Getting in Touch
The January/February edition of the Rural Library Services Newsletter has a cover story about maintaining your love and passion for library work and libraries in general over the course of your career. They have several ideas for perking up your emotional connection to your library, such as spending more time in the stacks, getting moving, and silently rehearsing how you would defend your community's right to have a public library.
I would add one more. Talk with your patrons. Interact more with your community. If you are feeling distant from librarianship and libraries and just rubber stamping your way through the job, then it is time to reinvest in your community.
How about being there when the story time group arrives?
Just meandering through when the teens are monopolizing the computers?
Chatting with the gentlemen who come in every day to read the newspapers?
Working a circulation, reference or information desk on a regular basis?
Moderating a book discussion group?
Being another adult to help handle large summer reading programs?
There are so many ways to break out of a rut. But I find the most effective to be the people I serve. They are the reason I do this job. It is not about the books, the computers, the building, the staff, though they are all valuable and important. It is about my community. And just getting in touch with them makes me know immediately why I do what I do.
Comments
I was thinking about your being asked a while back why you don't have self-checkout at your small library. Last week I was at a meeting at The Big Library in our county, one that's recently undergone a big expansion. Their staff told proudly about how 70% of their checkout is through the self-checkout. And their implication was that they'd have even higher numbers if all us little guys would just put our barcodes in the right place for their machines.
I know that a big library has a much higher volume, but something is lost with the human interaction. As in, there is very little of it.
Those of us in tiny libraries have that human interaction all day, every day. What a gift! A patron even brought me a grapefruit yesterday, as a thank you for ordering his books through ILL. :-)
Posted by: Kathie | April 27, 2006 7:21 AM