Family Friendly Libraries

... and I don't mean this group, whose website I am linking to ONLY out of a librarian's decision not to censor a viewpoint I disagree with. I feel that the organization Family Friendly Libraries has shown by its actions that it would like to set standards not only for the families of members but for other people's families, too, and that they don't take into account needs of minority (in all senses) groups in the community.

But back to my original post.

I am stepping away from my tech learning focus for a post in order to talk about an issue that is now by default an interest of mine. When I talk about family friendly libraries, I mean libraries that are family friendly for employees. This is important to me, first of all, because I have a 1 year old and hope to have more children at some point. While my current job has been great, it's not perfect. I would rather work part-time than full, but part-time professional positions are few and far between. I was able to pump milk with support from both my supervisors when I started my position with a 6 month old...but the place I could find to pump was behind some shelves in our closed reference stacks area. Plus, I had to ask one of my (male) coworkers from downstairs to cover the reference desk each time I pumped, which wasn't always easy for them, since the first floor of our library is always busier than the second.

I certainly understand that the balance between work and family involves certain choices. We chose for my husband to pursue a graduate degree, and so, for the time being, I have to work. We chose to find a way to raise our son as much as possible ourselves, and so I chose I job that is not in the area of librarianship that is my first interest (children's/school librarianship), and I also chose a job in which spending time with my husband is difficult. And yes, we chose to have a child, although I find myself repelled by those who say that having children is a choice and so, therefore, all parents should be left alone to the consequences of childbearing. (Full disclosure: I am pro-life. I am also pro-available/affordable birth control, anti-war, and pro-socialized--or at least more-socialized--healthcare. I am not a political activist, but these are my opinions on these select few subjects. I still question what I would do when presented with logical-extreme scenarios for many of these issues.)

Anyway, the reason I mention LIBRARIES in particular is that librarianship has traditionally been, and still in many ways is, a female-dominated profession. And, yes, family issues affect fathers, too (as my husband can attribute), but when it comes down to it, women have the babies. And if you want to feed babies breastmilk for the first six months-year of their lives (which I believe is recommended by the American Association of Pediatrics, but I couldn't find the actual recommendation, so I'll update if/when I do), a women is necessary. I am all for women having the right to work, but I don't think we can, or should, completely ignore biology.

Since so much of child-raising from the prenatal period through infancy has to do with women, then, I would like to think that women-dominated professions would make child-bearing easier on careers, with such benefits as paid maternity leave, or at least longer unpaid maternity leave, that allows for a guaranteed position upon return. Alas, it is not so. Teachers, another female-dominated profession, have rotten maternity options, and while I don't feel like libraries are especially unfriendly to employees having children, they certainly don't win any family-friendly awards.

I'm now treading on shaky ground, having not done extensive research on this subject. However, at my own institution, I would be eligible for Family and Medical Leave (the twelve-week unpaid leave mandated by the government, see here for more information--and I am shocked--as a pro-life, anti-war person--to see that they have added twenty-six weeks to care for a military family member!! But only twelve for a new baby or non-military ill family member!!), and I could ask to take a longer leave of absence. But my understanding is that this would all be unpaid. Not optimal. Less optimal for those who are single mothers.

Then there is the child-care juggle once maternity leave ends. Staffing a library desk is inherently harder to be flexible about than creating online presentations, making sales calls, or many other types of work. But libraries do have to be open at odd hours--evenings, weekends--so why aren't there more positions created to try to accommodate parents who'd like to work those odd hours? (And in that case, those employees who like to work the M-F daytime shift would win, too, with fewer evenings and weekends to cover.) And why aren't their more part-time professional positions, or positions that are shared?

My final word on the subject for now (since I've realized that I need to do more research before I speak more extensively) is that, however women chose to do their child-bearing, there seems to be a professional cost. Even if a woman could afford to take several years off, have kids, nurse them all, send them to kindergarten, she would then face the challenge of re-entering the workforce with a gap in her employment history. Why can't raising kids go on the resume?

The meeting...

...went fairly well.

On the downside, our chat "demonstration" didn't go so well--partly because LibraryH3lp was having an emergency fix-it day, but also because I don't think we practiced quite enough. And I think I should have left off the gateways and just shown the service with the widget. We were also presenting information about doing coursepages, and got more bogged down than we expected explaining the purpose and mechanics of these.

On the upside, it seems like there is agreement that we need these services. I think implementation will be slow--our director indicated an interest in starting by fall, but also wanted us to start by using the state-wide service. This will really slow things down, because we'd all have to get state training and sign up for question-answering time, which will take more time away from learning the LibraryH3lp system.

But it's a start.

I don't know exactly what my next LibraryH3lp steps will be. I think I'll need to create some more accounts and set up some practice chats--first just keep it librarian to librarian to get people used to chatting at all, then introduce some "patron" chats. I've also realized that I very much need a GoogleTalk gateway, since our students' e-mail accounts have recently been converted to Google Apps.

I've been remiss in posting lately, but will make up for it by adding 2 posts tonight--I have one that's been in draft format for awhile and just needs to be finished and posted!

Fun series finales

Last week, I was on vacation, and I got to read two books that finished young adult series I've been going through. The first is from a series that's been around awhile (I actually read the first book when I was in high school and didn't manage to track down the rest of the series), the Tomorrow series by John Marsden. Beginning with Tomorrow, When the War Began, it follows a group of Australian teenagers who go camping in the bush for a week and come back to find that their country has been invaded. I have found some of these books to be more compelling than others (for the first five, I like the odd numbered ones best, but the last two were both great), but they all have heavy action sequences and lots of blowing things up, interspersed with teenage romance and reflections on life, particularly ethics during war.

I spent the rest of the evening that I finished this book, and much of the next morning, moping in my head about how life was not "happily ever after" for Ellie and her friends. I also decided that, contrary to my earlier beliefs, I could not stop with this series and needed to track down the continuing trilogy that focuses on Ellie's life after the war.

The Other Side Of Dawn by John Marsden

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was an amazing end to the series,particularly in the realistic portrayal of how life can't go back to how it was before the war. My only criticism is that some of the close-knit friendships and relationships got cut off too quickly, which may be realistic but was still disappointing. I definitely need to track down the three books in the Ellie Chronicles to read, too.


The other series finisher (we think...) was the newly published The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan. Continues in the fun, action-filled Percy Jackson and the Olympians series that I particularly like for Percy's self-deprecatory heroism and the Greek mythology references flying left and right.

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Awesome end to the series; does an especially nice job of bringing Percy back together with Annabeth and Grover in a way that hasn't been the same since The Lightning Thief. Probably (but unsurprisingly) the most action packed of the books, less running into gods in out-of-the-way places. Nicely concluded, but there could definitely be more on the way...


View all my reviews.

Gearing up and gateways

Well, we have a date to present LibraryH3lp (and other project ideas) to our library director...June 4, 2009 at 2:30. Exciting! Of course, this now means I need to hurry up and get what I know about LibraryH3lp organized into presentable format (especially since I'm going on vacation all next week).

So, today, I created a handout detailing what LibraryH3lp is, how cheap it is (I figure given our current budget status, this needs to be a big point), how it works, what the challenges of implementing it are (best lesson of my 9th grade English class was that when making a persuasive argument, concede the opposition's best point and then go from there), and why we should do it. Next up is to figure out the best way to demonstrate the service during our meeting.

In line with demonstrating, I set up two new gateways today--Yahoo! Messenger and Meebo. They both seem to work fine (especially after I belatedly read the instructions to toggle your queue's online/offline status once setting up a gateway before continuing), except for one thing. From the "librarian side" of chatting, I can't see the patron going offline when I sign out of the "patron" account. I need to find out if this is because I'm exclusively using web-based chat widgets for testing, because I'm testing on just one computer, or what. Obviously, more testing is needed. I don't think I'm going to set up many more gateways before the meeting (maybe MSN if someone has an MSN account to test with--I'm slightly weary of setting up extraneous accounts for testing purposes), but this should give a picture of the range.

That's all the news for now! I will probably post again tomorrow, but after that I will be silent for a week as I travel to Maryland to visit family. Hooray! (And Astra Libris, this last line was just for you, my dear audience of 1!)

Last week, I crashed a system...

Ok, I actually think I only crashed a couple user accounts on the part of the LibraryH3lp system that our school is using, but it's still an impressive accomplishment, n'est-ce pas?

Luckily, Pam and Eric, LibraryH3lp developers extraordinaire, had fixed the damage I'd done within a day and fixed the underlying issue that caused the crash over the weekend. So if you are a librarian who's thinking about switching VR services, I recommend LibraryH3lp even more!!

Otherwise, there is not a whole lot else to report. Testing so far has gone well, but we (that would be my fellow reference librarians/virtual reference enthusiasts) haven't taken it to another level yet. I am trying to read through documentation because we are hoping to present the service to our reference head and library director in early June, and I want to have done as much background research as possible by then. I should also mention that we are going to present a couple other service ideas, headed up by my colleagues. We are excited, but still unsure if we have enough staff to make it work. Keep your fingers crossed!

If we have any more exciting test situations, I'll let you know! (This means you, A.L.; that is, after you return from all your traveling and if you have time with your exhausting job.)

Testing with a REAL person!

Today, for the first time, I was able to do some practice chats with someone ELSE on the other end of the chat. It went quite well! I first set up two of my fellow reference librarians with accounts, and then one of them and I practiced chatting back and forth. We both took a turn as the patron (using the handy-dandy, school spirited widget!), and also practiced sending files and web pages.

I hope to do some tests with someone off-campus at some point, because I want to see how accessing protected materials (i.e. databases) will go. Will the librarian be able to send a patron directly to an article? Will they have to describe the process of remote access (shivers run down my spine--it's already complex enough via phone!!)?

Also, I'd like to try to figure out if the librarian chat client has any allowances for increasing text size--we don't want to make all our librarians go blind!!

I've started systematically reading through the documentation on the Google Group, and that has been interesting and informative. Hopefully the time expended doing this will both prevent me from repeating questions and give me some background knowledge to apply as needed.

On an unrelated note, another piece of "technology" (really it's content, but quintessentially online) that I've decided I need to explore more is Wikipedia. I came across an awesome blog post about an assignment to write and follow a Wikipedia article that makes me realize how little I understand Wikipedia myself. It may take a few weeks to get around to looking at it, so I wanted to record the intention as a reminder to myself (I have to write down everything in order to remember it).

Back to chatting

I worked with LibraryH3lp again today, and was able to do the following things:

• Use the customized widgets (the chat boxes with school colors) on a different computer, so the "patron" was chatting directly through the widgets instead of through AIM or another chat service.
• Send files using that function.
• Successfully transfer a patron from one librarian to another.

Here are some things I'm still confused about:

• Sending webpages/links.
• How the different web browsers affect the LibraryH3lp functions.

Tomorrow (end of semester crunch is basically over, now that we are in exams week, and students need to study, but not so much to research). I need to spend more time with documentation--less exciting, but important for getting up to speed.