Library Prattle

Oi, so, me and internet, haven't really been getting too much quality time together. I have just been far too tired, or else the weather's been bad, which precludes me sitting outside the library to use the wifi.

Quick PFE note: Minus the 14 hours taken out for town trips/doctor visits/etc. I've worked a total of 106 hours in the past three weeks at the library. I work regular days, 8h00 to 17h00, minus an hour for lunch, so I don't count that as part of my credit hours. Because my schedule is regular, I've been summarizing the day's activities every so often rather than date-and-time-stamping a journal to keep track. I'll have completed my 270 hours (6 credits) long before I actually leave here, but I'll still keep a journal of my activities at the library and incorporate them into my coursework.

So the other day, one of the administrators from the training department at the college asked Sunel if she could borrow me for a little while to help with a filing project. Sunel reluctantly agreed, and I spent maybe an hour doing some really pointless, boring secretary work, which I probably screwed up at first while I got used to their filing system. The next day the same administrator asked to borrow me again, and Sunel said no. I'm very glad she did, too, because I'd have had to say something in protest, and quite frankly, I would rather be at the library. Sunel ruffled a few feathers when she explained that I'm the resource centre's volunteer, not the college's all-around grunt. That I've got my own projects to do at the library and if I'm constantly off in other departments, I'm not doing what I came here to do, which doesn't help me any, and doesn't help the library any. I think this is an important aside because it speaks to the organization of management in the college itself. We are a small college, and often departments will collaborate, and if one is overloaded with work and another is running dry, they'll help each other out, because we're really a cooperative, community-oriented workplace, not too tied up in drawing steadfast lines between administrations and whatnot. Which is fine, but there are certain people here who just come to expect that other people will help do their work for them, and Sunel needed to make it clear that I'm not college property. I'm here to learn and to help the resource centre, and my responsibilities lie here at the library, first and foremost. If another department is in dire straits and really, really needs an extra body to do some task, then, yes, I can help, but I'm not to be constantly running all around campus helping everyone except the one person I'm actually here to help. I'm glad that Sunel went and made that argument (and probably an enemy for a few days) because inter-office grunt work was never part of my job description. Sure, there's the ever-vague loophole of “other projects as assigned”, but if it got to be to the point where I was doing office work outside the library on a regular basis, I'd have to have a not-so-pleasant conversation with my supervisor regarding the nature of my job.

I think this kind of thing happens anywhere, because I experienced something similar at my undergraduate internship at Yale. I was working in electronic collections, and my supervisor was the database librarian, so I spent the majority of my time working with journal databases and licensing agreements related thereto. However, there was a digitization project that electronic collections was collaborating with the archives department on, and I wound up helping on this project for a while. This was fine, because it was a change of pace, reflected real-life collaboration which I'd have to deal with in a library environment at some point in my career anyway, and I did learn while doing. However, after the project was finished, the archives librarian asked if I could help with another project, and my supervisor said no, that I was not there to do everyone else's odd jobs. I was here to have a learning experience at electronic collections and contribute to productivity there, not to do other people's dirty work. I think that there is something that goes off in people's heads when they hear things like “intern” or “volunteer” that automatically translates to “free labor” and that anyone who knows the intern exists will try to commandeer him/her to help out in their department, forgetting what the intern is actually there for. Interns and volunteers contribute valuable time to the productivity of libraries and workplaces in general around the world, but because they're not being paid, there have to be learning/experience benefits that justify the work being done.

Every single thing that I do here, I have to justify in terms of learning, meeting educational outcomes or whatever, and not just because it's a technicality, but because I want to get as much out of the experience as I'm putting into it. Sure, an internship at XYZ company will look great on paper, but if the intern spent all their time doing tedious tasks and didn't learn anything, then it wasn't a valuable experience, and it won't actually do them any good if they get hired because of their time spent working at XYZ company and then don't actually have the job skills that the internship there was supposed to provide. Therefore, it is important for both supervisor and intern to have an understanding of what is expected of the intern, and if the supervisor is not going to adhere to a learning agreement or is not assigning tasks that are productive learning experiences for the intern, s/he must stand up for themselves and their rights.

Case in point: Yes, I piddled away an hour doing stupid filing work, but, it offered me the opportunity to reflect on the nature of management structures in the workplace, and I'm pretty sure that these reflections help to satisfy the “Professional Ethics” requirement of the PFE course. So it wasn't a complete waste of time after all. Although I'd be loathe to repeat the experience. I'm a librarian, not a damned secretary.

Other than that, though, I've been pretty productive at the resource centre, mostly cataloging this big collection of reports we have from different environmental organizations. The reports are broken down into subject categories, which each get a three-letter code, and then the first three letters of the author's last name make up the rest of the call number (unless there are too many authors/none are listed, which is rather common when an organization puts out a report, in which case the call number comes from the title). So, for example, something put out by the IUCN entitled “Empowering rural communities to conserve biodiversity: A case study in Zimbabwe” which does not list an author would get the call number “COM Emp”. The COM comes from the subject it falls under, which in this case is Community-Based Natural Resource Management. And the Emp comes from the title, because no single author or editor was listed. IUCN is considered the publisher in a case like this, as quite often these reports are not proper books with ISBNs or anything, even if they are professionally printed/bound.