Happily Ever After…

It’s 7:00 AM on a Saturday and I have just finished watching the Torchwood: Children of Earth 5 part-miniseries.  For those of you non-geeks out there, Torchwood is a science-fiction show made by the BBC set in the Doctor Who universe (c’mon, you know Doctor Who, right?) about a team of specialists in Cardiff Wales who regularly save the Earth from aliens (if you want the dirty deets, click here) .  Some of the episodes were great, some were really not, but the writing, the cast, the premise, and the plot lines stayed with me long after the episode ended.  So, after an 18-month hiatus, I was really looking forward to this mini-series, which was basically all the BBC was giving we fans in terms of a third season of the show. And, after watching the thing, I have come to some conclusions about TV writers/creators, particularly those in the sci-fi fantasy genre:

The bastards are the worst kind of evil-genius-sadists that ever frakking lived.

Take Joss Whedon, profilic writer and the mastermind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and now Dollhouse. He took a series and not only used it as a symbolic commentary on contemporary issues (high school is rough anyway – now try being a high school sophomore with a secret identity in a town overrun by the undead), but as a chance to fully develop living, breathing, human characters, that screw up and make mistakes and invite fans to really, fully emotionally attach to them.  As a fan, I cared about the characters in those shows, enough to regularly forget what most of the fans of the original Star Trek forgot – it’s just a show, those aren’t real people, so don’t get so upset when bad things happen to them.  The fact that I did get upset when Buffy had to kill Angel at the end of the 2nd season points (I hope) less to the fact that I am an enormous geek and more to the fact that Joss Whedon is a freaking brilliant writer who could make me care about his characters just as though they were real people.

So, take it as a given – Joss Whedon, Eric Kripke (Supernatural), and Russell T Davies (Doctor Who, Torchwood), like all good writers, have the power to make me, as a fan, care, and care deeply, about the fictional characters they create.

But with that power comes great responsibility, right? Not necessarily.

It used to be, back in the good old days, that there was an unwritten, cardinal rule, an unspoken bond of trust between writers and their fans. That commandment was simple. Thou shall not kill a major character.

(In the Sci Fi universe, that commandment is amended to Thou shall not permanently kill a major character.)

Put them in mortal peril if you must, even kill them (with the understanding that, through some otherwordly means, you’ll bring them back), but give us some hope that things will eventually turn out all right. That’s why we read the series, or watch the show, as fans – in the hope that somehow, some way, these people we care about will eventually prevail and everything will be all right.

Seriously, that’s all we want, writers.  If your creative process means that every week you feel the need to rip my beating out of my chest and leave me a hollowed, sobbing, empty shell of a person, go ahead – I’ll put up with it as long as I have some faint hope that, eventually, at least by the series end for God’s sake, everything will turn out okay. That’s all I ask.

So, when I hear talk on the Supernatural boards about sending the heroes out to die in a blaze of glory at the end of the series, or Russell T Davies decides that the best way to showcase the world going to hell is to utterly destroy team Torchwood until the few remaining characters are broken down, beaten shells of themselves with no hope of a happy ending, I get the strong urge to track those guys down and smack them on the back of the head until they figure out that they’re not living up to their end of the bargain.

What bargain, you may ask.  Those characters belong to them, they’re the creative geniuses behind them, they’re allowed to do what they want without regard to the fans, right?

I disagree. Books, shows, whatever, are not created in a vacuum.  If I’m writing a story for myself, then sure, I’ll do whatever I want.  But, especially in TV, the fans are what make a show live.  They’re what keep it on the air, or keep those DVD sales going after the series ends.  If, as a writer, the show creator loves his characters, then he ought to want them to live on, to leave a legacy, where people are still enjoying and reading and watching and caring about them long after the writer has moved on to other things.  And if you’ve got to end everything, then end it on a high note, so those of us who love those characters can imagine them keeping on doing what they were doing, living their lives and saving the world, even if we can’t see them doing it any more.

Doyle learned it firsthand when he tried to kill off Holmes in Reichenbach Falls, and the public outcry was so great he was forced to bring him back.  Fans give characters life.  A storyteller is nothing without an audience.

I don’t read fantasy and sci-fi, or watch it, because I need more reality in my life; I read it because I need a break from it.  So please, showrunners, writers, what-have-you, please STOP thinking that the only way you can illustrate your amazing talent is to break the norm and give me a horrible, angst-filled, hopeless ending where all the people I’ve spent years caring about are dead. Remember your audience – put yourself in my place.

And give me my damn heart back.

Creativity – We Haz Some

It never ceases to amaze me, the wealth of talent in the library world.

To put it another way, about six months ago I found out that out of the 15 people working at my branch, at least six (possibly more) are musically inclined AND are willing to risk public humiliation by performing in front of a live audience of roughly 200 kids and their parents this summer.

Yeah. My branch has a Library Band.

It happened like this:

Some in December (or January, I forget which), I was sitting in my office working on schedules when the branch Padawan (parapro working on his MLS) popped his head in and asked if I had a minute. Since doing schedules is like playing Sudoku in Hell and I needed a break, natch I invited him in.

The Padawan is youngish, about ten years my junior, and was entertainingly hesitant as he mentioned that he’d been talking to his supervisor the Doc about getting together to play some music. Doc is a self-taught musicologist who plays pretty much everything, and the Padawan plays bass guitar, I found out. Further conversation discovered they’d recruited SonoranDragon, my Circ Geek Supervisor Extraordinaire, to play keyboards. Did I want in? Maybe doing vocals or something, since none of them could sing (or so he said).

Since my only professional singing up until that time had been leading the preschoolers in storytime songs at the old branch (with plenty of non-professional singing in the shower and in the car), I was a little hesitant, then figured what the hell, it would be fun to hear everybody else.  So I gave the proper “Well, I’m not all that good, but I’ll give it a try, sure. That all you need or do we want to recruit anyone else?” I was thinking of the Happiest Goth girl and the East Coast Youthgal, since they sing in storytime too, and perhaps the three of us singing together would make up for the level of really-not-American-Idol-material-at-ALL talent.

Oh. Turns out the band needs a drummer, too. And I may have sorta played percussion in high school and college, and minored in it. Kinda.

So that’s how the Audacious Bibliosophs formed, with me on drums, vocals, and electric guitar (though not all on the same song, obviously), the Padawan on bass and electric and acoustic guitar, SonoranDragon on keyboards and drums (on the songs I sing on, since I can’t play drums and sing at the same time), the Doc on everything (two kinds of saxophone, bass, and guitar for this gig), and the Happiest Goth Girl and EastCoast YouthGal on vocals, (with bass guitar for the Happiest Goth Girl on the song that we needed an extra on).  Changing songs during the set is like the old (non-PC, sorry) Chinese Fire Drill routine.

My only caveat for doing this thing was that if we wanted to rehearse on work time, then we needed to be doing it for something work-related.  Which is how our first gig will be a summer reading program on forming a band and making music, followed by a showing of the movie Camp Rock.

Yes, there will be a video on YouTube, and I’ll post the link once it’s live.  If you have kidney problems you probably won’t want to watch it, since seeing us perform live will void even the strongest bladder. (Especially the vocalists doing The Shark during our encore song, Wipeout. I laughed so hard I flubbed my solo).

My point to all this? Librarians are a creative bunch. Talk to the peeps at your library, find out what people do in their off time. My guess is that you’ll find a wealth of talent that will surprise you. And, if you’re lucky, you can get something cool together like we did, too.

Now…gotta practice!

We Don’t Do No Dewey…

I was out in the stacks shelving this afternoon, getting back to my roots, as ’twere.  I started out as a page when I was 19, and even now that I’m a manager I still like to get out on the floor, put books away, and see what the library looks like from the patron POV.

(The answer is it looks like the children’s section got hit by an F3 tornado, and it sort of sounds like that too. But we’ve got 2100 kids and counting doing summer reading at our branch, so I’m not much surprised.)

What does surprise me is how decent the shelves look in non-fiction.  Not too destroyed, and a quick scan of the Health section tells me that yep, most of the items there are in title order.

Uh, yeah. Title order. Not number order.  You see, my branch is one of those subversive, new-agey, oh-my-God-you-killed-Dewey, you-bastard! libraries that got rid of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of good old bookstore-style subject headings.

My system was one of the first to start doing away with Dewey entirely in a branch, though by now we’re certainly not the only ones. A Colorado system (after visiting our District, btw) came up with their own classification system called WordThink and they’re implementing it at all of their libraries, which will make them the first system in the country (I think) where all branches have been converted to a Deweyless system.

We’re not really killing kittens, honest. (By the reaction of the library world in 07 when we unveiled our first Deweyless branch, you’d think we were ritually sacrificing the fluffy little things in the stacks every night at closing). The whole point of giving Dewey the boot was to make the materials in our collection, particularly the non-fiction materials, a little more accessible to browsers. So instead of telling a patron that the cookbooks are in the ‘641.5’s’, I tell them they’re in the ‘Cooking’ section. Duh. For a small collection (50,000 or less, like ours) it works pretty well.

What I noticed, while I was out shelving this afternoon, is how well our customers seemed to have adapted to the new system.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that they’re a pretty tech-savvy group down here, so most of them understand enough to go to the catalog, look up their subject, note that the call # says ‘Cooking-Recipes’ instead of the traditional Dewey #, and then come ask me where the ‘Cooking-Recipe’ section is.

Yeah. That’s kind of the part where Deweyless breaks down at my branch. Our signage kind of sucks.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, you understand. I did my best to arrange the non-fiction in a way that made sense to the average jane or joe off the street. The subject areas are arranged roughly alphabetically in three pods, with subject headings A through G in the first pod, H through S in the second pod, and S through Z in the third pod. (I say roughly because I just couldn’t justify putting the Wedding section after True Crime, no matter how much I wanted to. So technically the W’s (Wedding) are next to Home & Garden).

All this is fine once we explain how stuff is arranged to our patrons, but since our end panels are mostly display units (we do a lot of face-out bookstore-style arranging),  we don’t have a lot of end-panel signage.  This leads to what I experienced a few times today, as I was shelving in juvenile fiction, which is a patron compentently searching the OPAC , clicking on the button that shows the status for the item for our branch (which displays the call #), looking around themselves in confusion, spotting me, and then walking over to ask where the Cooking-Recipe section is.

Hmmm. Maybe I can talk IT into putting a link in to some kind of interactive map-thingy to tell the patrons where to go look for their stuff.  Then I can happily shelve my Deweyless nonfiction books by title (oh noes!), joyfully reliving my page days while the twelve-year old boys at that OPAC over there  find the Health-Sexuality section all by themselves.

Works for me.

Yay Technology!

I’m kind of a geek, I admit it.

Until recently, I was the head geek at my branch.  (My District let me hire a bunch of new staff when we moved out of our 2,000 sq. ft. building into a 47,000 sq. ft. building. I immediately stole the District’s top-geek Circ Supervisor from a neighboring branch, and no, they can’t have him back.)  Even in the Geek #2 spot I regularly get tapped to fix the self check-in and self check-out machines, figure out why our ILS keeps playing peek-a-boo with that patron’s fine history, make the damn public computers print to the networked printer already, bludgeon the copier into submission, etc. etc.  So when TPTB for our system said “Hey, we’re putting the Summer Reading Program online this year!” I was all for it.  I’m all for anything that keeps me from having to keep track of 1,500 little squares of paper registrations or having to do weekly prizecounts to report SRP stats to Admin.

Well, we’re well into Week 2 now and the online program is working gangbusters.  We’ve got over 1,500 kids signed up already at our branch and the best part is most of them signed themselves up. (Truthfully, we’ve got our branch patrons well-trained in self-service library use. It’s one of the things that allows us to handle total circ #’s approaching 100,000 each MONTH with a total staff of 16, only 9 of them full-time).  Anyway, with the click of a mouse I can run reports of how many people total are registered, how many of them have finished already, how many of them are eligible for prizes they haven’t picked up, and so on. It even looks like the numbers on the computer correspond with the actual stats! (Always a plus if the program you’re using knows how to do its own math).

Man, librarianship looks different today than it did when I started out as a fresh-faced 19 -year-old page! These days, when I get a reference question, I don’t go to our print reference section to research it – because we don’t have one. Thanks to online database access I can get biographical information on practically anyone for a kid’s school report on an obscure scientist. I can Google the nearest local taxi service to our small AZ town AND find out from their website if they have Spanish-speaking drivers since my patron doesn’t speak much English. I can hit Amazon to find out which book out of Nora Robert’s hundreds of published novels is the third in the Three Sisters trilogy.

And it doesn’t stop there.  My Blackberry lets me txt, email, or follow the Twitters of my staff so that I don’t have any surprises waiting at work for me on Monday. (Ask any manager – half of Monday morning gets spent putting out fires that sparked over the weekend.) Hell, I took my netbook on the plane to NE over Memorial weekend and got a week’s worth of desk schedules done on the flight. (Then when that was done I spent the rest of the time watching S1 of Leverage on my Ipod.)

And it all feels so *normal! My God, I remember back when there wasn’t an Internet or a World Wide Web; I remember connecting to BBS with a 300-baud modem; I remember when you had to write your own programs for your computer using DOS and yes, I remember playing Pong on the television with my dad. It all seems sort of floaty and unreal, now, like someone else’s life.

Wow, maybe it *was*. Maybe all those memories of the pre-digital age are just constructs of some nefarious outside force determined to keep me occupied and absorbed by the latest new info tech so I don’t notice the real world around me….

Sorry, gotta go.  I’ve got a sudden urge to watch the Matrix trilogy.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

It’s that time again.

Thousands of public libraries across the country are preparing for our profession’s version of Black Friday.  Nine WEEKS of Black Friday, that is. Those of you in the LIBworld know what I’m talkin’ about.

Yeah.  It’s Summer Reading Time again.

For those of you who are unaware of this phenomenon, Summer Reading is the time when your local public library (provided you have one and it’s still operating in this dark economic clime) provides incentives (AKA prizes) to reward kids (and sometimes adults) for reading over the summer.  Each program is a little different, depending on the library’s location, budget, and affiliations.  Several libraries take part in a multi-state collaborative where we all have the same theme, others develop a program on their own.  Some libraries have special performances in place of regular children’s storytimes, others don’t have the budget so make do with whatever the staff can put together. Whether it’s a big extravaganza or a one-librarian show, the whole point of Summer Reading is to, yes, get people to read over the summer.

So what’s with the whole ‘Black Friday’ thing? Well, if you’re a library user, you may have noticed that your library seems a little busier of late. That’s because the economy sucks, as you may have noticed, and when the economic situation is bleak and everyone’s running out of money, people start looking for free services in their community to help get by. And in most places across the country, public libraries are free for the folks in their community – sometimes free to people outside the community as well.

Take the so-called average American family of a parent or two and a couple kids. School’s out, the kids are bored, and then the parent/caregiver/babysitter discovers that they can bring the kids to the library where they can play on the computer, read a couple books, AND the librarian will give them a little gameboard with stickers and a PRIZE if they read so many books over the summer. And it’s FREE!

Now multiply that one family by thousands and you start to get an idea of how busy it can get.

For librarians,  this is a two-edged sword. I mean, don’t get me wrong, YES to people using the library, YES to encouraging reading habits in our communities, and HUGE YES to getting kids to turn off the TV and read something until school starts back up.  All of that is awesome.

But.

Even in prosperous times, most public libraries don’t have the staffing they need. And with recent budget cuts, reductions-in-force and hours, libraries can find themselves running the most popular program of the year with a fraction of the people they had last year, even with volunteer help.

So just how is a librarian to stay sane?

A few ideas:

1)IT’S NOT FOREVER. Take a page from the millions of retail employees who survive the Friday after Thanksgiving every year, and remember that this, too,  shall pass. The program only lasts eight or nine weeks (usually), and it’s usually the first four that are the craziest.  That’s a month, right?  You can do it for a month.

2) REMEMBER WHY YOU DO THIS. Chances are pretty good that if you’re working in a library, you’re not here for the money (pause for hysterical laughter from the librarians in the readership). Um, yeah. Librarianship, particularly public librarianship, don’t pay the big bucks, folks. So why are you doing this? For a lot of us, we get a tangible personal benefit (AKA a “HAPPY”) from providing public service, working with people, books, and bringing them together. If you can channel all the crazy of working with long lines of kids and parents into that warm little glow of service-provision, then you’ll have enough energy to light up Chicago, and also to get through the summer.

3) Your ‘Tude is All. Remember, your coworkers are in the same boat you are, and maybe you’re even one of the folks that other people look to in your organization. If you are, then set the tone for everybody else. I’ve worked (and managed) a few different public libraries in my career and God, when it comes to Summer Reading your ‘tude is everything. Ever been in a library where everyone dreads the weather turning warmer, is exhausted and bitching before the first kid walks in the door, and is miserable for the entire two months the program runs? Yeah. Don’t be them. Fake it if you have to, but smile and find the energy and the enthusiasm and all but the most negative people in your library will respond, and everyone will be a little bit happier and able to cope. And if you’re a manager, you should be doing this AND get your butt out there working the Summer Reading Desk like your staff. When the boss is giving her all, it’s hard for the staff not to.

Yeah, Summer Reading is hectic and crazy. But it’s the best time of year to get people into the library, get the community involved and invested in what you do. In this day and age, it’s vital that your community has your back, and one way to get them on board is to give their kids something fun and free to do this summer.

And, if you’re a library user? Remember that the smiling librarians your child just collected a prize from have probably kept that same smile going while handing out prizes about nine thousand times so far this summer. Make their day and tell them thanks, okay?

Hello world!

First post! Testing….testing… and there it is. Awesome.