What Do Public Library Workers Do? (2011) | Hacker News Reader

What Do Public Library Workers Do? (2011)

laurensmith.wordpress.com

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When I was teaching at Malmö University, one of the professors once shared that he had noticed one constant across all universities he had attended: on average, the librarians are the most helpful, cooperative members of supporting staff, whereas IT people are the most antagonistic, least helpful people. With just one year of working experience there I already knew exactly what he meant.

What we were puzzled by is what causes the difference. One reason could be some kind of selection bias for the kind of work. Another could be that in both cases the "base person" is nice in principle and that it's the work that brings out these personality differences. In that case it would be nice if one could transport "environmental fixes" from the library work floor to IT somehow.

IT support can be a thankless job. People only need you when something goes wrong, which means you can get a lot of unpleasant people. It also doesn't help that non-functioning technology is often amongst the biggest of many peoples pet peeves, so they already start out from an impatient state.

I can't see the same being quite as true for librarians as people aren't starting from a state where something that should be working isn't.

I used to work in IT support before becoming a librarian and my experience confirms this. Most (but not all, there were many pleasant people who called the IT desk) were in a sour mood when they called, making it hard to keep my own sunny disposition. When people come to a library desk, they're excited about any help they receive.

Extending your second paragraph, when people interact with the IT desk, they're trying to go from a bad state up to their base state. When people interact with a library desk, they're trying to go from a base state up to anything above that.

I can see what you mean, we ( = professor an I speculating) thought that would be factor. OTOH, people go to the doctor only when they're sick, which is also a bad state, but being a doctor isn't considered a thankless job whereas IT is.

Just speculating here, but I think it has to do with how a lot of people seem to look down on IT, and tend to blame them for their problems. With doctors, the people tend to look up to them, and don't blame them for their illnesses[0].

> when they called

I'm pretty sure this makes an enormous difference as well, btw, compared to face-to-face communication.

So we got three examples of service work, where the interaction with the customer completely shapes the experience for everyone involved.

[0] ignoring malpractice cases and such, but that's after treatment, not before.

IT in many libraries is heavily underinvested, both in pay and infrastructure. So, you have too few, average or below-average workers, annoyed with constant struggle with old software / hardware (plus standard IT support problems, like workers resetting their computers by turning the screen of and on again).

Woops, a disk in our 9-year-old array just died. Let me fill that form for financial director, and explain we really do need to buy a new one. Pray so that spare disk won't die in the meantime. "No, we cannot buy a cheaper one". What, new server? We just bought you a brand new expensive hard drive 6 months ago!

I know the struggle. Just make sure that everything is documented and let the other disk fail. Then go home. After a few of these dralas you are either fired or promoted to "we should listen to him"

All the public library librarians I know are amazing. All the university librarians I know are amazing.

For whatever reason though, all the secondary school librarians I ever interacted with (admittedly, a small sample) were the worst kind of petty bureaucrats, who seemed to revel in being deliberately unhelpful, usually for some kind of pedantic trivial reason.

Because of their clientele? They deal with double-talking rules-lawyers all day long. Develop a thick skin and zero tolerance, or they don't last long.

Richard Nixon was president when I last dealt with a secondary school librarian, but for what it is worth, I recall her as very pleasant. In junior high I was a library page, and though I no longer have any recollection of the paid staff, they must have been OK to work with, or I'd have quit or never started.

Can't confirm that - while my school librarians weren't exceptional in any sense, they certainly were not as bad as you describe.

I know I'm generalizing here, but this is another consideration:

Most people who go into IT do it because they enjoy working with technology. When they're working in IT, they want to work with computers, not people. Add in the common problem that techies often have a hard time understanding a non-techie's problem or explaining the solution to them ("You're telling me you don't know what a file browser is?"), and it the above observation becomes somewhat understandable. (Although not really excusable.)

Librarians, on the other hand, know from the outset that they will have to interact a lot with people - in fact, that's what most of their job is about. That's a whole different mindset to start a job with, and it will also attract people who work well with people.

(Having said all that, I have only had positive experiences with the IT support at out university - whenever I went to them, they have always been very friendly and helpful.)

To the other perceptive replies in this thread I can add that many US librarians, and especially public librarians, are attached to a set of service-oriented ethical considerations they associate with the work. It's enshrined by the American Library Association, and many consider it a mission.

My mother works as a library assistant. From conversations with her and her colleagues, and from what I gather applies nationwide, to add to that list: - dealing with reapplying for job every six months or so. - providing security support and lookout for councillors/MPs holding surgeries (this being particularly relevant post-Jo Cox). - dealing with a working environment that physically shrinks year on year, but still has the same amount of custom. - cutting staff numbers to one for smaller libraries means doing all the work on the list, just with zero support (again, custom still the same level)

On the flip side, these resources are used disproportionately by the poorest, so, y'know, screw em. Replace several cheap staff with a few expensive managers and some technology that isn't remotely as useful and off we go.

Yep. This comment at metafilter has been discussed here before, I think, but it's worth linking again:

http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-Dreamin#4183210

Thank you for linking this. The main article being discussed made me think "okay, so administrivia, book stuff, etc. Actually doesn't sound so bad". This link, however, made me realize how emotionally draining the library can be for everyone involved.

another fun fact: librarians make change. For example, librarian in Warsaw - 450$ a month. 520$ is somehow considered a "very good pay".

Society can be such a beautiful thing. But more and more it appears to be a beautiful thing destroying itself.

To be fair, when I was a kid, we didn't have internet. We only had library, and computer journals, the paper kind. Nowadays, for research papers, read arxiv. For news read hackernews. For learning stuff, Google, stack overflow. Fiction? Kindle app.

Unless you're poor. Then you don't have a computer.

That's amusing as I posted this article, I am homeless and I have a laptop, tablet and smartphone.

Yes, I spend my days at the library to get charge for my devices, free Wi-Fi and access to public PCs. But I am dirt poor and all my earned income comes via the internet.

/PSA

Out of curiosity, how do you earn your money via internet ? Do you make apps for people ?

I do freelance writing and I run a bunch of blogs.

What do you do for securing them?

A lot more poor people have a computer today than ever before. Nothing illustrates this better than seeing the homeless on their iPhones using the Starbucks wifi to access the Internet.

This is true, and a very, very good thing I think. But it's the prosaic stuff (how do I claim this? Where do I actually look for information? What information will help me? Etc) where having a real person sit and help you is incredibly important.

They do a lot of coding, too: http://code4lib.org/

Drupal's popular with some libraries, too: https://groups.drupal.org/libraries/resources

We clean up after the crap everyone leaves behind. And through it all, we try to help people and tea h them. We're forced to be janitors, curators, researchers, academics, negotiators, and entertainment all in one. It's thankless as hell.

And I wouldn't change one iota of it.

They've also been serious about privacy and security for longer than you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoia_Horn

I founded a non-profit that organizes learning circles for people to learn together. We used to focus on online circles, but found that we mainly reached people who were already fairly well educated. 18 months ago we switched to exclusively working with public libraries to host our learning circles, and we couldn't be happier with the results. We now see about 65% first time online learners, most are without a college degree, and even homeless people have joined. And working with the librarians has been awesome. Public libraries for the win!

Good job! Check this out and see if you want to add it to your toolbox for your homeless participants:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

They do a lot. Having a kid really enhanced my appreciation for libraries and librarians. They fill vital teaching roles, host enrichment programs, help with study groups and teach kids about research.

My local library system has stuff like maker events, guest sessions with 3D printers and all sorts of activities. It's an invaluable resource.

I wish more libraries would turn into hacker/maker spaces. :/

It's all about budget. My local library is in a relatively affluent town, so they've got kinda a startup space vibe they're trying to build, and obviously they've stepped up the computer lab offerings quite a bit. Another nice perk for the movie buffs among us, is that they buy 25+ copies of new movies, and checkouts are free. While the hold list means you'll wait on those titles a few months... I haven't paid to rent a movie going on ten years now.

I actually worked for four years at the library, and I absolutely appreciate the heck out of it.

Oh! I put this post together :)

Welcome to HN. :)

Thank you! :)

This appears to be another scalability vs human intervention argument that occurs commonly in public and private enterprises. I think much of this community favors the scalability side, but forgets that humans are available to provide better solutions in almost all areas that are currently available to computers.

Probably off-topic, but all I'm going to say is, if you are even slightly bit geeky, find and marry a Librarian. You won't be sorry[1]. IT minds, and Librarian minds are very compatible as both disciplines are all about the expansion of knowledge. The endless discussions on every topic are forever energising!

[1] Yes, I'm being subjective. YMMV of course, but we're over 18 years in, and still totally happy.

Hey, I know Lauren, I'll ask her to register in case anyone has questions.

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