Musings of an Academic Librarian

Recently the library upgraded to RFID gates supplied by Bibliotheca.  It was a long overdue change, the old RF gates had stopped working properly a long time ago and were actually designed for retail.  After a few tweaks the new gates have been working well.  However when the gate alarm is triggered by a student I still have the old habit of calling them back and asking "have you got any library books?"  What I forget to do is look at the screen on my PC and see which book has set off the alarm since the gates are data enabled.  (If it's not one of our books it will just say "unknown.)"  This is great technology and makes my job easier.  Plus they light up like a disco with the red LED lighting around them when triggered which looks cool.

Libraries are organic in the sense that they are constantly growing and changing.  Books get too old or damaged and get weeded (or go missing!) and new titles are bought or new editions of books the library already has.  It is the same for the college library.  Lots of books have gone missing over the years (hopefully very few more with the new security gates) and books have gone out of date.  The collection needs to be constantly updated. Because of my interest in collection development I realised that I am having a hand in reshaping the monograph collection and that is very pleasing to me.  For instance, since I have started reading picture books to my son I have become really interested in young children's literature and so I have been choosing some new titles for the library (bearing in mind we are trying to promote te reo in centres so I have been choosing mostly English-Maori books).  It's not just children's books.  Where I have seen a need fo...

In any library it's important to have subject headings that are very specific for books and other resources so that patrons can more easily find what they are looking for.  For example, books on RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) are very popular in the library where I work.  Often students will come in and ask for books on RIE and at first I didn't know what they meant.  Then once I knew I decided it would be a good idea to add RIE as a subject term for all the books that cover this teaching approach  (the other terms being used were very generic Library of Congress subject headings, e.g. Child care).  Now when you type in RIE as a keyword into the catalogue search box, all the books on RIE come up.  If RIE wasn't a subject term, then these books would only appear in the search results if RIE was mentioned somewhere in the catalogue record of the book, e.g. the abstract.

Academic publishing - how it works, eBooks, DRM and Patron Driven Acquisition, eJournals and subscriptions, Open Access and the issues surrounding it, collection management and weeding, cataloguing (a little), research databases and Google Scholar, library management systems (I would love to implement Kowhai at my current job), copyright and how it affects libraries.

Is not relevant to the library collection or what is being taught at the college.  Is badly damaged, e.g. water damaged, lots of loose pages, very worn. Is out of date, e.g. an old first aid manual. Contains potentially misleading information, e.g. a book warning against vaccines by anti-vaxxers. There are too many copies of it on the shelves and it is online, e.g. a Ministry of Education report. It is old and not used any more and there is a newer edition. It violates copyright, e.g a collection of articles printed from a newspaper website.

Many books at our library have been incorrectly classified and I have spent a lot of time reclassifying them.  This is for the benefit of students, for example if books on special education are scattered around the library and not generally in one section, it makes it harder for them to browse and find what they want.  Here are some examples: Books in the 700's - Arts, that should be in the teaching section, the 372's because they are about teaching art to children.  Books on caring for young children in the 649's - Parenting, that should also be in the 372's because they are written for teachers, not parents.   Books on children with learning disabilities in the 618's - Health, which should be in the 371's, the section on special education. Books in the 153's - Psychology, which are about psychologists like Vygotsky and how their work relates to teaching so they should be in the 370's. Recently I came across a book called Research Methods in Ea...

A good manager: Understands staff work  with  them, not  for  them. They are a team with mutual respect for each other. Is kind, positive and listens to their staff. Being tough and uncompromising is counter productive - it just leads to low morale. When they need to talk to a staff member about a problem with their performance they always begin/end by saying something encouraging about the staff-member's work.   Does not just make demands but supports and encourages staff. Builds rapport with staff through everyday chitchat, etc. Has a genuine sense of humour.