Walking The Stacks or Why a Librarian Appears to Wander

Occassionally, I walk the whole area which I am in charge of. This is to make sure the books are neat, nothing is out of place and everything looks right. Sometimes I get the question why are you wandering through the stacks.

Mainly I pick up books which are left on top of other books, scraps of paper, hidden soda cans, and other minor garbage. Occassionally, I will find a few books tucked in the corners on forbidden subjects like sex or abortion. These get put back in the sorting room.

I take notes in my mind spot checking for which places need to be rearranged, shelf read or neatened by the library aides (it is impolitic to call them "pages" like they did in the old days). Occassionally, I'll find something odd. Maybe, one of the patrons (library customers) has decided the books look better if they are tilted sideways or pushed in four inches, or has decided to stack large amounts of books on the floor. This really is not predictable.

There is a recurring fantasy which I have heard from many people that they would like to run through the library and knock over all the bookshelves so all the books fell on the floor and the shelves tipped over like dominos. I heard that the gangs when they were really bad where I worked used to run through the library throwing books on the floor.

The teenagers sometimes like to hide in the stacks and talk to each other about forbidden things, or chase after each other when we are not looking.

Sometimes little kids like to run their hands along the shelves like they are running their hands along a metal fence pushing the books in. Books have a nice feel to them. But, this has to be discouraged.

Mostly things are in order where I work. I check to make sure all the stuff is put away behind the desk.

Then if time permits, I scan through the new books both fiction and nonfiction to see what has just come in. This often works better than searching on the computer when people come up to ask for new books. Customers are confused and often don't remember the exact title of a book which they are looking for. They remember the title was in Ebony, The New York Times, Military Times, or some magazine or other. Having a vague idea of the new stock is a good idea.

A lot of people think checking to see the order of books, or shelf reading should only be done by the library pages or shelvers. This works only if you check their work on occassion. It is very easy to transpose letters and make slight mistakes in order.

Also occassionally reading sections of books which are not in your assigned areas gives you a better idea of what is inside a large collection of books. I can picture the location of many of the books in my mind because I have seen and read the shelves closeup over the years.

We have two floors below us where I work. These are actually fairly well organized. It is a huge last copy repository for the system. There are a lot of very strange old books some of them dating from the 19th century. Just looking through the old books is very entertaining.

You get to learn about what books people value because we keep books by circulation. There are a lot of really weird things which keep their relevance, old circus books, tattoo books, books on the maritime trade, old railroad books, human freaks, woodcuts and a lot of really odd things.

Many people want to go downstairs to look at the items, but we only allow people to look at things in the stacks if they are accompanied by a librarian. We have a couple people who come in and ask to see the World War II books, many of the books we have were written close to that that time period. We usually go downstairs to get them for people.

If I have time, I will occassionally go look at the old science fiction and fantasy books in the stacks, there are a lot of the less popular titles by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as well as some of the classic science fiction or fantasy writers like Andre Norton, L. Sprage De Camp, and A.E. Van Vogt. It is interesting looking at these in their library bindings.

I couldn't think of what to write about exactly today, so I chose something a little more free form.

The Recruiter, The Competitive Intelligence Professional And The Librarian

Aynsworth Rand Spofford, Librarian of Congress, 1864-1897

For a while during the internet boom, I worked as a sourcer locating people for an internal recruiting department. There are some librarian positions at the larger recruitment agencies and outplacement services. At the outplacement companies they help executive locate companies and find information on companies they are applying to.

Internet Sourcer is a kind of specialist position, it is finding people on the internet to interview as hires. It can also include other things like examining company web sites, tracking certain kinds of news, looking at layoffs, finding sales leads, and identifying similar companies to the company you are working at.

At the company, I took the beginning, AIRS training-- Advanced Internet Recruting Strategies. http://www.airsdirectory.com/, What this really means is that I was trained in how to find people on the web. Recruiters look at web sites, forums, people databases, blogs, alumni associations, social networking sites and anywhere that people may gather on the internet. They often take the time to learn the more advanced commands in internet search engines like link, url, file type so they can find specific documents leading to resumes or people. They also use specialty people search engines http://www.zoominfo.com/ , a biographical database, http://people.yahoo.com/ an excellent people finder.

I also used many more web tools as a recruiter than as a librarian. I had the Alexa toolbar which I checked to see who used a certain site. I used the http://www.completeplanet.com/ deep web search engine, I had several tools on my desktop like http://www.webferret.com/
and http://www.copernic.com/


In addition, they extract information from web sites, phone numbers, titles and addresses using software like Black Widow Site Sucker, or Webmole email extractor. There are various trainers who show people how to find people on the web. Probably the most famous of these is http://www.jobmachine.net/ , Shally Steckerl. There are others as well.

This makes many of them more proficient in searching the web than many librarians who are mainly focused on searching for documents and basic information. In fact in most public libraries, librarians are discouraged from letting people use email, forums, or blogs because they consider it disruptive. Things like myspace.com and facebook.com are frowned upon. But, this is where people are going to now. Social networking sites are becoming very popular. There is even one to share personal libraries, http://www.librarything.com/ .

Things like http://www.linkedin.com/ are an incredible opportunity for people who find people as their business on the web.

Librarians in the public setting and in many cases in the corporate setting have fallen very far behind the curve in using the internet to find information. They are now just getting into blogs and other social networking software. Recruiters have been there from the beginning because they are looking for people.

The other group which is using the web much more extensively than librarians in many cases are the competitive intelligence professionals. People like David Carpe use the internet as a source for finding information about competitors companies. http://www.researchzilla.com/ is one of David Carpe's websites. They also spend a lot of time finding people to interview so they can find out what is really happening inside a company. The web is a giant interconnected group of people that are writing about themselves, their interests, the places they are working at, the places they are working for, and just about anything else under the sun.

Librarians are not connected into the people part of the web. The web is not static, it is not the printed page. It changes dynamically. This is a nice little diagram of what social networking is:
http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html . People share websites in clusters. There is usually a central authoritative website which most people are linked to or discuss. The same goes for newsgroups. There are usually one or two people who have the most clout in a forum or newsgroup. Finding these people often identifies who you can ask where certain information is.

Librarians should take the time to learn more about how the internet works, especially the people focused part which is being ignored for the most part.

A lot of the strategies I have used to promote this site have come from my brief experience as a sourcer. I have searched newsgroups to find the proper group to post to, I have searched forums to identify where to drop links, I have looked at social networking sites to see where I can post comments or get widgets.

Anyways, this is part of my two cents for the day.

I have learned quite a bit trying to promote this web site. It has been a very interesting experience so far.
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Let me get back to what I am focusing on books. I am thinking about bookselves right now and the proper way to shelve books in a bookstore or library.

Ideally when books are placed on the shelf, all the spine labels should be visible as well as writing on the spine, they should be hal an inch in from the edge of the bookshelf. The books should not be packed too tightly together because it breaks the spine of the book and causes it to split in half.

There should be a bookend on each shelf with approximately 3-5 inches of space at the end of the shelves. Shelves should be dusted regularly.

No books should be laid on top of other books. This can be dangerous because this leads to a chance for the books to fall off the shelf and hit somebody. Larger books can be dangerous especially if they fall and hit someone in the head or foot.

Ideally bookshelves should not be too deep and should include a bracket in back to prevent the books from falling behind other books.

I've always found steel case bookshelves to be the best. Wood may look nice but it is not very practical in some cases.

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I am further into A Feast for Crows. I am on about page 60.