My latest toy: PULP-O-MIZER

 

Created with PULP-O-MIZER

Warmth

It doesn't matter how dark times seem, human beings try their stubborn best to signal to each other that there are twinklings of hope and joy...and that there is always a warm light on in the kitchen.

Blessings,
Mike Shell

Resilience

Yes, it's been almost two months since I last posted.

That's because since then, as part of Jacksonville Public Library's budget-driven staff reduction and reorganization, I have been reassigned to be Library Training Coordinator.

[Insert large, shocked smiley here.]

=8-O

Given that the Library lost dozens of staff to demotions and layoffs and had to redistribute the remaining staff throughout support services and the 21 branches...and then redistributed some more when we lost more staff to retirements and resignations....

...I was initially joking that my new job was to train people how to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.

However, here is what I wrote when I was interviewed for the JPL Staff Profile for November:

Q: Why is training important to JPL staff right now?

A: Our extended JPL family has experienced several years of escalating challenge and uncertainty because of City budget cuts, staff losses, and reorganizations.

I’ve always been impressed by the readiness of JPL staff to support and back each other up, and by the resilience with which we adjust to difficult changes. Even so, I imagine that we all feel like “displaced persons” at present, survivors of a crisis which has lost us friends and broken up strong, supportive team relationships.

When most of us went through the Destination: LEADERSHIP program a few years ago, we discovered how powerful it could be to step up as individuals, to teach and coach each other, and to offer our insights and guidance to JPL.

I want JPL Training to be a vehicle for recovering the enthusiasm and sense of competency which many of us grew into at that time.

There are obviously many practical, hands-on skills which we need to learn or relearn in our new assignments.

However, the heart of what we need to do is to train each other as we go forward, to call up that sense of community and of commitment which has always enabled us to share what we know with each other—just as we do with our public customers.

Lifting each other up is what public library is about.

So far, it seems that my colleagues across the Library system are responding with the resilience I've come to expect from them. I congratulate all of them.

Library is not just a job and it's certainly not a business.

It is a calling.

Blessings,
Mike

Librarian Avengers

Erica Firment still publishes Librarian Avengers, which she began in 1997—about 50 years ago in Internet time, as she says.

That's when Erica wrote an essay called Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian and created the website. Terry Moore gave her permission to use this image of Katchoo from his graphic novel, Strangers in Paradise. (Militant library types may wish to get "Look It Up!" shirts from CafePress.)

Here's how Erica's essay begins:

Ok, sure. We’ve all got our little preconceived notions about who librarians are and what they do.

Many people think of librarians as diminutive civil servants, scuttling about “Sssh-ing” people and stamping things. Well, think again buster.

Read it!

Randall Munroe's xkcd: "Tech Support Cheat Sheet"

---

What does XKCD stand for?

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

Black border

Talking with my library colleagues. Since the economic crash of 2007-08, we in the public libraries have increasingly been dealing with needy customers, unemployed, homeless, etc., who can no longer get government help at any level except through the Internet and email. The public library is the ONLY walk-in, face-to-face social service agency left. And now we are being dismantled. As we learned last Thursday, of the 150 City employees being demoted or laid off for Fiscal Year 2012-13, 75 are in Jacksonville Public Library. Several of the "survivors" have already announced retirement by the end of the fiscal year. A good number of the bright younger folks who were demoted—some after having promoted within just the past few years into key positions—are looking for jobs elsewhere. This Friday we will find out how the rest of us "civil servants" are being reshuffled among our different locations. Across our nation, our governments seem not to understand or to care that breaking up long-established teams of skilled human service colleagues is far more expensive, in terms of the blow to productivity, corporate memory, morale and community relationships, than the payroll and benefits dollars they think their personnel cuts will save. They do not seem to understand or to care how severely these cuts will hit the most vulnerable members of the community (see Digital Refugees), those who depend upon public libraries as their sole access to government services and employment resources, which have been pulled back across the "Internet moat" into the stronghold of the e-technology privileged. Last public service agency standing...but for how long?

Mike Keefe: Consumer Electronics Show