Category: Experience

Faculty liaison is one of my current job responsibilities. I have been trying to reach out to the faculties here and one of my ‘strategies’ is to make them aware of my availability. “Please feel free to let me know if there is anything that I can do to help you with your teaching and research” — that’s what I keep telling them. Well, it looked like that I got what I asked for…some of them did take my words literally and ask me to do ‘ANYTHING’, like the other day, one faculty asked me to “come to see me to finalize the program’ (a library instruction session for his class). He didn’t tell me when and where, and when I emailed back asking what time, he didn’t bother to reply. I emailed him again a couple of days later but still haven’t got anything from him yet…Today I got another request from another faculty with whom I have been helping to search resources for her research. She told me she would like to be on a popular talk show and asked me to contact the talk show host about a possible program featuring her story…I was speechless when reading the email request. I was thinking “Am I losing the minimum respect from others if I keep behaving like this — a forever smiling, easygoing, friendly and helpful librarian?”
I am wondering whether any of you could share your experience working with faculty(or in the case of special library, colleagues in other departments)? I hope I could find some answers from your experience to the question I put in the title…Thanks.

I took the shuttle to Seoul National University campus. After I got off the shuttle, I couldn’t find the library, or any sign in English. I asked several students who seemed to understand English and very polite. But nobody knew where the library was. Finally a handsome young guy waited with me for the next shuttle and asked the driver in Korean, then translated the direction for me.

Campus of Seoul National University

Yonsei University

72nd IFLA General Conference, East Asian Meeting

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.

I met an Indonesian girl when we hiked to the Lynn Peak last Friday. She is very interested in becoming a librarian. The problem is, however, she is severely hearing-impaired. She communicates with people (in English) through lip-reading, sign language, and handwriting. Do any of you happen to know some library study programs that actually take in hearing-impaired students? Or is it totally a mission impossible for her?

Hello, my fellow librarians (and librarians-to-be), I’d like to share with you a story of my working at VPL as a student librarian last term. I’d be very pleased if this story will reassure you even in the slightest way that you have made the right choice to become a librarian. Though this story happened in a public library, I’m sure those who work in either academic libraries or special libraries must have had the same rewarding experience as I did from helping a patron in their particular library settings. Here is the story:I was working at the desk at OAK the other day. A small boy came and asked whether I could help his dad while pointing to the direction of the computer workstations. I said: “Sure, I’d love to.” I walked to the workstation and found a middle-aged man sitting in front of the computer and looking obviously pretty nervous when I was approaching him. “I’m working at St. Paul Hospital”, he started, “and my job was mainly dealing with pigeon feces. My friend told me that it’s a dangerous job, because many people died from the toxin in pigeon feces. I’m wondering whether you could help me find some articles that report the death of victims caused by pigeon feces, and then I can show them to my boss. I tried, but I couldn’t find anything.” “Which sources have you looked at so far?” I asked. “I don’t know. I got a website from my friend but it seems it’s invalid” “Well, I think we can try PubMed”. It’s a free database provided by the American National Library of Medicine and indexes many medical journal articles.” I directed him to the homepage of PubMed and suggested to him he should try the search terms ‘pigeon feces’ and ‘death”. He struggled a lot while typing the words and I found he was single finger typing and he couldn’t get the words spelt right at the very beginning even though I was spelling aloud for him. He finally got it right and there were a couple of results pulled out and we read the first three together and found all of which were relevant to what he was looking for. He felt so relieved and kept saying: “Thank you, Thank you” and he printed out them and walked out of the library with his son. That day I truly understood the meaning of the word ‘empowering’. We always claim that our job is to empower the users of library but the word stayed at a very abstract level in my mind, but that day I finally saw the word coming into life.

在加拿大找工面试，是技术移民必过的一关。一些很有实力的同胞，因为面试不顺利，而错失良机，十分可惜。作为图书馆员，我对初来乍到时的一次面试印象最深刻，它对我日后的事业大有助益。在大温地区，有家规模不大服务一流的公立图书馆。无论作为读者还是专业人员，我都非常喜欢它。这是我找工作的关键，要发自内心地喜欢，面试时感觉才正点。虽然它当时没有在招聘馆员，我还是将求职申请Email过去。发出申请的当天，就接到面试的通知！

本来松散的神经立即兴奋起来，我积极地准备第二天下午的面试。我当时怀孕五个月了，但并不十分明显。经过仔细考虑，我决定不回避怀孕的事实。

面试我的是两位中年妇女，分管人事和参考咨询部门，温文尔雅，严肃而不失亲切。看到我骄傲地挺出的肚子，她俩略显意外，随之报以友好的微笑。双方的自我介绍非常简单，接着就是一长串专业问题：你如何评价我馆的网页？针对我们特定的馆藏，你对买新和剔旧的标准如何把握？在信息技术高度发达的今天，你怎样看自己专业的未来和进修的方向？这些问题看似普通，答案可长可短，可是临时想答案是来不及的。但是只要平时关注该馆的情况，热衷自己的职业，不难回答出自己的风格和自信。这类问题最能拉开应征者的距离。我庆幸只要将平时的观察和思考提炼条理化即可。

接下来的问题又为我提供推销自己的机会：“作为一个市立图书馆，只有充分了解本市的情况才能提供优质服务。你对我们所在的城市了解多少？”
“我虽然来的时间不长，但已经爱上了这座美丽又年轻的城市。它被确立为城市才不到十年，而其发展堪称奇迹。不仅有布局优美的居民区和设施齐全的文化机构以及社区中心，还有大量的店铺甚至越来越多的高科技公司。本市发展的动力之一是来自亚洲的大量移民，已经占到总人口的40%。他们之中又以华裔为主。无疑我的中国背景将有利于图书馆的服务。”我力图抓住一切机会突出自己的特点。

“你来自中国，英文却非常好！”
“谢谢。”为了强调自己的长处，我赶紧补充：“如果能成为贵馆的馆员，我的英文会进步得更快。你们知道吗？我的中文可比英文强多了！从贵馆的服务对象来看，中文也很重要。”
她俩又会心一笑：“你还很有幽默感。”
我进一步解释说：“我对英文只是运用自如而已，而我的中文能力和对中国文化的了解程度的确会对这里的服务产生积极影响。”

“太好啦！接下来请你做5分钟的演说。你一定有在连锁店购物的经验，给你五分钟，概述一下如何借鉴连锁店的经验去经营图书馆的分馆。”我选择的是Chapters 连锁书店为借鉴的对象，演讲的中心是以客户为本。作为这家书店的顾客，我仔细观察过，对书店宾至如归的服务印象深刻。无论商品的陈列，工作人员主动周到的服务，还是举办的活动，甚至书店里卖的咖啡都让我当了一次又一次的回头客。我心中暗喜，这个问题说明该图书馆变革求新、积极主动的发展策略，它和我所向往的工作风格不谋而合。

面试中也屡见我没有准备的问题：“从你的简历上看，你一直是商业的参考咨询馆员。你会介意回答孩子们的问题，甚至给孩子讲故事吗？”言外之意是说我不具备他们要求的经验。但面试中既要忠实于自我，又要变消极为积极。我发自内心地说：“当然不介意，作为一个准妈妈，我正在学着给即将出世的宝宝讲故事，开始零岁教育。我明白这里面有不少技巧，我会用心地在实践中学习，积累经验，我相信自己将做得很出色，将深受小读者的欢迎。”于是，两位主管乐意权且充当我的小读者，递给我一本图画书，让我试着讲一讲。书要面对“小读者”，我只能歪着头读上面的字，还要绘声绘色。她们学着孩子的神情随时打断我不停地发问；我也会即时停下来向她们解释。虽然我讲得有些吃力，可她俩的配合相当出色，表情和问题都跟着我的故事情节变化。让我领悟到在图书馆做孩子们的工作既难又好玩。

“如果你能把孩子们的工作做好，那么普通的参考咨询工作对你来说可谓轻车熟路了。下面的几个问题都是我馆工作中实际碰到的，我们假扮读者，请你尽力回答。

“我要找关于Steven Spielberg的所有资料，越全面越好。”
“作为好来坞的大牌导演，他的资料会非常多。我们可以从书找起，他的生平传记能给你较全面的背景资料。如果书不能囊括新鲜资料的话，我们还可以查现行期刊中的文章，还有杂志上的消息。因为他的电影个个叫座，影评也多得是。此外网上的资料数不胜数，查找和下载图片尤其方便。”

“我想去北部的一个温泉疗养地，你能告诉我怎么走吗？”
“先进这个地图网站，输入你起始地和目的地的地址，便可以得到一张详细的行车路线图，沿路的重要名胜和商业网点都有注明。”

问题一个接着一个，多数我回答得如行云流水。有个难题考出了我的不足，所以记忆犹新。对方压低着声音说，“我需要一个住的地方。”
“您是在找出租的公寓吗？可利用报纸上的租赁广告啊。”
“我没有钱，租不起公寓。”
“免费的住处可不好找呀！”
“可我需要”
我意识到此人需要的可能是社会服务机构或者慈善机构提供的庇护场所，于是提供这类的指南。
“我不识字。”
“最好的办法是到路对面的社会服务机构去找，相信您会顺利找到。”我这样回答着，心里却掠过一丝愧疚，觉得也许有更好的办法。但是问深了会涉及个人隐私，不深究吧，又恐答非所问。类似的问题还有几个，我意识到自己以英语沟通，澄清问题的能力需花大力气去提高。

最后一部分的问题是面试中常见的，考察合作和管理的技巧。“如果你的同事与客户发生争执你该怎么做？”“对下属的某一类抱怨你该如何反应？”“你喜欢什么样的领导？”等等。
这类问题我都力求简洁地说出心里话，诸如“我最喜欢的是能让下属充分发挥专长的领导”等等。

我对那次面试记忆深刻，因为全部是工作中实际的问题。它们让我从中了解到对方看重的员工标准，考出了我的长处和不足，让我对这家图书馆肃然起敬。虽然身怀六甲，第一次面试中也显露出不足，但我还是接到第二次由馆长面试的通知。我发自内心地告诉馆长：“面试后这份工作对我更有吸引力啦。”