Dancing in the Dark

We have a spiffy new building here, with spiffy energy-saving features like lights that are motion-sensitive and turn on when you enter a room. They turn off by themselves, too, if they (light elves?) don't notice any motion for awhile.

This is all very cool, but lends itself to some weird happenings. For instance, the end of the building where I live is a dead end. It's not all that uncommon for the lights in the hallway to just go out, since no one has wandered down our way in awhile. A bit disconcerting in the middle of the day.

The weirdest, though, is the morning bathroom dance. You see, I'm 5 feet tall. And while most offices have actual switches you can hit if the light doesn't come on for some reason, the bathrooms don't. And the sensor must be aimed fairly high. So there I am, in the ladies' room, dancing and waving my arms to make the thing come on.

I suppose there are worse ways to start your day. Dancing in the dark.

It's the small irritations.....

There's an Associated Press article currently on Yahoo, reporting that a small plane has crashed in southwest Nebraska. Near Omaha. Ahem.

Now, I know that Nebraska isn't that well known, particularly to those on the coasts. But for crying out loud, could you look at an atlas? Or ask a librarian?!? Sheesh.

Laugh of the day

Don't know who these folks are, but this spoof on those annoying, ubiquitous drug ads is hilarious: Panexa.

On being Newly Minted

When I followed my husband to Western Nebraska, I wandered into a position as the library director and fell in love with the profession. I had finally discovered what I wanted to be when I grew up. This came, apparently, as a surprise only to myself. I had moved with 10 bookcases full of books, have been a voracious reader since I learned how, and have been known to get lost in bookstores and libraries. When I shared with friends and family how much I enjoyed working in a library, their unanimous answer was a resounding, "Duh!"

Since I assumed that we wouldn't be spending forever in Nebraska, I decided to enroll in grad school for a second master's, this one in library science. My background is in business and higher education; my first grad degree in Organizational Leadership. And here's where I veer from the conventional wisdom of the library folks: as a library director, I am convinced my business degree was as much, if not more helpful, than my newly minted MSLS. Yes, it's good to be able to chat with the catalogers and know what on earth they're talking about. And yes, the classes I took in collection development and such have been helpful. But the bottom line is that a library director, especially in a larger library, is more a manager than a librarian.

To that argument, I would add that if library schools are going to educate folks to become librarians who will, presumably, at some point become management, they will need to add some management classes to the curriculum. It was no problem for me to deal with an annual budget, as I'd been doing it for years in the business and higher education sectors. Likewise the human resources functions that go along with management. My sales background made me a natural marketer. My acting background made me speak easily to the Rotary, Jacees, and whatever group would listen.

Yet in my MSLS program, none of these essential facets of library management was addressed. I had classmates who were terrified of actually getting a position as a library director, since they hadn't the first idea how to deal with a budget and personnel, not to mention the occasional idiot City Manager.

And so we wonder, as a profession, why we're not good at the politics that come with the job, why libraries don't market themselves, and why we're much more comfortable maintaining the status quo than instituting great change. Librarians, heal thyselves.

Good Grief.

So, I'm officially blogging. After attending Internet Librarian 2005, and hearing, ad nauseam about blogging, blogs, bloggers, all things blog I felt compelled to return to the Great North and blog already.

And so here I am. Newly Minted MSLS. Not so newly minted me. We'll see how this goes.