Here's an article from MSNBC on different libraries' approaches to reducing or eliminating fines including things like amnesty days (which I'd heard of) and “read it off” programs (which I hadn't) to even a “bike it off” program (which I couldn't even have conceived of!)
I'm sure I've written about how my first job out of library school was with a system that didn't have fines and that was a perfect fit with my personal philosophy and beliefs as well. That's not just my opinion though – studies have shown that whether libraries have fines or not, those who are going to return their books on time will do so and those who are going to be late will be.
Then there's the cost of having fines – how much valuable staff time is spent in dealing with (and then later, reconciling) all the little $0.30 and $1.20 fines that patrons have which could be used in a more productive manner?
Finally, there's a customer service element at play too. What sort of an institution, which prides itself on everything being free, creates a situation where we're (literally) nickel and diming our customers to death? (And you won't hear me call library patrons “customers” very often but in this case, I think it's appropriate.)
It's a not-so-dirty secret that fines can be a huge revenue line for a library (just check how many public libraries are willing to send patrons advance notices *before* books come due. Not many and in fact, lots don't even send overdue notices until a few days or even a week has passed rather than the very day the materials come due?)
Here's a quote from the article:
On Valentine's Day last year, the Anythink Libraries just north of Denver eliminated their fine system.
“Our
philosophy is that we want people to come to the library, even if their
heads are hanging low,” library spokeswoman Stacie Ledden said.
The
library system gives patrons 25 days after the due date to return a
book. It's then marked lost, and the reader is charged to replace it.
“Overdue
fines are definitely one of those traditional library conventions that
are worth taking a look at,” Ledden said. “It's intimidating to people.
They feel embarrassed about it. They feel guilty about it, and we don't
want people to feel that way.”
Regina had a wicked wind storm about a week ago and we lost a piece of the fascia on the front of our house. My folks were in today to help us fix the damage. Here are a couple snaps from the day…
Dad shares an old electrician's trick that helps you protect the house when using a ladder
The person steadying the ladder probably shouldn't be taking pictures!
“Hmm, how come they all get to stay on the ground?” (I'm guessing one of them wished he could join daddy and grandpa on the roof though!)
Our friends in the US are celebrating National Library Week which leads to awesome posts like this one from HuffPo on that country's most amazing libraries.
Of course the news isn't all good south of the border (check out the fourth or fifth comment down from MJinCanada!), especially right now.
The troubles for US libraries really hit me when we were hosting the PLA Virtual Conference a few weeks ago and the “Introduce Yourself” posts in the chat room were almost universally variations of “Wish we could be there but our budget was cut this year” or “Would love to be there but we're limited to in-state travel only for the time being.”
I've written about this in the past in the form of a post on the subject of “If libraries didn't exist, could you star them today?” Except the question is being reversed – libraries do exist but are heavily under attack from various sectors that don't support them (ultra-capitalists who think nothing should be free, tax-cut fanatics like the Tea Baggers, other mouth breathers.)
And of course I can't find it now but there was a great comment in a Reddit thread recently [edit: found it] talking about this exact idea – how libraries are in danger because some powerful groups are aligning against libraries because they simply can't wrap their heads around something being free in this day and age.
Scary times. And definitely not fun on any day of the week. But I've had all those links floating around for awhile so my initial link featuring amazing libraries provided a nice jumping off point to talk about a world when many of those amazing libraries are in serious danger.
In my interview for my first librarian job, I was asked that all-time favourite interview question, “Where do you see yourself going in ten years?” I replied “I'd like to be a director someday” but to this day, I honestly don't know how much of that answer was me being honest and how much was me saying what I thought the person wanted to hear.
Joke's on me – the person who interviewed me (who happened to be the current Library Director at that library) later said, “That was a bad answer – you were basically saying you wanted my job.” (“Well, I didn't say I want it tomorrow!” I remember replying…silently in my head, that is!) But that interaction has stuck with me having just passed my third anniversary as a professional librarian. Do I still want to be a Director someday?
Honestly, there are days when I don't even think I'd want to move up to management when I see the hours some managers put in and the stresses they deal with from above, below and the side. (I recently talked to a classmate who, as I think I was, seen by the rest of our class as the “future library directory” type – very involved in school activities, also won the school's “Spirit of Librarianship” award, etc. So I was a bit surprised to learn that she'd also had come to an “I'm very happy where I am now, thank-you very much!” position which I thought was revealing since I'd say she was very goal driven compared to myself.)
One other thing that's got this at the front of my brain – I recently went through some leadership/management training sessions and one of the things that stood out in the section we covered on personality types was that the type of folks who take up 90% of high level management jobs in any company tend to be the exact opposite personality type of myself, at least on the Myers-Briggs scale. (This reminded me that the Director who I mentioned in that first anecdote had told me something similar – and also happened to have that personality type – and was indeed a very good director.)
So is there any hope if I still *do* want to be a Director someday (other than the fact that by the time all the boomers retire, people in my generation might have no choice? )
Well, I just recently finished reading a book called “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving The Future of Business” and it's an early contender for The Hammy Award, the unofficial prize I give each year to the best book I've read in the last 12 months.
I'm going to quote one section near the end of the book on the future of work…
“What happens when the kids attending Adelphi [an American cybercamp for teens] enter the workforce? For starters, they'll accelerate the obsolescence of such standard corporate fixtures as the management hierarchy and the nine-to-five workday. As Thomas Malone, an MIT professor and author of “The Future of Work” points out, these conventions are artifacts of an earlier age when information was scarce and all decisions, for the sake of efficiency, trickled down from on high. Information is now available to anyone with an Internet connection. The result, Malone says, is that decision making has been decentralized.”
And maybe, just maybe, the type of personality type best suited to managing this emerging workforce isn't the traditional one either but the exact opposite one – more social, more open to experimentation, less concerned with hierarchy, rules and details. Maybe?
Just in time for Regina's mini-World Cup soccer tournament, the WCP Cup, Jaime Garcia has added some information to his web site targeted specifically at Regina's soccer community.
Jaime has a long history of involvement with Regina's soccer community and is still actively involved as a player and a coach. So in a riding where every vote is going to count, this type of micro-targeting of a specific audience could potentially serve Jaime very well if he can convert even some of the energetic, passionate and involved soccer folks into energetic, passionate and involved political supporters!
I could easily do 52 weeks of Music Monday posts featuring only catchy power-pop Britpop songs circa 1995. (I do admit – this is one crappy video though – looks like a Red Hot Chili Peppers outtake. You can check out the US video for the song to see which you prefer.)
My sporadically-recurring blog feature “Saccharine Sunday” returns with this video which is a bit over the top (especially that piano motif in the background – gag!) but has an otherwise touching message.
Even though it's aimed at middle aged, empty nester, as a relatively new parent, I enjoyed it too. Sometimes seeing Pace run down the hall, I can't help visualizing the same thing happening – only it's twelve or fifteen years from now and he's off to his summer job or football practice, going to hang out with friends or go on a date.
Everybody tells you time flies once you have kids but you can't really understand how true that is until you do.
(Thanks to Linda T. for passing this along. And RIP Rachel C – much too young.)
(And how pathetic were the Flames tonight to allow Henrik Sedin to get four points and a strangle hold on the NHL scoring lead? C'mon Ovechkin – you can do better than a career 65 pointer who made the majority of his points this year with second assists – even if you've played 11 games less due to injuries and suspensions.)
Ryan Meili announced this morning that he’ll be running in Saskatoon-Sutherland in the next provincial election. Jurist has details including a bit about the fact that this field will be a big one, just like Regina-Coronation Park, with four people seeking the nomination.
I thought this might be a prime opportunity to do a post I’ve been thinking about since, well, since June 6, 2009 – a Top Ten list of my personal highlights from Ryan’s leadership run last year. Some of these are things I’ve talked about on this blog before, some are things I haven’t.
10. The Power of Social Networking (The Real Kind, Not the Virtual Kind) I started paying attention to the leadership race right around the time that Ryan announced as the fourth candidate in the race somewhere around early February 2009. Seeing he was a doctor in Saskatoon who was around my age, I sent an e-mail to a good friend from high school who’d gone on to be a doctor to see if he knew Ryan. I’m paraphrasing but he basically replied: “Yeah, I know him. Good guy. Did lots of cool extracurricular stuff at medical school. Got arrested in Quebec City.”
I think I’ve talked about how I was looking for something like the Obama campaign in the US and frankly (and no offense to any of the other three candidates who ran) wasn’t expecting to get involved in this leadership race in any way because none of them gave me that vibe that mixed a willingness to use technology, to inspire young people and a new way of doing politics that I was looking for. That endorsement from a good friend of mine and mutual acquaintance of Ryan’s was enough to convince me that hey, maybe this guy might have some of those things I was looking for after all. Little did I know, I would end up giving hours of my time, my money, my ideas and my energy to the campaign over the ensuing five months.
9. Ryan’s Regina Press Conference After getting the positive word from my friend, I saw that Ryan would be having a Regina press conference to announce his candidacy down here (he’d already had one in Saskatoon.) I took an (ahem) extended coffee break and snuck off to the Beet Root vegetarian restaurant where the press conference was to be held. I wasn’t even 100% sure what Ryan looked like and introduced myself to a couple people, at one point thinking that someone who I think worked for the restaurant was Ryan! His Regina campaign co-chair (who I also probably thought was Ryan ) introduced me to the real Ryan. We had a brief conversation, talked about our mutual friend and a bit about the race then it was showtime. I was feeling nervous through the whole press conference – I think mostly feeling out of place wondering “what am I doing here? How did this happen?” After things wrapped up, I bought a membership (the last time I had one was the last leadership race back in 2001). Then that same Regina campaign co-chair drove me to my house so we could sign up Shea as well (an action that takes on some extra significance given the Lingenfelter membership scandal that happened later in the leadership race. I’d actually asked if I could sign up Shea without her being there and remember being told very clearly, “Well, other times we might be able to do that but since it’s a leadership race, we better make sure we have your wife’s signature on the membership form.”)
8. They Get It! (x2) Somewhere in the middle of the campaign, I attended Ryan’s press conference at the University of Regina to formally unveil his campaign videos. I’d seen them already but seeing them on a big screen in front of a room of supporters and journalists made me realise that Ryan truly was a candidate for the modern age, that he “got it” in a way that none of the other candidates appeared to – at least in terms of the impact that online services could have on a campaign and doing things in a decentralized, bottom-up rather than traditional top-down fashion. It’s a minor detail but I also realised Ryan got it in a different way too. After the press conference, a bunch of us were heading down the stairs from the top floor of the Education building and I observed that all the guys in dark suits looked like a scene out of Reservoir Dogs. And the greatest thing about it was that they all got the reference and started riffing on the idea, quoting favourite lines from the movie and so on. “Yep, these aren’t your granddaddy’s politicians!” I remember thinking to myself.
7. Getting a 24-Hour Ban from Wikipedia After Getting into a Revert War with Someone Over What Details of the Lingenfelter Membership Scandal Were Fair Game For His Entry That’s pretty self-explanatory but there’s another detail about this ban that I can’t talk about on the blog, even after a year’s passed. It’s nothing illegal or anything but something that will have to wait for the book I write after I retire in thirty years!
6. Putting My Librarian Super Powers To Good Use I spent a couple afternoons at the Saskatchewan Archives tracking down photos and music to use in Ryan’s convention opening. It was a brilliant way to open the video (mucho kudos to Simple Massing Priest for the idea) and the video still gives me chills…
5. ‘Twas The Night Before The Convention Began The day before the Leadership Convention began, Shea and I each had a long day of work then a busy afternoon and evening hitting a bunch of Mosaic pavilions. When we registered for the Convention at Evraz Place, I’d been thinking we might hit a few more pavillions around there. But Pace was getting cranky and Shea & I were both getting to the point where we just wanted to go home and crash knowing that we’d also be having a very busy weekend. But then I bumped into someone from Ryan’s campaign who reminded me they were doing one last phoning bee at Ryan’s Regina HQ. So when I got home, the guilt of knowing that this was my last chance to do something helpful made me walk in our house, explain how I felt to Shea, then turn around to immediately head back downtown (it helps to have a *very* understanding wife at times like that!). After the phoning bee, we went to the lounge in the Regina Inn and in some ways, it was the victory party. No matter what happened that weekend, we all took a moment to celebrate an amazing campaign. I ended up sitting next to Ryan at our table and once again, was amazed at the level of candor he showed, discussing the race and his thoughts on the future. Of course, that night also resulted in photographic proof that I was wearing these shorts in public so maybe I would’ve been better just staying home? Or I somehow jinxed the campaign with my poor fashion sense?
4. The “Ten Reasons I’m Supporting Ryan Meili” Series of Posts I still think it’s some of the best writing I’ve even done on this blog. And it happened while I was in Montreal for CLA and I was so pumped to do it that I’d slip back to my room between sessions and in the evenings to work on the posts rather than going out and sightseeing like a normal person would!
3. The Money Bomb I don’t know if I ever officially taken credit for it on this blog. But one of the ideas I suggested early on was a money bomb modeled on what had been done to great effect by a range of candidates in the recent US Presidential election. Ryan’s campaign eventually did the money bomb and it was a great success – bringing in more than their initial goal of $10 000 from numerous (and many unlikely) sources. I think it also had enough small donations that Ryan ended up with more individual donors to his campaign than any other candidate. I’m pretty proud of bringing that idea to the campaign – how often can you say you’re the first person to do something like this in the entire country?
2. Ryan’s First Union Endorsement (Almost) I was still fairly new to RPL when I got involved in Ryan’s campaign – maybe having just passed my six month probation? Even though I was still new and finding my place, I decided that what Ryan was doing was important enough that it’d be worth sticking my neck out a bit. I started doing more and more campaigning at work – mostly via our local – although that got me a couple cautionary words and a few more outright angry responses from other members who felt what I was doing was inappropriate. That didn’t put me off and my actions culminated in me making a motion at a union meeting about a month before the convention that our local should officially declare our support for Ryan and also make a large enough donation to his campaign that we would show up on donor disclosure forms. Just knowing I was going to make that motion got me even more angry e-mails from members who swore they were going to come to their first meeting ever just to vote against it (I happily note that not one of them did!) I was still quite nervous based on that feedback and seriously considered skipping the meeting completely, thinking it was a waste of time and the vote would be 50-1 against. I went and, probably as nervous as I’ve been speaking in public in a long time, made my pitch. I started by pointing out that, whether you were an NDP supporter or not, there are only two parties that can realistically form government in Saskatchewan right now – one which is labour friendly and one which isn’t. And of the people running for the leadership, I felt strongly that there was one candidate who would be the best for the province, for its people and yes, for libraries. I hit on a couple main points that I hoped would sway people – Ryan’s SaskPharm plan which I thought would appeal to many of the older members of our union and also how this was a chance for our union to do something that fits with the library’s core values of social justice and inclusion. I sat down, shaking, and awaited the vote results, joking that my only request is that the totals not be announced as the scrutineers left the room. They came back a few minutes later and…announced the totals. “What the hell?” I thought until it penetrated my brain what they were saying – they had to announce the results because it was a tie! We had a moment of confusion but eventually someone pointed out that with a secret ballot, the Chair doesn’t cast the deciding vote because that would reveal their preference. So the motion was defeated even though it was a tie. Even though I regret not pushing harder to get some pro-Ryan folks to the meeting (remember – I was thinking I was going to get killed so what was the point?), I took this as a major victory and the first real indication that – holy shit – Ryan might really and truly have a chance to win this thing! Even after the membership scandal, it still seemed pretty unrealistic to think Ryan could overcome all the advantages Lingenfelter had going for him. Plus, even I thought of Ryan as someone whose greatest appeal was in Saskatoon, that it was with young people, that it was a long shot candidacy. And here was a group of (mostly) middle-aged women in Regina who were saying they were prepared not only to take a baby step of making our union a bit more politically active but also jumping right to the point where 50% of them were willing to join me in supporting a specific candidate! In retrospect, it also made me realise that the most vocal negative voices were countered by the quieter, pro-Ryan people who would buy a membership from me in the coffee room or slip into my office to give me a cheque for the money bomb.) Oh well – I wish I’d gotten 50+1 but I did get a pretty good article out of the experience!
1. Where the hell did all these people come from? I wrote about this in my year-end entry last year (question 16) so I’ll just copy that piece which details my single biggest highlight of Ryan’s leadership run. (Funny how I mention in that post that I’d like to do a Top Ten list of highlights of Ryan’s campaign – it’s like I was doing the work ahead of time!)
I was a bit dejected at the convention – there seemed to be so many Link supporters around, they were all wearing those bright orange t-shirts which made them even more visible and I just felt badly out-numbered. “Ryan’s base is in Saskatoon. Ryan’s base is younger people who probably can’t afford to be here. Ryan’s base isn’t the party establishment who *are* here” I rationalized for what seemed to be the lack of supporters in evidence. Then, it was Ryan’s turn to speak and it just seemed like supporters materialized out of thin air to line the entrance way to the stage. I remember thinking, “Holy shit – where did all these people come from?” as the first percussive beats of “Past in Present” started up. Such a cool cool moment.
The clip at the start of this video doesn’t do the vibe in the room justice. Pretty amazing!
