Chinese Canadian Library Weblog

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.

“The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians through Film” – the first documentary film focusing on the work and lives of librarians

In case any of you is interested.

I just tested it with Simplified Chinese and English. It worked pretty fast. The Beta version supports for 11 languages. You can input a text limited to 500 words or enter the URL of a Web page.

A message from Shu brought loads of happiness to me, which I can’t wait to share with our folks here. She sent several pictures of her work place with the colleagues and her handsome husband, Chris. Please let me know if you want me to forward them to your mailbox. Shu lives in a newly bought house with a big backyard. Guess we will have a place to stay whenever we visit Collorado. Way to go girl! Again I feel really happy seeing her and her hubby’s big smile.

To get back to Mindy’s comment on July 31st, CALA is organizing another event in “Guangdong Dongguan City in December 2007, exchange ideas with Chinese colleagues; introduce the US experience of public library services; and find further cooperation opportunities for CALA. This is a part of CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series.” I am glad that Mindy and other folks are willing to contribute to libraries in China, “no matter how little it seems to be”. Mindy’s words remind me what I learned from CALA colleagues in Kunming.

One of them, Caroline (Han Xiaofang) from Cleveland Public Library, impressed me the most. She has super communication skill that is crucial for a public librarian and made her a great contributor for the event. Through her smooth and well-prepared presentations, the audience made up by over a hundred Chinese librarians shared her proudness. They admire her for working so hard for the first class public library in the world. We teased her that her library should give her an award for promoting the library like that. What she did and we could learn from her as a multicultural librarian includes inviting speakers from China for the library program, setting up a listserv for new Chinese material list and promoting her collection at local universities.

What inspired me more was her thoughtfulness and willing to go one step further in Kunming, after she made the audience interacting and found out their concerns. Xiaofang worked in her hotel room all nights to tailor her next day presentation to better fit the audience. The comments and questions we received on the floor proved that she made them think to the root of public library mission in current China’s context. The young attendees shook our hands at the end one by one and expressed their appreciation. They said that we have made a diffence in the way of thinking about their library work, they wish all the heads and relevent government officials attended the sessions as well.

Caroline made the Kunming event from technology oriented to a different way of thinking on our profession. She has touched many souls including mine. I feel lucky knowing a colleague like her and hope I will work with her again for the future events. Miny, I am sure we can make a difference for we have members like you and Caroline.

An article published early this year in Degree Tutor lists many reasons of our existence. What about 10 years from now?

Thought the major ILS vendors would dominate the market, but I heard more and more open source ILS recently, including the public libraries in BC–Evergreen Open ILS for all of BC.

CLA 2008 Conference will be held in Vancouver in late May. Our city will also host an IFLA satellite meeting in August on Multicultural Library Stories. Ping, Jan, Ian and many of us can get involved. Shall we plan an outing to discuss about them?

I wonder about this when I was reading about PowerSearch Plus by Gale. There seem to be more and more, including SFU. Ex Libris’ MetaLib is widely used. What’s the difference among so many vendors’ federated search?

This was a true story happened in my work place and made everybody in the Systems laugh that afternoon. As you know, library Systems is extremely quiet, usually.

One day, I asked a system librarian to update the library’s “News and Events” and sample home page of a digitized old Chinese newspaper published in Canada. When I followed the link to the home page of the Chinese newspaper, I found something odd on that page where an image of an ad for a medical treatment of Hua Liou Bing (a sexually transmitted disease that was one of the most common diseases in early 20th century) was put in the top middle of the page. I immediately sent an email to the librarian and other project related people, told them what the image was about, and asked why you decided to put that image on the home page. No body in this group except me understands a single Chinese word. The head of Systems said “what are the chances we’d choose that one?” in his response and he could not keep himself from laughing.

Finally, the librarian responded to my email and question. He said he saw the image on every issue of the newspaper and thought it must be something that reflected the purpose of the newspaper or something important.