Monthly Archives: March 2012

Mar 30

Lessons from the Campaign Trail

This week I’ve been engrossed in the Syracuse University iSchool’s Pinterest contest on the ‘Future of Librarianship’. I entered last week on a whim with the promise of a free book for the winner (The Atlas of New Librarianship by Dave Lankes), but the competitor in me kicked in when I found out I was a finalist. Since then I’ve been consumed with the contest and I’ve learned a few things along the way, related in the form of cliche.


It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. 

Once you get to the voting stage of something like this, merit goes out the window and it becomes a popularity contest. Whoever has the most friends wins, and that’s true in the professional world as well. I’ve been job hunting for a while now, and the jobs I get  interviewed for are overwhelmingly the ones for which I have a connection at the library. That being said, I’m horrible at ‘networking’ – I feel like my intentions are transparent and I’m not sure what to saywhen I’m trying to stay in touch – “Hi, it’s Kaylin, I’m still alive! What about you? Cool. Let’s do this again in a few months, okay?” If nothing else, this contest has given me an opportunity to reconnect with old coworkers and friends.

Don’t burn your bridges behind you.

This is an obvious lesson professionally, but I never applied it to friends before. A year ago I decided to ‘weed’ the people on my Facebook page that I’ve lost touch with, thinking that if I haven’t talked to them since high school I had no need to read their status updates. It wasn’t a bad move generally speaking, but you never know when a long-lost friend or even an acquaintance can help you out. This isn’t to say I would keep every person I’ve ever connected with on Facebook just to win a contest, but maybe there are a few who bear revisiting.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Last night I was telling Evan about how I was in first place all day Wednesday and had contacted quite a few people to ask for votes, and he cut me off by asking, “all this for a book?” Okay, yes the prize is a book (one I’m looking forward to reading whether or not I win), but the greater prize is reinvigoration and involvement in my field after identifying as a cake decorator more than a librarian for so long. I also met some cool new librarians and added their blogs to my RSS feed.

Stick to your guns.

About midway through the contest, I decided to use my resources in a different way and ask a friend who regularly handles event promotions to give me some advice. “You can’t force people to get excited but you can make them aware,” he said, adding that I should make sure people feel my enthusiasm, hammer home my message, and stick to my guns. That reminder was invaluable, since I often fall into the trap of formality at the expense of passion and personality when I’m presenting myself professionally.

Find out who your friends are.

I had a couple of surprises in the course of the contest as well. One of my undergraduate professors voted for me, then asked if she could post a link to the contest on her Facebook page and share it around the English department – it was above and beyond what I hoped for, and I was glad to have her in my corner. I found the same enthusiasm in a current coworker, and it’s nice to be reminded who has your back.

All in all it was a rewarding but exhausting week and the results will be published on the iSchool’s blog on Monday.

Mar 25

The Hunger Games on the Kindle

Here’s to broadening horizons.

I normally steer clear of young adult fiction – I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in high school and just didn’t see the appeal. Then I read Twilight for work, expecting to dislike it and proving myself right. I put off The Hunger Games for a long while, assuming the same would be true, but with a nagging urge to try it – dystopian, macabre stories are my favorite.

I’ve also been shy of eReaders – I bought a Kindle 1st generation when they came out, even wrote my undergraduate capstone paper on the potential of eReaders, but never adopted the idea into my reading habits. Their screens are hard to concentrate on, the pages turn ever so slooowwwwlyyy, the corners dig into my palms, and I can’t easily see how much progress I’ve made. Whose idea was it to forgo page numbers in favor of ‘locations’, aka. lines, anyway? I never know how many ‘locations’ there are total, and the progress bar is the same length across the bottom of the screen whether I’m reading Heart of Darkness or War and Peace.

So this week, I took a couple leaps of faith – I decided to read The Hunger Games and I bought it for my Kindle (bottom line, I’m cheap and it’s instantly available). I delved electronically into the world of Katniss Everdeen on Wednesday night and was pleasantly surprised.

Some of my suspicions were justified – Collins spells out characters’ emotions and motivations to the point of annoyance at times, her political ideas are transparent from the start, and the eReader is not nearly as comfortable a companion as a book – but I’m hooked! The major plot points of the series had been spoiled for me before I even began reading, but Collins builds suspense so well that I can’t stop. Some authors leave each chapter in a cliff hanger, but Collins manages to leave her paragraphs in suspense, with the result being that I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to go to work, I don’t even want to write this post… I just want to finish the book! And then maybe start Catching Fire.

Mar 20

It’s World Storytelling Day!

And the above is the somewhat questionable official logo of World Storytelling Day. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me… I get what they’re going for, but it doesn’t quite seem on the level.

Anyway, I love Mental Floss for the fascinating information I’m constantly finding on their blogs, and today I learned about WSD. It’s an annual celebration of oral tradition with a new theme each year. For 2012 it’s trees, while previous years have included water, light & shadow, dreams, and the moon, among others. The event began in Sweden around 1991, and became a global event about a decade later. (Source)

The art of verbal storytelling is almost entirely separate from the written word, requiring different cadences, word selection, purpose and direction. As storyteller Georgiana Keable says in the video above, it seems to be more about the journey than the transmission of the information itself – you’re not just trying to teach the listener or get from plot point A to plot point B, you’re enriching and entertaining the listener along the way. When reading a suspense novel, the reader must find himself on the edge of his seat or the journey is ruined, and all of this is dependent on how well the book is written and whether suspense is injected into the words on the page. If the same story is told in the oral tradition, the storyteller can vocally impart whatever urgency is necessary and breathe life into the story almost without regard to the wording.

There are storytelling festivals all over the country, not just on March 20th but throughout the year. I must admit my ignorance, having never heard of such a thing until a few months ago when I found out one of my favorite musicians, Steve Poltz, is booked for Oklahoma’s Storytelling Festival in September. It was something I thought was interesting but which I ultimately dismissed as a unique event outside of my region until I took more time to look into it today.  Storytelling festivals seem to have quite a cult following. Some of the big ones are the National Storytelling Festival which features a midnight ghost story event, the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival which hosts Utah’s Biggest Liar Contest, and the St. Louis Storytelling Festival which offers workshops and University of Missouri courses to correspond with the festival.

I love this idea! The festivals sound like a fantastic, eclectic experience. It’s too bad I can’t find anything in my area for today though – I’ll just have to come up with a story of my own.

Mar 15

Pinterest and the Librarian

If there’s one thing to say about Pinterest, it’s that you can, and will, lose yourself there. I logged on a little while ago to do a bit of quick research to see how librarians and libraries are using the site, and here I am two hours, dozens of pin boards, and several articles later. When I signed up a month ago, I was not initially sold on Pinterest’s appeal, but obviously there’s something to it.

It’s fun! It’s current! It’s all about me and the stuff that I like, but with the option to share and discuss with my friends! It’s social media-y!

The personal side of it held my interest briefly until I realized I’m a lethargic Facebook user, I closed my Twitter account due to neglect, and I just don’t need another social media site to talk to my friends on. That’s how I decided to look into the ways the library field uses Pinterest – because you know if there’s a hip new thing on the internet, librarians are all over it, adapting and innovating. Not surprisingly, I found some pretty cool uses!

Of institutions utilizing Pinterest (which I limited to Ohio-area libraries because there are already many!), I noticed a lot of recommended reading boards with links to the online catalog, a few boards featuring special collections to explore, and other event-specific boards. Geauga West Library has a couple of entertaining boards devoted to library humor and crafts, and I was especially excited to see Ashtabula Library‘s ‘Books the Library Should Purchase’ board, where patrons can pin suggestions. Only one book has been suggested so far, but as Pinterest awareness/membership grows I can see it becoming a popular board. As a patron, I would much rather go to Pinterest and make a suggestion with a simple ctrl+c, ctrl+v than try to navigate a library website I may not be familiar with and find a place for suggestions there.

As far as individual librarians go, Pinterest seems to be a place to intermingle professional and personal interests. Most of the librarians I found had the standard boards for fashion, travel and recipes in addition to reading lists, library-related art, crafts, unique bookshelf photos, and more. RetroLibrarian has a board of, you guessed it, retro photos of librarians, and GothLibrarian has a board devoted to the ‘corporate goth wardrobe’ in case you don’t want to leave your personal style at home but are still concerned with a professional appearance. Kelly Butcher has all sorts of library-related boards including the off-color ‘Swear Like a Librarian’ and Joe Murphy uses a travel board to plan future trips.

Pinterest certainly brings new things onto the personal horizon (for instance I never would have considered its use as a job search tool), and it can also be a good way to meet people with similar interests. Today I found several librarian blogs I may never have seen had the authors not also been on Pinterest. Anyway, enough for now, although I’m sure I’ll come back to Pinterest as a topic – after all, it’s being called the hottest website of 2012.

Mar 10

The Automated Job Search

Sometimes the simple thing of knowing where to look for a job can be daunting. I’ve been searching since I graduated library school last August, and I think I finally have a pretty good system in place to catch as many job vacancy notifications as possible as they pop up.

When I first began looking, I tried all the usual places – Monster, Career Builder, the ALA JobLIST – and I found a few jobs here and there. I applied, so did everyone else in the tristate area, and if I wasn’t vigilant, disciplined, and constantly searching, a lot of job opportunities slipped through the cracks. Now I have the entire process practically automated to work for me and I don’t feel nearly so lost. Here’s what I did:

  • Locate all the relevant job search engines available, including Monster, Career Builder, Indeed, and USAJobs, as well as library-specific ones like ALA JobLIST, LISjobs, and LibGig
  • Perform job searches in all of these with specific criteria such as ‘full time’ and ‘entry level’.

  • Find the RSS feed button (most job search engines have them these days) and subscribe!

  • See, I have 24 jobs waiting for me in Google Reader without any labor except the initial setup:

  • To make sure you’re not missing out on local jobs that don’t advertise, make a list of local libraries (I searched for public libraries, hospitals and universities in my area for my three areas of interest and came up with a total of 52 libraries within 50 miles of my house). Find the employment page on each library’s website, and save it as a hyperlink in a document.


  • Now all the initial legwork is out of the way there as well and you can just go back and check each employment page once a week or so.

And that’s how I took the dread out of job searching and automated the process. It is a lot of work to set up – I probably spent a good six hours over several days putting my system into place, but so far it has been well worth it, and I’m finding a lot more relevant job postings on a consistent basis.