intended location for display books. I guess a way to give back would be to stop doing that?
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Jul 21, 2021 00:51
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the thread title is not an invitation Although honestly, series belong in order.
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Jul 22, 2021 09:36
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