Seriously. In Lincoln the creed is God, Country, and Tom Obsorne (former head coach for the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, current athletic director for the University and viewed as the savior of Husker football). On football Saturdays Memorial Stadium becomes the third largest city in the state, with 81,067 folks riveted to the field. It looks like this:

Sea of Red Husker fans

It’s virtually impossible to get tickets unless you buy them from scalpers, or are fortunate enough to either be a student, or know someone who works for the University or bought season tickets back in the day and has willed them to their descendants. So this Saturday Rich & I are watching the first game of the season with my grandparents (age 92 & 94) on a big-screen at their retirement home. It’s the first time I’ve been able to watch a football game live with my grandfather rather than just emailing him about the game after the fact, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’m also excited to watch the band play at half-time, since my conversion to Husker Football came when I was 18 years old and a college freshman at UNL, playing in the drumline of the marching band.

I defy even the most ennui-soaked person to remain unmoved while marching down to the stadium from the campus music building, playing drum cadences like Dutch Boy and SexBeat while literally thousands of scarlet-draped fans line the street cheering you on. The band is a celebrity in its own right, shouting cheers and creating perfect formations with jaunty music to provide entertainment until the second half. During half-time, no fans leave their seats to hit the bathroom or refill on snacks, not while the band’s on the field.

The band has the best seats in the house, right down near the twenty yard line of the Husker goal, and the first time we scored a touchdown and I played the fight song my soul was swamped with Husker fever. I’ve rarely missed watching a game since, through bowl games and back-to-back national championships, even after Coach Tom left to be a politician for a while and Frank Solich took over. I missed a few games during the dark days, while Callahan and the former athletic director did their level best to completely destroy the program, because even from Arizona watching our records fall one by one was sometimes too painful to watch. (Ticket-holding fans had more stamina than me, though. It’s worth noting that the record of 304 consecutive sold-out home games still stands, because even when Husker fans hate the coach we support the players).

Hope has returned with the Pellini brothers, head coach Bo and Defensive Coordinator Carl. We had a great season last year, won our bowl game, and Bo has made no bones that this year he wants it all. Our points-scoring defense is back, we’ve got at least two good quarterbacks in the mix, and the whole team is hungry for payback against Texas before we leave the Big Twelve Conference for the golden opportunities in the Big Ten.

And I’m here, in the heart of it all, as the humid air begins to carry the tangy bite of fall, ready to watch the season opener with my family and fill up with Big Red Faith for another year. Because no matter where I live now, in my heart I’ll always be a Husker.

Go Big Red! Go Big Red! Go Big Red!

Love at First Sight

“He’s lonely,” Trish says to me over the phone. “He’s only in town for a few days. His oldest daughter is getting into trouble at high school, his ex-wife won’t deal with it, and he could use a night out, away from all the drama.”

“What’s he like?” I ask.

“Funny,” she answers, without needing to think about it. “Quick. Honest. Open-minded, a modern gentleman. Nice-looking, but not movie-star gorgeous—he won’t intimidate you. His sense of humor’s a lot like yours, so I thought you guys might hit it off.”

“I’m not really looking to get into anything right now,” I say. It’s been seven months since my divorce finalized and I’m enjoying the single life.

“He’ll take your lead for how you want to treat the date – he’ll be fine with it if all you want to be is his buddy.” Trish’s voice is cheerful over the line. “We dated for about six months before he moved to Maine, and we’re still friends. He’ll treat you right.”

“So what’s the downside?” I ask. If the guy had been that perfect Trish would have kept him for herself.

“Well….he’s older.”

“How old are we talking?” I’m twenty-six; my ex was four years older for all he acted like a sullen teenager. Maybe older would be a nice change.

“Um…he’s forty-eight.”

Twenty-two years my senior? God, that wasn’t much younger than my Dad. “Jeez, Trish, that’s a little out of my range!”

“I really think you guys would get along. Just one date, come on!”

“No date,” I say decisively. “But tell him I like to shoot pool and if he does too, I’ll meet him at Big John’s for a couple of games to get him away from the crazy family.”

It’ll be like playing pool with my Dad, I figure a few nights later as I walk into Big John’s. The jukebox is playing Joan Jett, which I love, and I start humming ‘I Love Rock n’ Roll’ as I scan the people at the tables for my pool playing buddy for the night.

There’s a guy racking up alone at one of the tables near the bar; could be him. His back is to me, in a blue knit long-sleeved shirt and faded blue jeans that, I can’t help but notice, fit quite nicely to his slim build.

He straightens up and turns around, catches sight of me. Bright blue eyes widen a little behind rimless glasses. He looks a whole lot like Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, right down to the mostly bald head with the fringe of silver hair and the neatly trimmed mustache and goatee.

As it happens, I thought Sean Connery was pretty cute in that movie. This guy is cute too, especially when he gives me a warm smile that reveals a dimple in his right cheek.

“Are you Holly?” he asks, blue eyes twinkling.

“Which means you must be Rich,” I answer, smiling back and trying to hide the fact that I’m blushing. That smile…wow.

“Well, this is never going to work,” he declares, sighing in mock sadness as I join him at the pool table and pick up a cue.

I tilt my head and arch my brows at him. “Oh no?”

He shakes his head, face solemn but eyes dancing, dancing as they look me over. “Nope. You’re wayyy too pretty for an old geezer like me.”

The blush goes all the way past my hairline, and I fall in love.

Ten years later, we still play pool on our anniversary.

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

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!

(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.

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.

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?