In keeping with my theme this week of rhetorical diatribes, how important is a librarian to have a well rounded knowledge of the culture around them. That’s a long winded way of asking must a ya librarian read Twilight?
I don’t think anyone would argue that a librarian must be able to relate to their patrons, but just how much does that require? A colleague mentioned to me recently that they were looking forward to being able to read an adult novel over a vacation. Let’s think about this comment for a moment. A librarian is never going to be part of the target audience for any childrens or YA book in our collections, and while many adults can enjoy those books anyway (I’m certainly one of them), you can’t expect that from everyone.
So, how much exposure is necessary? And is it bad if watching/reading/playing like a child or a teen becomes work? Particularly as that’s work that must be done off the clock. Or, is it possible to get by on the How to Talk about books you haven’t read approach?
Survey Madness Part II
March 10, 2009Last week I posted about results of our patron recent patron satisfaction survey. But at that time we hadn’t sorted through the slew of comments we received. So guess what I’ve been working on for the last few days.
36 pages later we at least have them in some sort of (possibly) useful order. The comments themselves are definitely interesting. According to the more frequent comments we’re a great asset to the community, however:
We could do a better job of customer service
We need more parking
We need more/faster computers
We need more dvds/audiobooks/graphic novels/music
and we need to tell people to be quieter in the building
As you might imagine that last one bugs the hell out of me. Particularly because most of those comments included things like the library should not be a social place and that quite a few of our (noisier) services are inferior uses of the library compared to traditional research.
We spend so much time trying to become a modern library and quite a few patrons seem to want us to resist those changes. We even had multiple commenters request that we bring back the card catalog! ARGGGHH!
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: card catalog, change, comments, librarians, libraries, noise, patrons, progress, requests, satisfaction, surveys, technology
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