Swear Like A Librarian

I hope this post doesn't get blocked by your filtering software.

When not at work, some librarians I know have the filthiest mouths of anyone I've encountered. But at the desk they obviously can't use bad words, so I got curious about the public-safe language librarians use to replace swear words. That's the catch-22 of libraries: serving the public can be stressful, but working at a public service desk means being limited in how we can respond when something goes wrong.

I asked around a bit and here's a list of some choice "safe" words library staff use:

• some old standards: Shoot, Fudge, Bologny
• Jeepers Crow
• Flip
• Fly me (to the moon)
• Mother of pearl
• What the what?
• For the love of Pete
• For cripe's sake
• Frick
• Shut the front door
• Sugar Honey Iced Tea

The last one is my favorite - read it again, but just the first letter of each word.

I'm sure everyone has their favorites - what are your patron-safe swear words? Please share them in the comments or make #swearlikealibrarian a trending topic.

P.S.
When I was originally working on this post, I thought some gansta rap-style image would make an appropriate illustration. I couldn't find one exactly right, but I did think this was funny:

Good job Hillsdale Free Public Library - Sir Mix-A-Lot would be proud.

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Reference Question of the Week – 7/31/11

When I came into work one day, I was told that three people were already working on this question and no one could find an answer - we still don't have anything conclusive, so please let me know if you have any suggestions.

A student from a private school a few towns over came in to start her summer reading project. One of the books she has to read is S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and in addition to the typical "read and describe" work, this student's assignment also said,

...after you finished reading the book, answer the following questions. If you need help, ask the librarian at your public library for assistance.

1. The Outsiders begins and ends with the same sentence - does this technique have a name, and if so, what is it?
2. ...

First of all, it's great that the assignment encourages the students to seek out librarians for help - although bad in this case that we're failing her. Second, I dislike the "does this have a name, and if so, what is it?" - it makes me feel like we're not finding an answer because there isn't an answer, but I don't want to give up looking.

Anyway, of course the first thing I did was grab a copy of The Outsiders to check out the sentences (copy/pasted here courtesy of LibraryThing's Common Knowledge)
First sentence:

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.

Last Sentence:

And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home...

After describing the question to me, my coworker said that they had consulted every literary dictionary and reference book in the library, and also any literary terms website they could find - but hadn't been able to find anything.

My first thought was to try the Descriptionary, which is perfectly designed for this type of question. It's a dictionary that lists information by description, rather than by word, so it lets you look something up by what it is and the book tells you what it's called. However, in this case none of the descriptions matched a story beginning and ending with the same sentence, so no luck there.

My next thought was to ask one of our library volunteers - when she's not volunteering for the library, she's a Professor of Literature in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. If anyone would know this, she must.

Later that day I spoke to her and explained the question, and she said she had no idea. She felt that if there was a term for it, it would be a term of rhetoric, so I should search those instead of just literary terms. She also said she'd ask around the department and let me know if any of her colleagues knew.

I searched online for rhetoric terms, and found quite a few glossaries, and although many terms were extremely close, none were exactly right.

Later I heard back from the volunteer - she said that no one she spoke with could identify it, and the only suggestion anyone had, however dubious, was "circular construction." That sounds good on its face, but I couldn't find it listed in any of the glossaries I consulted.

Frustrating. This all happened on Thursday and Friday, and I haven't yet contacted the patron with an answer. So if anyone knows, please comment.

***WARNING: SPOILER ALERT***

I read The Outsiders when I was young and don't really remember it, so I was interested to learn about this first/last sentence trick in the book. The book ends with a student being assigned a writing project, and he begins his assignment by writing the first sentence of the novel. This leads to the conclusion that the novel itself was the student's assignment, which is fun because it blends reality with fiction, and turns the story into a sort of mobius strip of plot.

It also reminded me of the imagery of the snake eating its tail - which got me wondering if there is a term for that symbol. It turns out there is: Ouroboros. When I do call this student back on Monday, she'll have all kinds of paths to follow.

Update 8/26/11:
After getting comments on this post, I spoke with the patron by phone, and emailed her a few links. A couple weeks later, she emailed me back:

Thanks for the answer and all the hard work everyone did. I just e-mailed my teacher about the summer assignment and she said circular structure is the correct answer.

Alex

That's great - thanks for helping, everyone.

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Visualizing the Flow of My Library’s Information Online

My library just launched our long-overdue Facebook page. In the course of preparing it, we had a discussion about why we needed a Facebook page, what we wanted to use it for, and how it related to everything else we were doing online.

This led to the realization that no one really understood exactly what all we were doing online. We have a website, Twitter account, blog, email newsletters, flickr account, and now Facebook, but no clear policy as to what gets posted where, when information is duplicated, how things are updated, etc.

To help understand how our various types of information are represented online, I created the diagram below - it's probably not 100% complete, but it does cover most of our bases:

On the left are our different types of information (MacKay is our branch library), and the arrows show how that information flows through different electronic tools. There isn't necessarily a hierarchy at work*, other than perhaps the automatic updates necessarily come after the manual updates. Otherwise, the boxes are laid out just so they all fit on the page.

After discussing this, we uncovered two philosophies at work:

1. use the different end tools - website, Facebook, Twitter - for unique content, so as not to duplicate things and essentially "spam" our patrons that use more than one service (for example, you can see above that no event information is posted to Facebook)
2. publish all of our content almost equally through all of our channels, so we're sure to reach all our patrons regardless of which tool they choose to use

I don't think they are mutually-exclusive, but it does take a lot of work and forethought to do it well. I also think that more of what we do could be automated, as cutting down on the manual postings would save staff time.

Do other libraries have similar online information relationships? I imagine things range from very structured to a free-for-all to orphan accounts galore, but I'm curious to hear what other libraries are doing, to get ideas on how to do it better at my library.

*Something to note on the diagram is our "secret" Twitter account. We have a primary Twitter account we encourage patrons to follow and we use for regular tweets. The secret account is one we use only to post messages directly to our homepage. The reason for two, and why I don't really want anyone following to the homepage updater one, is that clearing the message off the homepage requires sending a blank tweet - it's not the end of the world if anyone follows it, but the blank tweets do look odd. Besides, everything posted to it gets posted through our primary account anyway.

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Job Opening for Evergreen Library Support Technician

Back in May, my library's consortium migrated our catalog to Evergreen. Since then, it became clear that we need more staff to support Evergreen, because using an open source catalog is a great deal more work than supporting vendor software.

As a result, the position description (below and at the MBLC) was posted last week, and I encourage anyone interested to apply. Don't let the "temporary" part fool you - there is so much work that there'll be plenty to last beyond the 9 month initial period. And although not strictly required, I think the more tech and database skills the better. The job will primarily be the front-line support and liaison person between libraries and Evergreen developers, but anyone who can contribute to development is greatly appreciated.

And also, a bit of a warning: the MVLC underestimated what it would take to support an open-source catalog. With open source, we're in charge of everything, not just the data - as a result, our list of problems to fix, features to add, and just things to figure out grows daily. Whoever accepts this position will have no shortage of things to do.

Customer Service Technician

The Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC), a group of 35 public libraries in NE Massachusetts, is looking for a service-oriented individual with excellent trouble-shooting, interpersonal, and communication skills. This is a temporary (approx. 9 month) position that will focus on providing customer support to member library staff for the library catalog and online applications. As part of the network support team this person will be the primary helpdesk contact involving the reception, organization, and resolution of problems, and actively contribute to the growing knowledge base. This person will also have significant responsibility for the design and configuration of the public catalog and network Web sites and provide support for database and third-party products that integrate with the library system.There is potential for this to become a permanent position.

Required

• Bachelor's Degree
• Proven customer service orientation
• At least two years technical experience with automated systems or databases
• Knowledge of HTML, CSS and other Web services tools
• Substantial knowledge of PC environment
• Excellent oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills

Desired

• Library experience desired
• Understanding of User Interface design
• Database design (SQL)
• Linux experience
• Program languages such as Perl, Python, etc.

Salary: $22.17/hr

Please forward cover letter and resume to:
Lawrence Rungren
Executive Director
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
1600 Osgood Street
North Andover, MA 01845

or [email protected]

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Reference Question of the Week – 7/24/11

A patron actually asked this question a couple weeks ago, but it's still quite timely. Also, it's a good example of two things: one, of someone asking a question expecting one answer but the actual answer being something different, and two, of being one of the most frustrating kinds of questions.

A patron walked up to the desk and said,

All this talk about raising the debt ceiling, and the idea of raising taxes instead of cutting spending, sounds like "no taxation without representation" to me. That was the battle cry of the Revolution - who was it that first said it?

It seemed like a fairly straight-forward question. I pulled our Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (17 ed.), and looking under "tax" in the index produced an entry for "Taxation without representation" on page 340. Sounds good.

That entry was attributed to James Otis in 1763, and read,

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

But there was a footnote:

This maxim was the guide and watchword of all the friends of liberty. Otis actually said: No parts of His Majesty's dominion can be taxed without their consent. -- Otis, "Rights of the Colonists" [1764], p .64

Since that was not the exact answer the patron was looking for, I tried searching online for who said "no taxation without representation" (with apprehension, I should say, because an internet search like this can often be less than definitive).

The first result was a Wikipedia article on the phrase, which credited Reverend Jonathan Mayhew in a sermon in Boston in 1750, but gave no citation. In the hopes of finding a transcript of that sermon, I tried searching for his name and the phrase, and found a series of interesting posts on the topic from the Boston 1775 blog:

• Who Coined the Phrase “No Taxation Without Representation“?
• James Otis, Jr., on Taxation Without Representation
• Looking for “Taxation Without Representation”

The first one links to the text of a 1750 sermon (pdf) that carries the sentiment of the phrase, but not the phrase itself.

The blog posts, and most other sources I could find, went on to say that this sentiment had been around for decades, if not a century, and shared by the people of Ireland, England, and France against their respective governments. The American Colonists of the time we just the next group of disaffected citizens to adopt it.

Various sources cited that, while the phrase was in use in Boston by 1765, there is no clear record of who originally put those words in that order.

The patron was not pleased with this, but was getting antsy with the search process. I think what she was expecting was a very definitive "on this day, this American patriot said these words and this is why we are a great nation today," so all the maybes and ifs we found were disappointing - especially the references to this sentiment being embraced by the English and French before us.

In the end, she decided that attributing it to James Otis was most plausible - not only was he a patriot in the right time period, but he was also cited in Bartlett's, which was the most authoritative source we found.

I felt bad for not being able to find a better answer, and that's what frustrated me about questions like this - it's entirely possible that there isn't a better answer. I feel like there must be, and I have spent a little time since looking, but haven't found it yet.

Although, this does remind me of something a tour guide once said, about not having definitive answers to questions of history: "if a historical tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to write it down, did it really fall?" Of course. But now with cell phone cameras everywhere, "reality without record" might be a thing of the past.

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Library Day in the Life, Round 7

Today starts Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life project, chronicalling what librarians do on a daily basis. I'm going to try to live-blog my day like before, and other people are contributing to #libday7. Thanks as always to Bobbi Newman for providing the push and the forum for this.

11:00 AM

• Get to work, talk with coworkers about the heat from the weekend.
• Check my mailbox: purchase suggestions from staff, reference question from patron (I still get reference questions via USPS about once every couple months), and letter from former coworker who still has the library street address memorized, so he sends me things here instead of to my house.
• Check staff email: one message from a patron asking how to do something in our catalog, and then another twenty minutes later from the same patrons saying nevermind, her husband showed her how

11:15 AM

• Look up and request summer reading books for patron
• Tell two different patrons they have to go to the main circ desk to check out their books
• Explain to a girl how to print, and then make change for her a few minutes later
• Take a call from circ staff because they're not able to move a patron higher up in a hold queue - have to submit that as a help desk ticket to developers because even though Evergreen has the menu options to do this, it doesn't work for me either
• Notice that this week is also our quarterly stats recording day - mark down six tick marks because I forgot to count as I went

11:30

• Try to confirm for a girl that our copy of The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde really is the full version of the story, even though there are other stories in the book as well. She has to read it for summer reading and doesn't want to read the wrong book - she leaves skeptical.
• Try to help a patron connect his iPad to our wifi network. We have more trouble that we should, so make a note to let our IT person know. Also, this isn't the first time iPad patrons have trouble connecting
• Talk to one of our pages about her weekend, summer sports schedule, her new haircut, and the list of tasks her mother has assigned her to finish by the end of the summer - she is not amused
• Give one of our teen volunteers a quick rundown on how to shelf read in the teen room, then set her loose to help keep things organized - thank you!
• Patron with a study room reservation comes in late, and someone else has already snuck into his room - try to make everyone happy, and manage in this case

11:45

• Research the Evergreen problem (moving patron to the top of a hold queue, because she said she never got the notification it was ready and staff needed to rerequest the item, which of course moved the patron to the bottom of the list) and found there is already an open ticket on this same problem - submitting a follow-up to see if there is a workaround
• Log into my email for the first time today to submit the followup - see I have 21 new messages since yesterday. Not too bad, considering 6 I could deleted without opening, and 3 others are messages I sent myself as reminders
• Help patron find a pair of headphones to use
• Help a patron log into our computers (logins not necessary, which is why it's so difficult)

12:00 noon

• Help another patron log in (which really means restarting Windows and letting the computer auto-logon). I think this happened because all our computers are full which kicks off anyone who has been on longer than one hour - since no one else is waiting, I just log back on anyone who needs it
• While walking back to the desk, pick up some religious flier - we have one patron (a.k.a. "God's litterbug") who constantly leaves religious propgranda and printouts all over the library
• Download the free ebook of Machine of Death story collection a friend told me about - neat
• Update our mobile site with the new hours of our branch library (which should have been done July 9th, but didn't occur to me until just now - oops)
• Replying to emails
• Still can't get in to add myself to the Library Day in the Life pbwiki to add myself - it is constantly locked by other users

1:00 PM

• Finally get to add myself to the pbwiki page (#161)
• More trouble with the wireless network - this is frustrating
• Doing a little bit of selection in between helping patrons
• Get resolution on moving a patron up in the queue - it's not something staff can do for the time being, but network staff can, so I'll just email them whenever we need to do it
• Have been busy, hence less frequent updates
• Explain to someone how to use the library's Fax24 fax machine
• Heard this phrase, which makes sense in context, but is still funny:
  

  Do you have direct contact information for someone in the historical society? They're only open by appointment only which means no one is ever there, but since everyone is on vacation in the summer, right now they're even more never there than usual.

• More email - seemed to have hit a lull with patrons
• Spoke too soon - phone patron wanting me to reverse-lookup a phone number. I was able to find that it's a Haverhill number, but not who owns it, and we don't have a print directory for Haverhill so I gave her the number for the Haverhill library

1:30 PM

• Teen shelf reader checked in to say she needs to leave, and that she got up to the L's
• Finally send an email about our Evergreen Steering committee that I've been on-and-off type for the past hour and a half
• Talk to the maintenance guy and find out the reason the building was so hot on Friday and Saturday is that one of our AC units blew a fuse - but on the unit itself, and not in the fusebox, which is why we didn't see it when we started looking for the problem on Friday)

2:00 PM

• Check my personal email, and try to find a link from WordCamp from this weekend. Couldn't find it, but found great summary of the day
• Talk to coworker who just got back from a week in Florida - she was woken up one morning by the sonic boom from the space shuttle as it was landing
• Summer reading, summer reading, summer reading - I'm sorry, they're all checked out
• Start documenting a list of issues with Evergreen, from both staff and patrons, that I've been scribbling on scrap paper

3:00 PM

• Help patron find travel books for Vermont - yay, VT
• Time for lunch, I think
• Talk with my cataloger about issues we're facing with Evergreen

4:00 PM

• Continue compiling the list of Evergreen issues
• Helped two phone patrons right in a row who were each asking if we had different books - amazingly, both of them were on the shelf. That never happens twice in a row. I put them on hold and they both said they'd be right down to get them.

5:00 PM

• Yay for the day slowing down - it's dinnertime, so people are going home - there are actually public computers available
• Had a discussion with the IT director about what to do with a laptop that has been in our lost-and-found for almost a year - the easiest course is to just erase the hard drive and get rid of it, but I feel guilty doing that
• Talk with the author of a soon-to-be-published local history book about the permanence of library and chelmsfordhistory.org webpages - my best answer was "we have no plans to remove them, but whether the web will even be around 20-30 years from now, I can't say
• Update the library's homepage with this week's upcoming events

6:00 PM

• Prepare for an Evergreen priority meeting tomorrow - we're still going through the list of discovered bugs and desired features putting them into some kind of development priority order. The current list is four pages long, and more are being added daily
• Remove the Elibrary database from our website, as state funding for that database stopped
• Try to find out when John Barrasso (R, WY) said, "If this is such a good bill, why do they want out?" It looks like he said it to reporters on Feb 1st, 2011
• For the same patron, find a news article saying that Planned Parenthood did indeed file a lawsuit against the state of Kansas about defunding clinics - found multiple
• Figure out why a pdf file is printing every other page upside-down, and how to fix it - turns out, changing the double-sided print orientation fixes it, thank goodness
• Showed patron how to use http://zamzar.com to download "filmstrips" from the internet
• Spend time weeding my email inbox, trying to get it down to one page - success! I might not reach "inbox zero," but at least "inbox 25" is doable

7:00 PM

• Print out a few last resources for a patron to pick up later, tell the person coming out to relieve me what's going on at the desk, and go home for the night. Good night, libday7

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