I have my BS and MS in computer science along with 10+ years experience in the tech sector. I have been a full time caregiver for the last 4 years but planning to return to the workforce when I can. I don’t want to work in tech anymore- I’ve decided my dream job is serving the community at a library especially focusing on adult literacy. Besides volunteering 5 hours/week with an ESL adult literacy program at my local library, what else can I do? Is it even possible to get a library job without a MLIS degree? Location is San Francisco Bay Area if that helps. TIA :)

Throughout my time in library service, I have experienced that library staff and leadership have a lot of stigma and display subtle passive aggressive behaviors towards patrons that are either elderly, low economic status, homeless, may have mental health disorder, even racial demographics, or etc, despite if those patrons have done anything or participated in behaviors that would lead to such reactions from library staff. Just them being present is enough.

I’m not sure if this is due to the library staff I’m familiar with (I live in the suburbs now) being people who where born and raised in the suburbs and have lived a sheltered life, not having interacted with a lot of people that may be from sensitive populations in their lifetime, but I find it very interesting that these same people are the most vocally “performative” politically towards the same groups that I’ve personally witnessed them be hostile towards (not actively but through their body language, etc).

The way all of these people’s eyes open wide, they get really stiff, immediately become hyper vigilant or overly curt with any or all of these type of patrons… has been disturbing to me. Especially when they act very hypervigilant and do walk thru‘s of whatever room or area that patron may have entered, without the patrons doing anything to warrant this type of reaction from staff outside of existing.

I find the cognitive dissonance very disturbing because these individuals are typically the most vocally performative, and politically charged individuals I have ever encountered in my life, and yet are the most prejudiced people I’ve ever witnessed personally.

If you are going to be an inherently prejudiced person, you can’t walk around the world thinking of yourself as this other persona that you have convinced yourself you are—which contradicts how you actually carry yourself in the world.

Through my experience, I have realized that most politically left leaning people in the library world may be some of the worst people I’ve ever encountered in my life, in terms of their subconscious bias towards poor people, people of color, people with mental health disorders, elderly people, diverse teen populations, etc. The reason I say they may be the worst people, in contrast to those who are very open about their biases and prejudices, is because these people stroke their own egos and build their public personas based on the advocacy for the groups that they stigmatize. There’s something very icky about that to me.

*Ironically, I now feel prejudice towards politically charged library staff individuals (ranging in racial demographics) and immediately assume all the left leaning people I encounter in the library world are inherently prejudiced individuals, who are being performative (subconsciously or consciously) to gain social status, or build up their own egos or self importance, or etc.*

Howdy fellow library workers! I have been tasked with coming up with ideas to have more programs geared towards the men of our community, both young and older.

The community I work in is a majority Hispanic population and I would love ideas for programs that would be interesting!

I’ve had this question for a while. I reserved a bunch of books and most of them were ILLs and they were ready at my library literally within 2 days. I was kind of shocked.

Is there some sort of ILL transport service you guys use? Or is it like USPS? Even at my university library, they happen soooo fast… I’m seriously amazed

I really appreciate the hard work of every library but especially my own local library. I think I’ve saved well over $500 this year from using mine alone!

Yes, I know, a tale as old as time. But it takes everything in me not to roll my eyes when dealing with customers that have this attitude. If you are below the age of like 65 and don't have BASIC tech/computer skills and can't function without having your hand held, I feel like this is a personal failure on your part. At this point, computers and technology is intertwined into the basic fabric of society - it's everywhere. This is an ESSENTIAL skill or ability to have, and I don't feel sorry for customers that give me a sob story of how they don't know how to do this, they don't use computers, blah blah blah. Especially when this is in conjunction with weaponized incompetence or a complete lack of effort to try and learn.

"But not everyone has access to computers." Sure, maybe if you live in a poor country or very rural area. But libraries are free. You could use a friend's. Watch a video tutorial or read a book about it. Computer classes have occurred in schools for decades. This stuff has been around and it's not going anywhere, so get on board and learn.

If someone came up to me and claimed they couldn't read, write, or tie their shoes or perform some other basic function, I'd be concerned that there's been some serious neglect in this person's life, either on behalf of others (parents, family, etc.) or themselves. In my view, the people that aren't trying to improve their digital literacy are neglecting themselves in a sense. These are skills people NEED to have in a growing ever-evolving digital world.

Now I would never shame or chastise someone for this to their face - I have a job to do. But I am getting tired of people expecting everything to be done for them and not having to put in any effort whatsoever to learn and get with the times.

We went to floating several years back, and although it causes some significant problems, the thing that keeps being said is that it saves money due to reduced courier needs.

Anecdotally, there were more bins circulating among branches because instead of staying where they landed, items were shipped back to their lending libraries, so the increased cost was due to the increase in bins, not necessarily an increase in trips made (we contract with a courier as opposed to doing it in-house, so I do think more bins=higher cost).

However, I haven't been able to find ANY hard data that supports this cost-savings claim, and lately I've begun to wonder whether it's fact or fiction, as Frakes would say.

So, some questions for you all, keeping in mind I've read the stuff from Nashville Public Library on the topic, so I'm good there:

• Can anyone point me towards any numbers-backed studies that break down the cost savings (or not) of floating?
• Does anyone have any info on cost savings in a more whole-library model? For example, does the savings in courier outweigh the increased hourly wage costs that come from shifting?
• Does anyone have any sort of data or data-backed study that weighs pros of floating against cons?
• Has anyone recently moved to floating who could say one way or the other (one of the issues I have is that we moved so long ago, I can't reliably attribute much to floating versus static collections)?
• Has anyone moved away from floating recently, and if so, what convinced your system to do so?

Thank you! If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of shifting, but I am totally open to being proven wrong!

Hi all. When I book presenters for workshops/presentations, I usually stay in the room for the whole program even if they don't need me just in case something comes up. But i also like staying to talk to the patrons and connect with them - a good example is our monthly adult crochet club. It's essentially a crochet meetup at the library but we have an outside person come lead the program since not many of our library staff know how to crochet. I always stay so I can talk to the patrons and answer questions should the need arise. If I have work I usually grab one of our laptops and just do some work at a table nearby.

Well, now I'm leaving my job for a new one next Wed. I've been training my replacement on a bunch of programming stuff; and recently she mentioned that she would be leaving the room whenever there's a program that she's not leading herself. She doesn't see a need for her to be there if someone else is leading the program. It's one thing if you need to cover the desk or if you have conflicting responsibilities, but I kinda think it's bad practice to not stay at least for a little bit just in case something comes up. In my mind, she'd also be missing out on time connecting with the patrons. Part of the reason why our adult programming is so strong at my library is because people know me, y'know?

I'm honestly not super worried about it. I'm happy to be leaving and I realize none of this stuff is my problem anymore. I mostly just wanted to ask how you guys handle programs with presenters and what your opinion is - do you stay or do you leave?

I would love to hear other people sayings!
Here is ours:
The roof is leaking again!
Someone hit the book drop again!

Hi everyone! I’m a fairly new youth services librarian at a suburban library in the U.S. with a big Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese community. Our juvenile world languages collection is embarrassingly outdated, so I’ve taken it on myself to fix that...

I know Brodart, Ingram, etc. have pretty limited selections in these languages, so I’ve been doing my own digging. So far I’ve found:

• Book Window / Tsai Fong Books
• Pan Asian Publications

Has anyone worked with either of these? I would love to hear how they’ve been for selection, quality, and shelf-ready services. And if you know of other vendors (or small publishers or shops) worth checking out, I’m open to any advice.

(I have family heading to Vietnam soon, and I’m honestly tempted to just ask them to haul back a suitcase of books. 😅)

For those whose libraries use Libby, you can tell patrons about a new feature, which is to filter out AI in searches. Settings > Content Controls > AI Contributions > Human Only on all