Tech Service Frustration Medley Plus Miscellaney

undergroundlib — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:29:27 +0000

We’re doing a migration to a new ILS. It’s a big name ILS (Sirsi) but I have been less than impressed with the customer service. I think we finally got a person who will help us out (I hope). With one of my staff taking a great lead, I think we can migrate everything manually. I know that most everyone would gasp at the idea of this, but maybe it will be a good learning project. I don’t quite trust Sirsi to import everything successfully for us at this point. ..and they’d charge us a couple of grand at least. They haven’t even sent us invoices!

Also having many problems with EZProxy. I was hopeful that when OCLC bought it out that they would give more than e-mail support, but no go. It’s really hard to get someone on the phone. I am trying to use the help of kind librarians and IT folks who will help us out for free. It’s very frustrating. I’m not sure how much librarians are supposed to know about EZProxy…I don’t have access to the back end stuff and it would be hard for me to understand it. I’m not even sure if this is supposed to be the realm of a Systems Librarian. Probably.

Also trying to weed our reference section which is older than the hills. Well at least as old as the 1970s. Librarians say you should keep print reference around, but unless students are led to it kicking and screaming, I don’t see the point. It’s fun looking at old titles though. Our reference room is a makeshift tech services room for now. Our reference desk/circ desk/tech services area is normally all the same area…one of the things that librarians from bigger places get wide, disbelieving eyes over. But at some small places, that’s just the way it is…. We got rights to an extra room upstairs, but its purpose is still up in the air. We moved our reference books up there, and I want to eventually use the extra space for a study room/writing center. For the meantime, it’s great for cataloging stuff that requires more concentration (it’s hard when you’re being interupted at the circ/reference desk all the time!)

I’m also working on my virtual reference service, my labor of love. I hope it starts getting more hits. I’m hopeful. It’s available to at least 9 smaller libraries now.

Oh yeah, I’ve also got a management issue…less said about that the better You can’t make people work well together…but I’m going to give it my best shot next week…

About this blog

undergroundlib — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:59:18 +0000

I work at a little community college as a library director. I find that most library blogs are written by people who work at big places–huge universities, big community college districts, big public libraries, etc. Or high profile, smaller libraries. My place is small and not very high profile, but there are a lot of libraries very similar to it all over the country.

I’m calling this “Middle of Nowhere/Middle of Everything” because librarians like me may be out in the middle of nowhere geographically and on most people’s radars. However, we’re very frontline in dealing with small communities and populations, and we have to do a little bit of everything.

Middle of Nowhere / Middle of Everything

Tech Service Frustration Medley Plus Miscellaney

About this blog