Read On! Bullet Journals

Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

Bullet journaling, habit tracking, and life planning are all terms for the popular phenomena of using good old fashioned pen and paper to keep track of your life. Whatever you call it or whatever kind of vessel you use, designing templates to track various aspects of our lives is a big deal right now.

I did a quick survey of the staff working at the time of this writing and all of seven of us use some sort of analog system to record our daily lives. We use our various journals and planners to track a wide array of things – to do lists, car maintenance, habits to be formed, daily moods, bills paid, books read, and more.

Most of us have special pens we use in our notebooks or planners and have chosen to decorate the pages where we track the various things we want to record before we start using them. Some of us like to use stickers, others draw freehand or with stencils. All of us have taken time to think about what we’re tracking and devote a space for those things in our journals or planners.

I struggle with the difficulty of translating a vision of art onto paper, so my planner is not very pretty. I was feeling a little glum about that fact this morning, but then I remembered that the library has a collection of scrapbooking tools. It’s not an extensive collection, but if you’re looking for a free way to spruce up your planner or bullet journal (or do some actual scrapbooking), we’ve got fun stamps, fancy edge scissors, and paper punches that you can check out or use in the library. I’m excited to use some of the paper punches to make my own stencils.

If you’re interested in starting your own bullet journal or habit tracker, keep an eye out in the next few months for a workshop on this very topic. Our adult classes and events are the second Thursday of every month at 7 PM.

Read On! The Five Laws

In 1931, Dr. S. R. Ranganathan proposed the Five Laws of Library Science. There have been several adaptations along the way, but I tend to like the original:

  1. Books are for use
  2. Every reader his/her book
  3. Every book its reader
  4. Save the time of the reader
  5. The library is a growing organism

I think about the laws of library science more often than I thought I would when I first learned about them in library school. They’re a bit of a touchstone for me when I’m making decisions about the library’s collection, services, staffing, and building.

The five laws work very well as a whole to remind libraries that our collections of books, movies, online resources, etc. are not museum pieces to be looked at. Our collections are meant to be used by the people we serve (Law 1).

As we select the items that fill our collections we must consider the needs and interests of our communities (Law 2) as well as act as a conduit to connect people to the correct resources for their needs and interests (Law 3).

While we do all of that, we must make sure we’re not putting up too many barriers between our communities and our collections and services, we must make sure our collections and services are findable (Law 4), and we do not get bogged down by the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality (Law 5).

This week, you may notice Law five is in full effect at your library. Our building is getting some much-needed attention in our public restrooms and we’ll soon be looking for bids to do some brick restoration. You might also notice we’re looking for two part-time (18 hrs/wk) employees – one for our computer lab and one for our youth services department. If you’ve got excellent customer service skills and would like to join in on staff shenanigans, get your application to City Hall by 5 pm on Friday, Dec. 7th.

 

Read On! Chicago Revisited

I got to go to Chicago a few weeks ago to attend the Participatory Design Workshop for the Measuring Library Broadband Networks study (which is to say, we had a meeting to help the researchers focus and design their study so the results will be the most useful to libraries across the nation). The participants represented 10 libraries of varying size from across the nation – even staff from a library in Alaska serving 150 people – as well as experts in the fields of both library science and information technology. There were about 30 people in all.

The entire experience was a rich and worthwhile one. My mother and I got to experience the amazing culture of Chicago’s museums, stand in awe of the size of Lake Michigan, and I got to share Pryor with a group of pretty impressive library-folk.

Some of the participants from larger library systems were surprised at how many hats your library staff wears. I am the Director by title, but I am also the library’s primary IT person. They were even more entertained when I explained that if there’s an IT problem I struggle with, I call one of our local police officers for backup.

To give you an idea of scale, your Pryor Library has a total of 34 computers in our single building. The Chicago Public Library has 3,500 computers in their 80+ branches. They have a veritable army for IT problems. We were all impressed by the unique experiences each library has.

One of the ways this study will benefit libraries across the U.S. is to ensure our internet providers are providing what your tax dollars pay for and ensure we’re using our budgets effectively. More immediately, learning about the experiences of other libraries and being able to call these 29 people colleagues and friends will help your Pryor Library grow in new and exciting ways. I can’t wait to start.