I am just going to toss out quotes that are floating around in my brain. Connect them in any way that you will.
- Libraries count circulations, door counts, and more. These are great numbers but we need to think bigger than this. How can we count hi-fives and hugs from our patrons? A hi-five from a teenager in a library is one of the most important things that can happen in a public library. How do we fix our broken world and help everyone see that there is value in hi-fives and hugs?
- Some people are good at customer service. Some people are good at using the public library as a canvas for their creative public programs. Recognize these talents in each and every individual and respect these talents. Don’t push people to be everything at once. Let them be themselves.
- The moments where we relax with each other, chat, and not force work are some of the best moments we can have in a library. Relax. Talk to each other. This is your job, not your life. Sit back, make some tea, and talk.
- Working in a public library is not about competition. It is about community. We are not here to be Library Journal Library of the Year 5 Star Winner Full Page Cover Spread. We are here to ensure that those that visit us and utilize our services leave with a smile.
Every blog post needs an image and here’s a great image of Prince being the fucking coolest person that ever lived.
ALSO PS: here’s a 14 minute track of all the background music in Purple Rain shhhh it is pretty darn amazing.
“Working in a public library is not about competition. It is about community. We are not here to be Library Journal Library of the Year 5 Star Winner Full Page Cover Spread. We are here to ensure that those that visit us and utilize our services leave with a smile.”
This is an awful confession. One of the reasons I knew I needed to leave my job is that I sensed that I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for reaching our students. I wasn’t doing a whole lot of the teaching I thought I was going to be doing and spending a lot of time getting rid of old books that should have been weeded out when they moved from the card catalog to the OPAC. I also didn’t really have the tools to be able to do the things that would have been helpful for our students as many are commuters. If I hadn’t set such high expectations, I think I could have kept going and kept my focus on the students, but I let other things bother me, like the politics between both campus libraries (my boss is not the library director). I move back and forth between guilt of not being satisfied professionally at the community college level and excitement about moving into an environment that has sexier things.
But I know our students deserve access to someone who is really present, so this move is good for both the campus I am leaving and myself.
Politics and unfulfilled ideas/enthusiasm can make it hard to stay in a job. I applaud you for recognizing you needed to move on. This is what our profession, and probably to a larger extent our world, needs. Stagnation isn’t a good thing.
BTW: you did a great job on that weeding project! I remember you blog posts about it.
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