Category Archives: Work

Libraries Are Quiet Places? Right!

I think people generally tend to think of libraries as quiet places where nothing much ever happens. On the other hand, here’s a partial list of things I’ve heard of happening at libraries I’ve worked at and elsewhere – lots of which involve illegal activities while others are just unsavory… fist fights between patrons that […]

Winners of 2010 Pimp My BookCart Contest Announced

This year’s winners of the annual “Pimp My Bookcart” contest have been announced. This was the contest’s fifth and final year so people appear to have gone all out with their entries. (On a related note, we briefly considering having a “Pimp My Bookcart” contest as part of our staff conference this year.  Unfortunately, a […]

Friends of RPL Reading

Like many public libraries, Regina has a “Friends of the Library” group.  But unlike most libraries, ours sprung up in response to threatened closures of three branches plus our art gallery and our Prairie History Room in 2003.   The Friends group played a big role in keeping the threatened locations alive, managing to get […]

10 Things I Think About (Nearly) Every Day at Work

Outside of thinking about things like my current projects or what’s in the pipeline for the near future, e-mails that need to be sent or answered and generic everyday stuff like that, there are some things that occupy my thoughts for at least a brief amount of time pretty much every single day that I’m […]

What Is the Defining Quality of Desirable Employees?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what single quality, if any, would be the thing you should look for in hiring new employees.  There are a few things that made me think of this – obviously working in the HR Unit at RPL has me thinking about these things, especially when I consider the […]

Jessamyn West at the RPL Staff Conference

I’m pretty excited about our staff conference on Friday (although the last minute details and fire fighting gave me a bastard of a headache today so that I ended up coming home and crashing for two hours.) But I think we’ve got a great line-up – including having not one but two sessions by the […]

Ten Things Every Librarian Should Know

Sure, when you get your MLIS degree, you learn some skills that are supposedly important – how to catalogue, how to answer a reference question, that Meville Dewey preferred to spell his name “Dui”. But there are some other skills and abilities that you don’t necessarily learn in library school that are possibly even more […]

Notes from Rachel Van Riel Workshop at Regina Public Library

RPL hosted a workshop with well-known library consultant, Rachel Van Riel of OpeningTheBook.com today, the only Saskatchewan stop on a cross-Canada tour that will also take her to Alberta and Ontario.  The information presented was excellent and I’d highly recommend her to anyone looking for ideas on how to improve their libraries. As always, a […]

Saskatchewan’s Libraries Helping to Support California Pro-Pot Legislation?!?

I could write headlines for the World Weekly News with a subject line like that! But I did catch this little tidbit in a story about how Facebook is refusing pro-pot advertisments, even as one of the site’s co-founders donated $50 000 to the cause. Stephen Silberstein, the founder of Innovative Interfaces, a company that […]

When Did Librarianship First Enter The Picture As An Option For Me?

We had our annual New Staff Orientation Day on Friday.  It’s a day when we get all of the staff who’ve joined RPL within the past year to come in and hear from the various managers, committee members (eg. OH&S) and others with specialized positions (eg. our Assessment Librarian) about how all of the different […]