Last November, the Library where I have volunteered for two years hired a new branch librarian, hopefully to reduce the work related stress on the County Librarian who'd been doing both jobs. The new librarian is black, lesbian, and a declined to give me the internship I'd earned with 750 hours of volunteering there. She said she was too busy. It turns out she was right. She's cut the cut the budget, cut hours and staff, and is probably going to reduce open hours and days for the library branches, if not close some of them. She's also removed 20% of the library's books, admittedly old books, but some were parts of popular series. Others were merely purchased and hadn't been borrowed in five years. A library is a collection of books, kept in order by staff. That's what a library is.
One of the staffers quit within a week of the new librarian taking over. A man was hired to replace her, the first that had worked in the branch in 10 years. The library mostly hires women. Most of the women are married, but there is such a thing as a Beard, a spouse to hide your proclivities. That goes for Lesbians just like Gays. The man hired was fired a week or two ago after increasing frustration caused him to make a mistake at work. Summary termination is not standard in county operations. Everybody gets a hearing and he didn't. This is another sign of egomania in the new librarian, and supporting evidence for Lesbian. Only lesbians try that kind of hulk-shit. Its unprofessional.
Two other staff have also quit. One was the Children's Librarian. She tried, really tried, but she's scared of men, accused me of hitting on her when I was being friendly and helping with her books so I avoided her and her books piled up. I'm one of TWO volunteers that comes in on Saturday, a popular day for all the parents too busy to come in during the week. The Children's librarian is an MLIS, and thus at least $30/hr, probably more. Letting her go and then not replacing her means other librarians on staff will have to do her job. I checked the website and the county has not advertised replacements for any of the positions lost. They've had weeks. The jobs should have been posted. Nada. That means these are staff cuts.
The final employee who left came back the following week and signed up as a volunteer, which she used to do prior to being paid as a library assistant. I have worked with her in that year and she's very nice. It really says something when someone would rather work for free and completely avoid the hostile manager bitch, now forced to be polite to the 80 regular volunteers she'd lose her job if she offends. This must be hell for black lesbians. They're used to throwing their weight around and playing the race card. But Blacks number in the teens, total population, in this county. I think more have moved here so they might be 100 people now, but still they're 1%, and insisting the white man is keeping them down is not a safe card to play.
The lady who quit and came back is going to listen to audiobooks, like I do, and my boss has started too. It really does make things enjoyable when working rote dull jobs. I don't think this lesbian boss is going to last long. The staff was already cut to the bone. Closing hours in the library will piss off the public, who will complain to the supervisors, who obviously hired this harridan despite poor personal skills, and I've already seen three librarians come and go.
Some of what she's doing seems to work.
She works the front desk with the staff.
She is personally doing the weeding and shelf moving project rather than assigning it. That's good.
Removing help staff from the computer center is a good idea. I'd cut the time they're allowed to use them, or charge money for access is totally justified since they can't hang onto a staffer in that job. Its three jobs, is why. Manning the help desk is an IT job, not a library job. Teaching technology classes is a teaching job, which should have a teachers pay and apply through the teacher's union or send them to the community center classes at the college in Grass Valley. Duh! The library mission is not to teach classes. It is not in the Mission Statement. Neither is housing the homeless. There's a community center for that.
As for the other branches, that's more of the county librarian's job to figure out. If it were me, I'd close down the Grass Valley library's hours to just 2:30-5:00 PM after the local school closes for the day, so the drunks don't wander in, and post a guard with a taser and pepper spray to keep them out. Short of closing the bar across the street that's the best you can do. The local police are lazy and indifferent to preventing crime. Death threats don't get them to show up for two hours (true!) and property crime bores them, according to the peace officer I spoke to when a panicked neighbor dropped a tree on my house, missing me by 25 feet but the neighbor by 4 inches. If it had wrecked the garage his house would have burned down because the trunk was in line for the gas main and the electric junction box: fuel and spark and no shutoff valve. I won't call them Law Enforcement because he didn't care about laws, only peace which is entirely different. That's a problem. This is a critical community failure.
The better and cheaper alternative to paying a cop to keep out the drunks and hobos is to move the library itself. The catholic church might be a better choice, or at the local Junior High, and share with that school library. The existing library is very small and in a bad location with no real parking, at the end of the main street. It doesn't get enough legitimate non-drug visitors to justify existing. At this point its a homeless shelter for drug addicts and drunks. I would rather leave than risk injury working there.
Grass Valley could put a library branch in the major shopping center near the intersection of 20 and 49. That's better than downtown. Big parking lot too. And available retail space. If one of those banks closes that's a good location since banks have good A/C and the nooks and crannies work well for bookshelves. And the drive thru can be used for the overnight book drop. I doubt this will happen, unless someone in charge can get funding or is willing to make the more aggressive changes like abandoning the downtown library location to become a museum like it ought to be.
The Penn Valley branch is apparently a single room shop in a strip mall next to a supermarket outside a housing development called Lake Wildwood. It's tiny and everybody involved hates the place. They want to move it into the actual Town of Penn Valley, which is not incorporated so has no funding and no building. Its population is also small and spread out, with half its population being at Lake Wildwood and the other half in the various boonies and ranches in the area. A big parking lot is important because there's no "walk-ins". Wildwood might benefit from a kiosk in their own community center, and another kiosk in the business district in Penn Valley rather than its current location. I suspect they'll just close it entirely and the locals will all vote against further library funding since there won't be one anymore. Climbing 2000 feet of twisty roads to borrow and return books at the county library in Nevada City, 25 miles away, is probably irritating. Overdue fees will cause them to stop using the library entirely and vote against any funding requests. This is a failure.
You can't fix all the things wrong with this community. You can't fix the funding or the ignorance or the junkies and hobos who think the library is a great place to surf porn or use the bathroom to bathe in. It isn't nice. Its creepy. Its terrible for young mothers with young children trying to budget some kind of tolerable childhood for their kids in a community that keeps young families at the poverty line because most of the population thinks a Shiny New Nickel is enough wages, often literally. Dementia is a terrible thing. We're just a bit off of White Slavery here, and the Youth flee as fast as they can, right after graduating high school. The only ones who stay are the newest victims of the drug culture, and they DO practice white slavery and murder. The local hippies are either killers or victims or both, sometimes in short order. Its ugly and I'm close to fed up with this town and its horrible people.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Another Librarian Quits
My local library has problems. They're mainly financial ones, but not solely. The volunteers, like me, make it able to work, but the paid librarians have poor morale and the HR that hires new librarians is the worst I have ever dealt with. And that is saying something. One of the good librarians, only having worked there around a year now, gave notice. Her last day is next weekend. I feel bad because she was kind and cheerful and showed up and did her job consistently with a smile on her face. She helped the patrons and put up with eccentrics, the stinky, and I guess the new librarian was just the last straw. She is the third librarian to quit rather than continue to work with the new branch librarian. Three out of a dozen is really bad numbers. Three capable and hard working librarians, not losers or wasters. This is a bad thing. I feel sorry for all involved but I'm sure the HR department will insist that the new hire have a full AS degree and three years work experience, again, and they'll eventually get someone who meets those criteria, then has to work with the new librarian, and will quit a few months after starting. Even with the terrible job market here, people would still rather quit than deal with the local library situation. Morale and work conditions are just that bad. This is tragic.
I could apply for her job, but I don't have the work experience and two of the problem staff members have already said they despise me (these are the anti-male chauvinists with professionalism problems) so I think I'll not bother. Besides, with the sort of rumors drifting out about the new librarian she'd probably schedule me to work at the same time as my internship just to prevent me finishing my AS degree. I have run into that kind of person before. They are Sadists. I don't want to play along, thanks very much.
Meanwhile, with my drive down the mountain to Marysville I work with a completely different environment and far more stable and less eccentric people. The environment is happy, the patrons are reasonable, and people come into the library to get books, not run drug sales operations. Its a huge difference and worth the drive, which at this point I find very meditative. Nobody has hit my car in the parking lot, and my pass continues to work.
When I finish my degree I am going to look for work down there, not up here. It is weird, but that's one of those things. Even the military brats are better behaved than the junkies up the mountain where I live. I am baffled by this, but whatever. It is better to move on than to struggle with a failing design. Even my car is happier with the drive.
I could apply for her job, but I don't have the work experience and two of the problem staff members have already said they despise me (these are the anti-male chauvinists with professionalism problems) so I think I'll not bother. Besides, with the sort of rumors drifting out about the new librarian she'd probably schedule me to work at the same time as my internship just to prevent me finishing my AS degree. I have run into that kind of person before. They are Sadists. I don't want to play along, thanks very much.
Meanwhile, with my drive down the mountain to Marysville I work with a completely different environment and far more stable and less eccentric people. The environment is happy, the patrons are reasonable, and people come into the library to get books, not run drug sales operations. Its a huge difference and worth the drive, which at this point I find very meditative. Nobody has hit my car in the parking lot, and my pass continues to work.
When I finish my degree I am going to look for work down there, not up here. It is weird, but that's one of those things. Even the military brats are better behaved than the junkies up the mountain where I live. I am baffled by this, but whatever. It is better to move on than to struggle with a failing design. Even my car is happier with the drive.
Friday, January 8, 2016
Graduate School Blog and Local Politics
It seems I will need to make this blog official for my library school. I have a fair bit of experience so I will include some local topics which are driving libraries to explore those topics in their collections, from periodicals and books to self-help. Patrons are interested, but the politics and budgeting are complex.
My community is rocked by serious illegal and borderline legal activities of squatters growing dope, often on public land, getting their information from the library where I volunteer. What they are doing is illegal, or sometimes barely legal with special permits. The sheriff has gotten involved with the DEA and CAMP inspecting operations for violations, as there's a legal limit to the number of plants allowed for the few legal growing operations. Many are growing more plants than their permit allows, and they move them elsewhere when they get caught. The local growers use drones to spy on neighbors fields to attack in force and steal their crops, leading to quiet but nasty wars between operations. As this is a rural county, sometimes people just "disappear", meaning they are murdered and it might not go reported, something I'm not privy to other than hearing the gunfire.
Furthermore, the growers are mostly squatters so few of them pay taxes. They visit the library for books on growing tips, soil fertility, processing dope, and use the research computers to organize dope sales on Facebook or other social media sites, using email and black market codes on their blogs to arrange sales very much illegally. Legal marijuana does not involve this, so what they are doing is illegal, and worth investigating if you were in law enforcement.
This is awkward for the library staff because their facilities are supposed to protect intellectual freedom but are instead being used to assist in drug activities. The library funding is at risk if there are arrests over this, or if the DEA starts monitoring activity at the library. My suggestion to stop this is to block SSL and HTTPS support on every browser so they can't use encrypted logins to websites and thus the computer will tell them every time they try they could be snooped. This is not exactly subtle, yet gets the point across while stopping the drug trade in a public building meant for education and self improvement rather than narcotics trafficking. It's also cheaper to apply this IT solution than paying a uniformed officer to stand in the computer lab to glare at them.
How is this fair to put onto a librarian, by the way? I have no training in drug addiction or mental health assessment or treatment, yet far too many patrons and library managers consider that a library staffer's job. Nope: a world of nope. Seeing this is another reason I'm headed towards Academic Libraries for my future. The homeless are the mentally ill, and I don't have training for that. Not my job, thanks very much.
The squatters and growers also use library books to learn how to turn low quality dope into honey (hash) oil using butane and an open flame, a process which often causes serious oil fires, the kind that burn down buildings and spread beyond. Why does the library have books about this? Honey oil production has been directly tied by arson investigations into the initial start of incredibly large fires like the Valley Fire in Lake County, burning down 500 homes. Honey oil was also tied to the Lowell Fire near Alta north of I-80 last year, also tied to dope growers. Friends of mine had to evacuate their home because the fire was surging towards them. There have been a number of house and apartment fires tied to honey oil production. The Buttes Fire was tied to a dope grower arsonist. Dope growers are a threat to the public health and assisting them violates a number of laws. It is also an ethical consideration. If you help a criminal commit a crime, you are an accessory to that crime. So is the book you hand them on making honey oil making you an accessory to arson as well as narcotics? Please think about that. This is an ethical consideration.
Where do we fit between the ethical choice of freedom of information or obeying the law to protect yourself and your library from retaliation by state and federal agencies enforcing the law to shut down illegal dope growing? The local library has already had its budget cut when the housing bubble busted. They were declined a bigger budget after spending lots of money buying computers through a Federal program that provided no funds to maintain them or babysit them after the fact, a point that is costing the library around $160K a year in staff, and those computers are mostly used by squatters and dope growers, not tax payers, since the locals have their own computers and smartphones. The smart answer to this waste is to close down the computer center and save the $160K, shifting that back into reopening the Reference Desk (currently closed for the computer center staffing costs).
Assisting dope growers and failing to spend the budget on appropriate books for the public good is a bad move, and likely to generate anger and further cuts to the library, possibly resulting in the firing of the current county librarian. Dope proponents are aiding illegal activities that harm the community directly. Should these librarians be punished or do they think helping this squatter community is helping the community at large, and themselves indirectly since the squatters walk in the door, thus are "counted" as visitors to justify open hours for the library? Isn't that morally wrong? Where is the ethical answer? Where is the financial answer? How do you defend the library in these circumstances? This is an ethical conundrum that has been itching at me for the last two years.
There's a downside to this, beyond the fires. Read the history of Kashmir and see the next step and what it did to them. "Frightening" is the word. When dope prices fell in Kashmir after a road allowed trucks through their pass, they started growing opium for a higher value crop. This brought in terrorists and they enslaved the population. That could happen here, thanks to lax border controls and the influence of the Mexican drug cartels in domestic drug trafficking. Full legalization of Marijuana would crash the price, and production shifted to less expensive regions with cheaper water, such as the lowlands and rice fields near Marysville and Yuba City, or the highlands on the Modoc Plateau, now getting their water again since the drought ended. The social consequences locally would be terrible. The small gardens cling to poor soil in remote locations that are expensive to look after and have low yield per acre. They can't make it work economically if they try to compete with mechanization and huge fields. They would have to switch crops to something that pays more. Desperate people do desperate things, and poppies grow here quite well. I worry that the locals will switch to that if Jefferson state becomes real.
These are rural counties, dependent on transportation and agriculture for most of their jobs. The drought killed off most of the agriculture, the coast was banned harvesting redwood trees and their salmon were killed by the California Aqueduct, salmon fishing being the foremost paying job along the northern California coast from SF north to the Columbia River. North of the Oregon border there are still salmon, but South of it salmon fry come from the Sacramento river delta. These were mostly killed off by the water pump near Tracy which pumps drinking water out of the river system and over to the South Bay Area and also to the San Joaquin valley and Los Angeles via the California aqueduct system. The cause and effect have been known since 1981, but LA needs the water and does not care about the lives of people far away. Jefferson state wants to charge for the water to pay for investment LA will not allow via the state legislature in Sacramento, thus the flag "double crossed by Sacramento".
My community is rocked by serious illegal and borderline legal activities of squatters growing dope, often on public land, getting their information from the library where I volunteer. What they are doing is illegal, or sometimes barely legal with special permits. The sheriff has gotten involved with the DEA and CAMP inspecting operations for violations, as there's a legal limit to the number of plants allowed for the few legal growing operations. Many are growing more plants than their permit allows, and they move them elsewhere when they get caught. The local growers use drones to spy on neighbors fields to attack in force and steal their crops, leading to quiet but nasty wars between operations. As this is a rural county, sometimes people just "disappear", meaning they are murdered and it might not go reported, something I'm not privy to other than hearing the gunfire.
Furthermore, the growers are mostly squatters so few of them pay taxes. They visit the library for books on growing tips, soil fertility, processing dope, and use the research computers to organize dope sales on Facebook or other social media sites, using email and black market codes on their blogs to arrange sales very much illegally. Legal marijuana does not involve this, so what they are doing is illegal, and worth investigating if you were in law enforcement.
This is awkward for the library staff because their facilities are supposed to protect intellectual freedom but are instead being used to assist in drug activities. The library funding is at risk if there are arrests over this, or if the DEA starts monitoring activity at the library. My suggestion to stop this is to block SSL and HTTPS support on every browser so they can't use encrypted logins to websites and thus the computer will tell them every time they try they could be snooped. This is not exactly subtle, yet gets the point across while stopping the drug trade in a public building meant for education and self improvement rather than narcotics trafficking. It's also cheaper to apply this IT solution than paying a uniformed officer to stand in the computer lab to glare at them.
How is this fair to put onto a librarian, by the way? I have no training in drug addiction or mental health assessment or treatment, yet far too many patrons and library managers consider that a library staffer's job. Nope: a world of nope. Seeing this is another reason I'm headed towards Academic Libraries for my future. The homeless are the mentally ill, and I don't have training for that. Not my job, thanks very much.
The squatters and growers also use library books to learn how to turn low quality dope into honey (hash) oil using butane and an open flame, a process which often causes serious oil fires, the kind that burn down buildings and spread beyond. Why does the library have books about this? Honey oil production has been directly tied by arson investigations into the initial start of incredibly large fires like the Valley Fire in Lake County, burning down 500 homes. Honey oil was also tied to the Lowell Fire near Alta north of I-80 last year, also tied to dope growers. Friends of mine had to evacuate their home because the fire was surging towards them. There have been a number of house and apartment fires tied to honey oil production. The Buttes Fire was tied to a dope grower arsonist. Dope growers are a threat to the public health and assisting them violates a number of laws. It is also an ethical consideration. If you help a criminal commit a crime, you are an accessory to that crime. So is the book you hand them on making honey oil making you an accessory to arson as well as narcotics? Please think about that. This is an ethical consideration.
Where do we fit between the ethical choice of freedom of information or obeying the law to protect yourself and your library from retaliation by state and federal agencies enforcing the law to shut down illegal dope growing? The local library has already had its budget cut when the housing bubble busted. They were declined a bigger budget after spending lots of money buying computers through a Federal program that provided no funds to maintain them or babysit them after the fact, a point that is costing the library around $160K a year in staff, and those computers are mostly used by squatters and dope growers, not tax payers, since the locals have their own computers and smartphones. The smart answer to this waste is to close down the computer center and save the $160K, shifting that back into reopening the Reference Desk (currently closed for the computer center staffing costs).
Assisting dope growers and failing to spend the budget on appropriate books for the public good is a bad move, and likely to generate anger and further cuts to the library, possibly resulting in the firing of the current county librarian. Dope proponents are aiding illegal activities that harm the community directly. Should these librarians be punished or do they think helping this squatter community is helping the community at large, and themselves indirectly since the squatters walk in the door, thus are "counted" as visitors to justify open hours for the library? Isn't that morally wrong? Where is the ethical answer? Where is the financial answer? How do you defend the library in these circumstances? This is an ethical conundrum that has been itching at me for the last two years.
There's a downside to this, beyond the fires. Read the history of Kashmir and see the next step and what it did to them. "Frightening" is the word. When dope prices fell in Kashmir after a road allowed trucks through their pass, they started growing opium for a higher value crop. This brought in terrorists and they enslaved the population. That could happen here, thanks to lax border controls and the influence of the Mexican drug cartels in domestic drug trafficking. Full legalization of Marijuana would crash the price, and production shifted to less expensive regions with cheaper water, such as the lowlands and rice fields near Marysville and Yuba City, or the highlands on the Modoc Plateau, now getting their water again since the drought ended. The social consequences locally would be terrible. The small gardens cling to poor soil in remote locations that are expensive to look after and have low yield per acre. They can't make it work economically if they try to compete with mechanization and huge fields. They would have to switch crops to something that pays more. Desperate people do desperate things, and poppies grow here quite well. I worry that the locals will switch to that if Jefferson state becomes real.
Jefferson state is another tricky situation with local political consequences impacting the libraries. Northern state counties feel unsupported during the years of the drought. They've got a major drug problem with methamphetamine, and associated violence and unwanted teen pregnancy as well as serious unemployment. Many of their local drug growers want full legalization, and have signed the petitions to support Jefferson State for that specific reason.
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| Jefferson State fantasy map, with counties on both sides of the California-Oregon border. |
All politics are local and recruiters for the Jefferson state have clipboards at the local grocery store parking lots. They ambush people loading up groceries and try to get them to sign the petitions to divide California. They have support from boards of supervisors from Yuba and Sutter Counties, and some support from Placer and El Dorado and Yolo, stranding Sacramento County in the middle, along with Nevada County where I live, since most of the population here is retired conservatives, many of them Air Force veterans from the nearby Beale Air Force Base. They don't have support here. That there is no legal mechanism for a write-in campaign to divide the state doesn't seem to matter to these determined and ambitious men with big plans. Either they plan to charge too much for the water in the two huge reservoirs (Shasta and Oroville) or they haven't done the math on what it costs to run a modern state economy and public services.
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| Shasta Dam and reservoir contains nearly half the state's water supply. |
Understanding your patrons means you get to ponder these active political issues and worry about the ethical considerations, direct consequences of which can be actual disaster or crime. As public employees, what we do at our libraries matters in a very real way.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Grownup College
So far, my education in library science has largely been reading documents and opinions on ethics and methods and thinking about things certain ways, rather than deeply informational. Much of the ALA.org documents were clearly written by well-meaning hippies. As you may know, I was raised around hippies and despise them intensely because they are hypocrites and parasites on their environment, every bit as awful as Yuppies. The ALA.org statements should be read out loud with a breathy lisping female pot-head hippie voice to truly understand what I am talking about. Then you pause and surge as you read, as if the hippie had just finished reading a passage from one of those bodice rippers from the 19th century. Hilariously outlandishly wrong. Its not that the teachers at Cuesta are wrong about things in Library Science, per se, but it would be more helpful not to setup strange expectations with the students. Real life is going to disappoint them terribly.
I am starting my Masters degree, at San Jose State University and its a different environment. I can already tell the books weren't published to exploit student's bank accounts. They are current and well written. I am impressed so far. I may actually read these books. I aced my classes at questa merely refrencing those books most of the time, rather than reading them entirely. I can detect BS most of the time, and a lot of what was in them was BS. SJSU's books were better written, with some attempt at reasoning rather than accretion of essays into a binding. We'll see, but it is off to a good start.
Cuesta's courses are a good start for a high school student level education requirement, and is probably perfectly adequate to do most of the tasks in a library, even if its really skimpy on details like Cataloging or work performance.
The Supervisor class was a major downer, since there was little time spent on budgeting and there seriously needs to be. Money defines what is possible in a library, and telling kids/students/library techs that there's this or that magic beans program that suddenly enables the blind to see or cures ignorance? Nope. Programs are the BANE of libraries. They always cost lots of money and often special training and there's rarely funding for them. Its programs that strip away money from BOOKS, which are the entire point of a public library. Spend your money on books. Not programs. As soon as the programs thing happens to a public library, it goes sour, and like a radio station, that sort of rot poisons the whole staff with despair. And since the manager of the library is often the instigator of the poison-program? Its the manager responsible, which causes self destructive behavior in the staff, reduced efficiency, and paranoia over firing. People in libraries end up working "just barely enough" rather than their usual efficiency before the rot set in, and the result is terrible bad things. And when you stop serving the community and get wrapped up with local govt politics? You are screwed.
I have seen this several times in various libraries in the Sacramento and Gold Country areas. Rotten, run by rotters who see parasitical and destructive programs as their one scam to get their resume souped-up and get them a job somewhere better. Bad programs are a catapault over the wall to freedom. Locals here think the Midwest, which pays double for librarians, is the holy grail for their careers. And maybe it is. I don't know yet. I do know that I love the West, and while hippies stink of dope and a lack of soap, they also read. So I need to serve their interests too, and while my local library is imploding socially and financially, they get enough books to remain viable thanks to the Friends of the Library, who donates the books for about half the collection, keeping the book budget out of the hands of the self destructive librarians running the library into the ground for their ambitions and egos, hoping to escape from a town that's been kind to them. Sigh. There's been four or five head librarians that bailed out of this county after nearly bankrupting it with expensive programs that looked good on paper.
I have long been someone who cared about ethics and reputation and critical thinking. I think I can spot selfishness in management. I've seen this before, after all. The Bay Area is 100% evil selfish people, after all. Any goodness you think you see in the Bay Area is just someone who is fooling you. Remember that.
The other bane in an industry is staffers who brag of their mobility. Turnover rates are important, because they teach you which libraries have serious management or structural problems. When staffers quit after a few months, this is their vote of no confidence. They really ought to teach that at Cuesta, since recognizing you're bathing in a toxic pool (library mismanaged) is a crucial life skill. You should not stay in such places, and keeping an emergency fund to LEAVE, and staying active in job offers down the line is very important. In my experience, communities don't really notice who their librarians are. You're a person behind the desk, like any clerk. You don't matter. There's no connection or gratitude from the community. Sure, some librarians embrace programs at their own expense to make a connection and feed a sort of masochism, which explains teachers really well, but even loved teachers become anxious to jump ship? That's a big warning sign. The local high school librarian said she's ready to go elsewhere any time. Ready to be poached. When librarians are like swingers there's a real problem in the industry.
The most important thing I learned at Cuesta is to listen more, and to not express my opinions. For one thing, my opinions may be misinformed, ignorant. If you don't have all the facts you're wrong. Ignorant ranting is pointless ego. It is far more useful to get the facts and learn and watch what others do and say. That is often more entertaining, as well. When wishful-thinking hippies start to blather about some ALA.org tripe, and get themselves fired for breaking various laws, that is the sort of karma you can giggle over. And probably should. In Library Science, you have no excuse not to get the facts, and I'm a much better researcher now than I was before, when I started blogging seriously in 2013 when my mother was dying.
I plan to listen carefully, to remember Dana's Rule (still wish I could thank her in a personal and meaningful way she would appreciate, such as curing her inherited kidney failure), and continue to write essays that match the requirement specified. It is easy to get distracted on side-topics related to the center of the issue, but Masters school is for grown ups. I am not some damn floppy hippy. I am a cynical and observant adult.
I am starting my Masters degree, at San Jose State University and its a different environment. I can already tell the books weren't published to exploit student's bank accounts. They are current and well written. I am impressed so far. I may actually read these books. I aced my classes at questa merely refrencing those books most of the time, rather than reading them entirely. I can detect BS most of the time, and a lot of what was in them was BS. SJSU's books were better written, with some attempt at reasoning rather than accretion of essays into a binding. We'll see, but it is off to a good start.
Cuesta's courses are a good start for a high school student level education requirement, and is probably perfectly adequate to do most of the tasks in a library, even if its really skimpy on details like Cataloging or work performance.
The Supervisor class was a major downer, since there was little time spent on budgeting and there seriously needs to be. Money defines what is possible in a library, and telling kids/students/library techs that there's this or that magic beans program that suddenly enables the blind to see or cures ignorance? Nope. Programs are the BANE of libraries. They always cost lots of money and often special training and there's rarely funding for them. Its programs that strip away money from BOOKS, which are the entire point of a public library. Spend your money on books. Not programs. As soon as the programs thing happens to a public library, it goes sour, and like a radio station, that sort of rot poisons the whole staff with despair. And since the manager of the library is often the instigator of the poison-program? Its the manager responsible, which causes self destructive behavior in the staff, reduced efficiency, and paranoia over firing. People in libraries end up working "just barely enough" rather than their usual efficiency before the rot set in, and the result is terrible bad things. And when you stop serving the community and get wrapped up with local govt politics? You are screwed.
I have seen this several times in various libraries in the Sacramento and Gold Country areas. Rotten, run by rotters who see parasitical and destructive programs as their one scam to get their resume souped-up and get them a job somewhere better. Bad programs are a catapault over the wall to freedom. Locals here think the Midwest, which pays double for librarians, is the holy grail for their careers. And maybe it is. I don't know yet. I do know that I love the West, and while hippies stink of dope and a lack of soap, they also read. So I need to serve their interests too, and while my local library is imploding socially and financially, they get enough books to remain viable thanks to the Friends of the Library, who donates the books for about half the collection, keeping the book budget out of the hands of the self destructive librarians running the library into the ground for their ambitions and egos, hoping to escape from a town that's been kind to them. Sigh. There's been four or five head librarians that bailed out of this county after nearly bankrupting it with expensive programs that looked good on paper.
I have long been someone who cared about ethics and reputation and critical thinking. I think I can spot selfishness in management. I've seen this before, after all. The Bay Area is 100% evil selfish people, after all. Any goodness you think you see in the Bay Area is just someone who is fooling you. Remember that.
The other bane in an industry is staffers who brag of their mobility. Turnover rates are important, because they teach you which libraries have serious management or structural problems. When staffers quit after a few months, this is their vote of no confidence. They really ought to teach that at Cuesta, since recognizing you're bathing in a toxic pool (library mismanaged) is a crucial life skill. You should not stay in such places, and keeping an emergency fund to LEAVE, and staying active in job offers down the line is very important. In my experience, communities don't really notice who their librarians are. You're a person behind the desk, like any clerk. You don't matter. There's no connection or gratitude from the community. Sure, some librarians embrace programs at their own expense to make a connection and feed a sort of masochism, which explains teachers really well, but even loved teachers become anxious to jump ship? That's a big warning sign. The local high school librarian said she's ready to go elsewhere any time. Ready to be poached. When librarians are like swingers there's a real problem in the industry.
The most important thing I learned at Cuesta is to listen more, and to not express my opinions. For one thing, my opinions may be misinformed, ignorant. If you don't have all the facts you're wrong. Ignorant ranting is pointless ego. It is far more useful to get the facts and learn and watch what others do and say. That is often more entertaining, as well. When wishful-thinking hippies start to blather about some ALA.org tripe, and get themselves fired for breaking various laws, that is the sort of karma you can giggle over. And probably should. In Library Science, you have no excuse not to get the facts, and I'm a much better researcher now than I was before, when I started blogging seriously in 2013 when my mother was dying.
I plan to listen carefully, to remember Dana's Rule (still wish I could thank her in a personal and meaningful way she would appreciate, such as curing her inherited kidney failure), and continue to write essays that match the requirement specified. It is easy to get distracted on side-topics related to the center of the issue, but Masters school is for grown ups. I am not some damn floppy hippy. I am a cynical and observant adult.
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