Top 500 Reasons to Come to the Great Indoors

This little guy, plus 499 friends:

The Great Indoors: Sunday, August 31st from 4-6 pm @ Shapiro Library.

Collections for Personal Enrichment

I like to collect things. I have quite a few collections of things, most of which have no value to any museum, archive, or estate/ junk sale. When I write this three of my most worthless, yet highly cultivated, collections come to mind. My collection of tattoos I have seen (good and bad), boat names (good and bad), and t-shirt sayings (just bad).

On a recent sailing adventure I found a real treasure to add to the boat names collection. Sighberspace. What a terrible boat name. Imagine with me for a moment Sighberspace’s distress call; “Mayday mayday, this is Sighberspace.” It’s such a bad joke name for a boat, not to mention just a downright terrible computer joke that can only spark more terrible computer jokes. If I wanted to relax, you’d better believe I’d spend some time floating around in Sighberspace. Har har.

Millennial Mania

Lately I've been thinking a lot about millennials.* The librarians I know often discuss millennials -- our current generation of younger patrons. How do millennials access and use information and how do they communicate? If librarians can pin down millennials' needs, we can better serve them and we can maintain our relevance in an increasingly decentralized information age.

I realized recently that the youngest of today's library school students are among the first crop of millennial librarians. In this vein, I have a confession to make. I am a millennial (a fact that I hadn't confronted about myself until, fittingly, I read it in black and white on Wikipedia). So what does it mean that we new librarians are in the same generation as the students that more experienced librarians are desperately seeking to understand?

As a millennial (however reluctant I am to admit it because it makes me feel like an awkward middle schooler), I am accustomed to rapidly-evolving information and communication technologies. I remember dial-up, but barely. I may not be a skilled texter, but I could be if I focused more. I rarely have the attention span to read a book cover-to-cover, but I can spend hours following a trail of interesting Facebook updates.

I've been asking around about millennials, and I've heard they expect information resources to be intuitive, to be Google or Wikipedia-esque in their ease of use. I've also heard that millennials are as likely to rely on peers as they are to rely on their superiors for "expert" advice. I’m not sure how true these things are of me, but I think they may be generally true of those youngsters born in the 1990s.

This collaborative way of approaching knowledge (and in a sense determining our truths by the consensus of any given moment) signals a shift in society discussed --and sometimes bemoaned-- by philosophers and pundits alike. But older generations have a history of worrying about what cultural dead-ends those young kids are leading us into. And as of yet, cultural evolution has continued apace both despite and because of the innovations of the young.

Personally, I don’t think we need a revolutionary response to millennials’ supposed information, communication and technology prowess. I don't think we need the brand "Library 2.0" to open ourselves to a paradigm shift. Libraries have always evolved to reflect society’s views of knowledge, and have so far managed to remain relevant and useful. Maybe we respond a little more slowly to the latest technology, perhaps with slightly more deliberation. But we adopt the things that work and we empower our patrons adopt them, too. I value this traditional function of libraries as much as the next librarian, millennial or no.

So, what does it really mean to be a millennial librarian? Is there really a generational gap here, or are the reports of our differences greatly exaggerated?

* Beware that Wikipedia link, the year range listed for the "millennial" or "gen y" generation changes regularly. I guess that's a symptom of society's attempt to describe itself as it evolves. Or the lack of authority and dependability of Wikipedia articles. Take your pick. For more on naming the millennial generation, see this Washington Post article.

Theft, Part II: TO CATCH A THIEF

I think one reason our library director considered the stakeout a viable option for dealing with a series of thefts was that Oberlin actually has a history of apprehending library thieves (which is a whole other amazing/ridiculous story).

James Shinn, who got his 15 minutes of infamy in the early 80s, was caught by a librarian at the Oberlin College Library in 1981. He had stolen 480 rare library books with a combined value of $35,000. Shinn is a nerdy-interesting Google if you are curious. A brief 1981 NY Times article describes the manhunt. Besides inspiring librarians in general to beef up security for special collections, Shinn also gave librarians at Oberlin a hearty sense of their own crime-fighting capabilities, thus enabling me to have my very own brush with library covert ops nearly 25 years later.

The Oberlin College Library has a special room named for James Shinn and plastered with news stories of his crimes and capture. This room is not open to the public and is rarely visited by staff. The Shinn Room is the library’s Executive Washroom. I mean, where better to study a rich history of library heists and library heroism than a library director's bathroom? Nowhere, I suppose.

[Something I discovered along the way:
books about people who are crazy about books.]

P.S. Mr. Shinn, if you Google yourself regularly, thanks, and no hard feelings!

Summer Time Warp

The library is quiet. There are a few people studying at tables or working at the computers. A librarian sits behind a computer at a desk. There is a middle aged man (Patron) sitting at a public computer.

Patron: (gets up from the computer he is seated at and slowly approaches the librarian) Excuse me, do you know what the date is?

Librarian: (looks up from the computer) Hello. Yes. It is August 5th.

Patron: (confused) I'm sorry did you say August?

Librarian: Yes.

Patron: (squints and shakes his head) It's August?

Librarian: (shows patron a calendar on the computer screen) Yes.

Patron: I missed my flight.

Librarian stares at patron with a commendable straight face. There is a long silence.

Patron: Huh. (pauses) Do you have a pay phone I could use? I think I need to make a phone call.

Librarian: I'm sorry, we don't have a pay phone. There is a pay phone on Liberty near Border's.

Patron hurries out the door. Librarian shrugs and goes back to looking up interesting things on the internet.

Theft, Part I: LIBRARY STAKEOUT

STOP, THIEF! Security is a legitimate concern at libraries and librarians often struggle to balance the ideal of open access with the reality that monitored areas are sometimes less prone to theft. Is it our responsibility to protect innocent borrowers from visitors who will prey on unattended valuables? What level of monitoring would our users prefer and what would serve the community's best interests? Librarians like to ask such questions of ourselves and each other. If no immediate agreement can be reached, we form committees to deal with the issue. Or, on certain occasions, we snap into action. This is story of one such action.

In my undergrad years, I worked as a circulation desk attendant and student supervisor at the Oberlin College Library. One year, we had a rash of laptop and backpack thefts. No matter how many signs we posted warning people of the danger, they still left their stuff unattended and it still got stolen. One patron came to the desk in tears to report not one, not two, but three separate thefts of her valuables over the course of a week. (Responses among library staffers ranged from sympathy to incredulity that she would leave her stuff unattended the second two times.)

The library administration decided reporting these numerous incidents to Safety and Security after the fact was not enough. We needed to catch a thief red-handed. Thus, a plan was hatched and a LIBRARY STAKEOUT was born.

Late in the semester, the library's student workers received an email announcing extra work shifts. We were told we had the chance to join the library's effort to end the theft problem once and for all (well... at least for that school year). Get paid for a covert mission in the library? Yes, please! The following day, I signed up for my very own stakeout.

This is how it went down: A circulation staffer planted a "dummy" backpack in a high-traffic area of the library. Whoever was on stakeout duty got paid to sit in a darkened room for an hour with a walkie-talkie and keep a watchful eye on our planted backpack. If we saw someone grab the bag, we were to radio down to library administration, where the library director or assistant director would run out of his office and stop the thief as he or she exited the building. The staff implemented this plan with fervor (that particular and rare fervor of bored library workers who are suddenly tasked with a vitally important stakeout mission).
Photo: abbyladybug on Flickr - pretty much exactly where our backpack was planted.

You're probably buzzing with excitement right now, just as we were in those precious, early days of Operation Catch-A-Thief.... Come on, already! Did you catch the thief or what?

Day in and day out, we watched that dummy backpack. Day in and day out, we brought the backpack back to the staff area at the end of the day's scheduled stakeout shifts, simultaneously relieved and disappointed that no theft of our utterly conspicuous fake bag had been attempted.

Soon, since no more thefts had occurred, the stakeout shifts became more expensive than they were worth. How could it have been that we had so many thefts, followed by none at all, right as we began our stakeouts?

I have a theory. Remember that email I told you about, in which all the student workers of the library system were offered extra hours? And remember how hilarious and ridiculous it seemed that the library would pay us to sit in a darkened room watching a planted backpack, armed with only a walkie-talkie, intense focus and the library director as backup? I forgot to add that there was a clarifying email sent out a couple of days after the first, reminding us that this library stakeout mission was supposed to be... a secret.

But if all those other library workers were anything like me, they got that first email and immediately told everyone they saw that day about an amazing new project at the library. And like me, when they got that second email, they probably thought, "Oh, well... you probably should have told us that to begin with."

Instead of catching our thief red-handed, the Oberlin College Library effectively spread the word that the building was being closely monitored by staff. Instead of stopping crimes in progress, we successfully prevented them.

Come to think of it, all the library had to do was convince its student workers that a series of stakeouts would occur, and we took care of the rest. I guess it just goes to show: you should never, ever underestimate the power of a funny story.
Photo: StudentsReview - Oberlin's Mudd Library. Looks like a fortress, but it wasn't really. Until the stakeout.