Month: July 2006

I believe most of us have encountered such a sad moment in our career path that when we told others about our professions, people would ask in a surprising manner “Really? Do we still need librarians nowadays?” or looked at us in such a sympathetic manner which you could understand the look meant something like “Are you going to spend the rest of your life stamping out books?” I usually take this kind of response as kind of ignorance and don’t bother to be upset with it. However, if this kind of attitude is held by your boss or your coworker, it is something that you cannot simply shrug off and walk away.

Two days ago, a volunteer brought over 200 student evaluation forms to the library asking me to enter the data to a database. She told me that the Academic Department Coordinator asked her to do so since “the library is so quite there”. Isn’t this typical that in most people’s eyes, the librarian is ONLY responsible for checking out books, so if there are not many students in the library, the librarian must have nothing to do but sit there idling? Personally I don’t mind helping with other departments, but since they sent out the forms to me based on an assumption that the librarian doesn’t have much to do, I consider this an insult to the library work. Moreover, my workload didn’t allow me to help out either. As I mentioned in my previous post, the library where I’m working now is a solo-librarian library. Right now the librarian is away for a 3-week vacation and I have to run the whole library by myself. Due to the limited resources of the library, I have to spend quite a lot of time processing interlibrary loan requests everyday. None of the databases we have access to provides fulltext articles, so normally the students would email me long lists of journal articles/conference proceedings citations asking for help to locate the articles for them, either from the open web or from our ILL supply library.

I decided not to do this data entry job in the end. It was not an easy decision to make at the very beginning, for I was a little concerned that other staff might think me unhelpful or nonflexible. But finally I made the decision not to do, for I regarded this an issue with the image of the library, rather than a personal affair. I emailed the Coordinator stating my willingness to help but due to my already full(if not over-full) workload, I felt sorry that I couldn’t help at this time. At the same time, I felt that I had the obligation to give a little bit ‘lesson’ to people like the coordinator who hold such a stereotypical notion of a librarian that we do have many important tasks to do other than checking out books. I wrote in my email about the amount of ILL requests I had to handle each day, and the backlog of cataloging we still had to catch up with in the library, etc.

Though I know it is an endless journey to fight against the stereotype of a librarian, and I know we cannot simply blame or angry with people for belittling our job, for we have our share of job in ‘educating’ people about the importance of our profession, still, from time to time, I feel frustrated when confronting with a situation like this….

Hello all,
Here are some pictures of the city of Strasbourg and the ISU library where I am working for the time being, enjoy!

Bonjour, everybody out there in Vancouver! Meant to send this greeting message earlier, but it took me quite a while to get everything settled down. Arrived here in Strasbourg on June 23rd and spent the first two days sightseeing a little bit of this beautiful historical town. Started to work the third day doing some preparation work for the upcoming Summer Session Program (SSP 06) held at the International Space University(ISU), where I’m going to spend the next two and a half months working in its library.

You may know more about ISU from the link I’ve provided if you like. I came to know a little bit about the university during my job application process, but only after arriving here, did I learn from the students that it was quite a famous organization in the field of space engineering technology. It is especially well known for its annual summer session program, which is hosted in different country each year and attracts over 100 students from all over the world for each session. This year is the 18th anniversary of the ISU Summer Session Program and there are 104 students from 27 countries coming to this session, which is held in its Central Campus based in Strasbourg, France. There have been students from China since the early 1990s and there is a big delegation this year from China(12 students + 3 staff members), only 2nd to the Canadian delegation(around 20 students + 5 staff members(I’m one of the five)) among all the participatory countries.

Since it’s a very specialized university, the library has quite a specialized collection and VERY small(only over 7000 items plus several online databases), but it has a very nice location and one side of the library is all glass facing the patio of the main building. It’s a solo-librarian library, which means the librarian has to do everything(and that’s me :>) I’m working as the front-line librarian for the SSP. The head librarian works in her own office most of the time and she is going to take a 3-week vacation in next month and will leave me alone to run the library! I feel lucky to come to such a small library where I can have my hands in every aspect of the librarianship, from cataloging to shelving, from circulation to reference, and from interlibrary loan to information literacy instruction. So far I’ve given a library tour to all of the 104 students and held three library workshops together with the head librarian. I’ve learned how to catalog and already entered over 100 new books into the library catalog. One thing I didn’t expect to learn here is to stamp dates on books when checking out, believe it or not, many libraries here are still doing that.

I’m sure this job will turn out to be a truly rewarding learning experience for me and I am really enjoying what I am doing here. By the way, as a staff, I do get some perks from the SSP, for example, I’m allowed to attend all the distinguished panel speaking sessions, and Liwei Yang(the first Chinese astronaut went to space in 2003) is coming next Monday to give a lecture, and I’ll be able to attend that lecture too.

I’d very much like to visit the public libraries and other university libraries here in the next 2 months to gain as much information regarding the librarianship here as I can. I’ll keep all of you posted when I come across some interesting findings. Bye for now, my friends and colleagues, wish you all a fabulous summer!

I just came back from my vacation a while ago. Because my parents came from China to visit me, I took them to quite a few places since this is their first trip to Canada. During our trip, I also visited a few local libraries: Kelowna public library, Banff public Library, Squamish public library, Montreal Public Library (I forget which branch it was), Blacker-Wood Library of Biology at McGill University, North York Central of Toronto Public Library, Mid-Manhattan library and Donnell Library centre of New York Public library, and East Asian Library at Columbia University.

It was a fun and interesting trip. But too bad I missed the Research Library of NYPL at 5th Ave & 42nd Street because I didn’t know it is close on Mondays. The building is very nice though, and it reminds me the movie The Day after Tomorrow.

I am not going to introduce each library I went, you can easily find information on their websites. I just want to share the experience with two Chinese librarians I met in New York.

In a sunny morning, I went to East Asian Library at Columbia University. The first thing caught my eyes is magazine HOW, which is a Chinese magazine about fashion, cosmetic and trendy stuff, doesn’t seem like fit in such a serious academic environment. I was also impressed after I found out I can use both traditional and simplified characters to search their catalogue. I decided to meet their Chinese librarian. After 20 minutes wait while I enjoyed HOW, I met Chengzhi Wang, the Chinese Studies Librarian. He is very nice and immediately reminds me my professors in the university back in China. We had very nice chat, from housing price in NYC to career path. I really appreciate that he can spare 40 minutes with me during his busy day (not because he gave me a souvenir at the end) . I have learned a lot from him.

In the other afternoon, I went to Donnell Library after I visited MoMA. The reason I went there is I was told by a librarian in Mid-Manhattan Library that this library is the only one in their system collects Chinese materials. After I went in the library, (BTW, I was very surprised that there were security checks in both libraries), the Chinese Librarian spotted me and pointed me to a direction right away “Romance is over there”…Er….I don’t read Romance….(maybe it’s time to get new outfits to change my image)

I browsed their collection. It is smaller than I expected, maybe this has something to do with their demographic numbers. Finally I grabbed a chance to introduce myself to the Chinese Librarian, Hung-Yun Chang. We spent about half hour to discuss issues on collection development, programming, staffing and etc. It was a very informative talk. I also appreciate that Mr. Chang shared his over 20 years experience with me. (Yes, Mr. Chang, everybody in the library calls him Mr. Chang).

Apparently, both librarians know Jing well, they both asked me to say hi to Jing. I guess it is hard to find somebody in this field who doesn’t know Jing. It’s really great that we have Jing here, such a great librarian and mentor.