The Librarydude!

There was a young boy at my library today, who was borrowing a heap of books on Medieval England. When I was processing his loans I asked him if he had an assignment or essay to do on that topic. He said "No. I just wanted to learn about it"

That really made me feel good.

I keep feeling that I'm old fashioned. I enjoy the Internet, and think it's a marvellous tool for resaerch, entertainment and spreading old jokes, but I'm not sure that I trust anything it contains. It is so easy to post on it, have things listed on search engines, and to have your site be easily found. This page (LibraryDude!) was listed on Google 2 days after it was created. 2 Days!! I've found links to this site on other library sites (Thanks for doing that guys! I appreciate it) , but this gives the impression that this page is important, and credible. It isn't. It contains my opinions, and my thoughts. Nobody checks anything I post, there is probably NO info on here that is worth two halves of a brass razoo, and this is typical of most of the Internet.

I realise that there are very credible sources on the net, databses and so on. But the typical student (usually High-School student) will never go to those first. In my experience Google or Yahoo! search engines are the first port of call.

God! I promised I'd be less critical last time didn't I? Maybe I'm getting old. That must be it. turning 28 is getting to me.

There aren't enough of these sites on the Internet. A funny literary site.

I'm at the circulation desk, it is raining so hard that people are not coming into my library, so I've been "researching" stuff on the Internet. I know that these people can definitely not exist, but here's a Cranky Librarian

For all the public librarians out there, here is Today's Tip.

If you have books that are not moving off the shelves, load them onto a shelving trolley and try to shelve them. You will instantly be surrounded by people wanting to borrow these items.

I used to tell this as a joke at work, but it has never failed to happen.

Greg at Open Stacks, has listed me on his LIS Blogsource page, so I thought I'd return the favour by adding a link to Open Stacks here. A good read it is too. Check out the research paper on Weblogs. (Planet Blog)

I find it amazing how many people (usually High School students) go straight to the Internet to look for information, and rely on that as their sole source. Having only one source is bad enough, but can you really trust anything on the Internet? 99.99% of the content would be crap and the rest is intentional misinformation. (Except of course, for this page :) )

Does anyone think to use an encyclopedia these days?

I must have missed the lecture when I was studying librarianship that told us that when we work in a Public Library, we must accept verbal abuse from everyone. I had a collegue today almost in tears from such a customer. This is not right, and not productive. If only we had some power against people like that, we'd be in much better shape.

Sorry. Didn't make this blog so I could whinge. Try to make my next post really insightful and library-related.

At the moment we have a display about a pretty hot political topic in our library, (treatment of refugees and asylum seekers). I'm surprised this has been allowed to return, as we had some rather violent reactions to this display last year. (Pieces of it were thrown at staff). Even with a fairly prominent disclaimer stating that These are NOT the views of the Library Service, we still get people making comments to us, (and usually negative ones). I'm not sure if this would be censorship, (something I'm completely against) but wouldn't it be better to not have displays that are political hot potatos. It seems the Library staff are the main target for peoples anger about this topic. We are not paid to be verbal punching bags. How do other libraries cope with this type of problem?

Thought I'd add the link for The Rabid Librarian. This is a nice site with tons of links to library sites. I haven't checked them all out yet, and some seem rather frivolous, but there are some good ones there as well.

I noticed on my first post that I refered to myself as a Library Technician, even though I have no official qualifications whatsoever. Anyway, I do the job of a Library Technician (here in Australia) so I think I deserve that title. Next year I will be able to gain some proper library qualifications. (and be recognised by ALIA)

Ah. Hello everyone.
This blog is going to contain all the library related go's and woes in an average (average????) Library Technician's day. Not that I'll update this every day, mostly when library stuff happens. Anyway most of my comments and weird stuff can be found on my main Blog. Y2dave.blogspot.com This page, however should be devoid of the weirdness and other stuff found there. There shouldn't be a quote of the day here. If you want a laugh, go see Y2Dave. If you want serious thoughts, by all means stay here. Or why not visit both?