PLA Blog

The last of my “tour” of ALA discussion groups was the Reference Performance discussion group. Here’s a snapshot of some of the issues and questions that were brought up at the group. Feel free to comment on these!!

• What ARE the expectations of a librarian? The group agreed that it’s not enough to only be good at “reference”–it goes further than that. Even in an academic setting, librarians can no longer be strong in only one arena of librarianship.
• Librarians should take leadership roles within the school/community they serve. In turn, this makes the library’s role (as well as the librarian’s role) in the community more visible and potentially viewed as valuable.
• What is a “bar” for librarians to meet or exceed? Should there be such a thing? This brought about some lively discussion.
• Attitude–can it be quantified? Does it have to be? Attitude was mentioned as a way of evaluating librarians.
• What are ways in which librarians can be evaluated? Peer, “secret shoppers”, supervisor only, written evaluations, self-evaluations were all mentioned as possibilities.
• We discussed a couple ways to get buy-in on new technological advances: Use early-adopters of technology to be the prophet to the rest of a (jaded?) staff; put nay-sayers on committees with early-adopters.
• How do paraprofessionals come into play? What is the break-point between what a para can answer vs. what a professional can answer? This is an age-old question that still has some librarians disagreeing.
• Is mandatory involvement the way to go, in terms of getting staff to contribute to new technologies, new ideas, etc.?

On Saturday, January 12, I attended the “Best Practices in Cooperative Reference: Reference and Social Networking” session presented by QuestionPoint, with panel speakers Stephen Francoeur (Baruch College), Beth Evans (Brooklyn College) and David Lankes (Syracuse University). While the panel seemed targeted at academic librarians, I actually found a great deal that would be of interest to public librarians. (more…)

Let’s say you had the Sophie’s Choice of reference books: in all the world, you could only keep your top 5 favorite print resources. What would they be?

This question is inspired by a message I read in the April 25 (Vol 25, Issue 26) digest of the WebJunction Publib listserv:

Hello,
I am a library student with a question for reference librarians. My reference class is evaluating different resources, and I am wondering what your “Top 5″ are - which general reference books you consider invaluable and are most used by your reference staff. Also, are there any that your library purchases regularly but which are very rarely used?
Thank you so much in advance for your responses!

The message is from Kathy (Brown) Gregory, a library school student in her second semester at Southern Connecticut State University who works at Hartford Public Library. The original assignment, for her Reference Materials and Service class, is really quite interesting and nifty: subscribe to a library listserv, post a question, and record your responses. It’s an excellent opportunity for students to realize that listservs are a resource for reaching out to the library community, and an interesting way to examine how responsive and active some lists actually are.

There were several responses from the listserv, published in the very same digest, that also proved interesting. Favorite print resources included: almanacs, ValueLine, Morningstar, town histories/reports/stuff, state laws, atlases and maps (especially local), dictionaries, guides to grants, and self-help law, to name a few.

Two things happened: 1) I wanted to help Kathy obtain more data, and 2) I got really, really curious. In a day and age of electronic resources, what print resources are considered “favorite children,” near and dear to the hearts of public librarians who can’t live without them?

We want to know! Tell us what your fave 5 print resources are by replying to this post. We’ll send the information on to Kathy, who can use it in her report.

Podcasts are a valuable source of information. Like most other information resources on the web, we suss out the best, most useful and authoritative resources, and present them to our patrons to help them find the information they want and need. In an effort to highlight podcasts that might be useful to librarians and patrons, I’ll be posting links to podcasts from time to time. If you have any recommendations for podcasts to highlight, please feel free to send an email and let me know.

Today’s highlight is the Butterball TurkeyTalk Podcast. In the past, Butterball has offered a hotline as well as online resources to help people out with their big bird roasting issues. To help people get a jump start on planning, Butterball has started a weekly podcast (6 episodes total) to help with Thanksgiving and December holiday planning.

Each episode will give you a quick, step-by-step lesson on essential turkey and holiday planning tips with the Butterball 5-Minute Lesson. This week, Mary begins with party prep ideas and tips for getting “holiday ready.” Then Sherleen walks you through the basics for cooking the perfect turkey.

This is a great podcast to add to your weekly library newsletter, talk up word-of-mouth to your patrons, add as a flyer to your display of Thanksgiving cookbooks and cooking magazines, or somehow otherwise highlight. The real URL is long and cumbersome, so feel free to use this TinyURL instead, which will point to the real page: http://tinyurl.com/jgynk.

As with most other podcasts, you can either click on the link to the episode and listen to the sound file on your computer, or you can subscribe to the feed to receive the podcast through a news aggregator or podcatcher.