PLA Blog

I live maybe ten miles from the Philadelphia airport—I was through security and waiting at my gate this morning less than an hour after leaving my house—and I’ve lived in the Philadelphia area most of my life. Yet from the air, on take offs and landings, it’s almost impossible for me to tell where I am; the familiar seems completely new from thousands of feet in the air. I think it’s the shift in perspective more than the effects of speed, because jets don’t give the impression of moving all that quickly.  Looking out from my window seat, the ground seemed to sort of meander along, even though we were covering 3,000 miles in just a few hours.

This isn’t a travelogue, this is a metaphor for libraries and my relationship with them. I enrolled in library school less than two years ago, and I graduated in September. While in school, I worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, then worked at the libraries of Temple and Saint Joseph’s Universities after graduation. In May, I began working as the director of the Collingswood Public Library.

I thought, before all this began, that I knew libraries pretty well. As with driving, food, and website design, when it comes to libraries we all think we’re experts. Of course, I had more to learn that I could imagine, and library school was a great place to start. I’m particularly grateful that Drexel’s faculty helped me apply what I already knew (I’ve worked as a web developer, fundraiser, and nonprofit manager) to our profession, a field that seems to meander along, and yet manages always to cover a tremendous amount of ground with startling rapidity.

With that in mind, I’m attending this year’s Annual so that I can do my job better. Like our colleagues in Borough Hall, at the Police and Fire Stations, and in Public Works, our job at the Library is to make Collingswood a better place to live. So I plan to talk to Tim Spalding about his ideas for revamping classification, because Dewey may not be the best choice for everyone. And to colleagues who are implementing faceted interfaces for their catalogs (Collingswood will be rolling out a Scriblio-powered website in the next couple of weeks). I want to talk to the folks at LibLime and those who are using Koha to see how it might help us deliver better customer service. And I definitely plan to talk to OCLC about exposing our records in WorldCat; Aaron Swartz has already agreed to include our records in the Open Library, with links back to our catalog once our Scriblio instance permits us to produce stable URLs, but I’d love to let people who are interested in our collection access it from as many sites as possible.

Of course, that’s just the beginning. I have a lot more planned, and I also hope to be open to the sort of serendipitous moments that ALA fosters. For those who are following this blog from Anaheim, please say hello. And for those following it from home, let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to investigate on your behalf.

Tags: ala08, ala2008, PLA

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.