library day in the life 7.2

Or, A Day of Frustration

Today wasn't as structured as yesterday, so my breakdown of how I spent my day isn't going to be as accurate. Having meetings most of the afternoon yesterday basically left me the morning to do other stuff, so it was easier to keep track. However, unstructured days is more often than not the rule for me. Here's how the day went:

• 2 hours - prepped for and participated in the ACRL (Dr. E. J.) Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Committee meeting
• .75 hour - emails (throughout the day)
• .75 hour - checked out the UCLA All-Staff Picnic (actual lunch was at my desk while reading -- see next bullet)
  
• .75 hour - checked/reading articles/links shared on FB, Twitter
• 4.75 hours - reviewed/modifed LC CAPSEA country profiles

The Good:

• Again, I didn't have that much emails today. This is really surprising. I'm glad, though, because I really have some deadlines to meet.
• A recurring meeting that was on my calendar didn't happen, so more time to do what I needed to do.
• I always like to check out articles/links shared on FB. I learn so much from them about library-related things, as well as current events. Now, that I'm sort of active on Twitter for this Library in the Day project, I'm also learning a lot more of what's going on out there in libraryland.
  
• I took time out to check out the all-staff picnic. This is an annual event, and this is the 4th time since I've been here. I never went before, though, because I heard that a) the free food wasn't anything interesting (which it wasn't) and there really isn't much to it (which is kind of true). But it did get me out of the office and gave me something to photograph, so I can finally put photos in my post.

This is what it looked like when I got to campus around 7:30am, and they were still setting up.

It looked quite different at lunchtime. Folks had their picnic blankets and were spread out on the grass and under the trees. There was a DJ and dancing, including dancing mascots, as shown in the picture below. They happened to be playing salsa around the time that I was there, and I was very tempted to dance. That's the Powell Library Building in the background, home of our undergraduate library.

Here is a close up of our mascots, Joe and Josephine Bruin:

The Bad:

• I like to come to meetings prepared. I had actually done a little prep work for my committee meeting, but I actually hadn't done the important part, which was to review the agenda and necessary documents. (I guess those emails came on a busy day, and I missed them somehow. Though, I think it was more that I thought that they were the same documents I had seen before.) So, I spent quite a bit of the meeting reading up and sometimes missing what was discussed. I was still an active participant, though, just not as ready as I should have been.
• Though, I learn from FB and Twitter feeds, they are still distractions. I tend to be more distracted when I'm doing something challenging and/or tired. Today, it was both.

The Ugly:

• Yesterday, I talked about LC CAPSEA and doing my annual review of my country profiles. Today, I had to finish reviewing and modifying the profiles for the rest of the countries. It was such difficult and depressing work. As I mentioned before, I have assigned budgets to each country based on what tier they belong (in the top tier are those countries which are of most interest to our researchers). Last year, I stayed as close as possible to those budgets when I did my profiles. Well, this year, I have the same budget, but the costs have gone up. For some countries, costs went up by 40%! What does one do?

Let me explain about approval plans, since most people don't know what is unless they're collection development librarians. (We were actually talking about this recently, and we all said that we really didn't learn about approval plans in library school and only learned about it once we started doing our jobs.) For approval plans, you set up a profile where you're telling the vendor to send you all books from certain subject categories. You might limit this by content (e.g., research-level), publishers, etc. And you give them a spending limit. This is intended to save librarians' time, by having certain books come automatically instead of ordering titles individually.

Many libraries have approval plans with YBP, as do we. The great thing about YBP is that they pre-catalog the books, and these books have call numbers (not localized, of course). So, when you do your profile, you can not only specify the subjects that you want, but you can also be as specific as you want in terms of call number ranges. That way, you can technically get only the books you want.

Well, with CAPSEA, that is not how it works. You can specify subjects, but these subjects are broad. And you can't limit it by specific aspects of the topic or the authoritativeness of the materials or even by publishers. Thus, a subject like religion might have useful books on religion in the life of Southeast Asians, but it is just as likely to have not as important books on specific temples or the lives and teachings of individual monks. This makes it very difficult when you are trying to tighten your profiles and stay within budget.

For example, take Indonesia, which I have given an assigned budget of 100%. Well, some categories cost almost 40%. That means I can only I have 2 1/2 to 3 major categories. Which areas I am supposed to cut: history, politics, economics, sociology, literature, or religion? These are all important areas. And when you cut, it's all or nothing. If I cut a topic, then it means I'm getting nothing for that topic. And, if I choose to only go with, say, 3 major categories, then I can't have the smaller (meaning, cheaper) categories, such as reference works, gender studies, education, public health, etc.

Thus, I had to decide which areas I can afford not to get books in, at least for the upcoming year. I had to decide which subjects are more important than others. The answers are different for each country, since it depends on the current research interests of faculty and students, as well as what I think will be the continuing or future areas of interest.

And, unlike here, where it is possible to get old publications from publishers or used bookstores, it is a lot more difficult to do retrospective collection development for Southeast Asian materials since most publications are printed in very limited quantities. Either you get it right way, or you lose your chance. With only about a dozen collecting libraries in the country, many also facing budget woes, there is a good chance that the other librarians are making the same cuts and the lesser the likelihood that these titles would be available through interlibrary loan.

This is the reality. Increasing costs vs. budgets. Subject areas pitted against each other. And I had to make those decisions. That's why today was a hard day.

But the day is done (not that tomorrow will be any easier, as I have serials review to do next). So, I will leave you with this fuzzy picture from my walk on the beach this evening. Good night!

library day in the life 7.1

I am the Librarian for Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the Librarian for Anthropology, Archaeology, and Religion, based in the Young Research Library at UCLA. This week, I'm participating in the Library Day in the Life Project because:

1. It seems like a fun thing to do.
2. I don't have enough things to do. (Not!)
3. I'm trying to be do more creative things, including blogging (even if it is about work).
4. People just have no idea what librarians do. (Sometimes, even I don't know what is I do, though whatever it is sure keeps me busy much more than 40 hours a week.)
   

Okay, that seems like a really boring way to start a post; I feel like I'm introducing myself at a meeting or conference. But the instructions say I should do that and, since this if my first time doing this, I should probably follow instructions. (Though, of course, nothing's really going to happen to me if I don't.)

Here's the approximate breakdown of my day:

• 2.5 hours - prepping for and participating in search committee meeting
• 3.5 hours - LC CAPSEA country profiles review
  
• 1.25 hours - monthly (though it happens more like quarterly--not that I'm complaining) meeting with supervisor
• .50 hour - sign up for libday7, set up new Twitter account for libday7 (@librariansdream), skim tweets
• .50 hour - APALA work: add wiki users and submit 2013 Program Committee budget
• 1.25 hours - check emails, FB (throughout the day); eat snack & lunch (both while working)

Some of this work requires explanation, or at least I want to provide more information:

• Search committees: Most librarians, especially in huge academic libraries like mine, participate in search committees, i.e., the committees in charge of selecting librarians, library staff, etc. (Search committee work includes: going through applications; narrowing down candidates; creating lists of questions for candidates and references; scheduling and conducting references; scheduling and conducting day-long interviews; writing recommendation of who to hire.)
  
  I'm in a search committee for a librarian position. This is the second time I've been on a search committee in the last year. This particular search is more complicated, time-consuming, and drawn out than the other.

• LC CAPSEA: The UCLA Library has excellent area studies collections. Many of the area studies librarians develop their collections with the help of the Library of Congress' cooperative acquisitions programs (CAPs). Basically, the Library of Congress, through its overseas offices, acquire publications for participating institutions on a cost-recovery basis.
  
  As the Southeast Asian Studies librarian, I work with CAP-Southeast Asia. The main office is in Jakarta, Indonesia, with satellite offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Bangkok, Thailand, and Manila, Philippines. They collect materials in various formats (e.g., monos, serials, A/V, ephemera) and languages (e.g., English, Southeast Asian languages, other Western languages, Chinese), according to your country profiles and/or your selections on monthly circulars. They collect for all 11 Southeast Asian countries (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam).
  
  Every year, I have to review and modify my country profiles because costs keep going up while our budgets keep getting cut. Even though we self-select (through circulars) for a few of the countries, we still have to do country profiles for these countries, as this will determine how much LC will charge us, since we have to pay them upfront for the upcoming fiscal year. (Their fiscal year begins in October, which is why we're doing this now.) If we go over what's in our LC account, then they send us a supplemental bill.
  
  Since I started this job just over 3 years ago, I've been trying to do some kind of equitable distribution across the 11 countries (before, we weren't getting anything for some countries at all), based on a tier system that I devised (i.e., Tier 1 countries get more money, but all countries have a base amount). With the rising costs and budget cuts, it's inevitable that some topics get cut out of our profiles. I have to weigh things like this when I'm going through these profiles. Today, I was only able to go through 5 country profiles (guess you know what you'll be reading about tomorrow).
  

That's probably more information than you want, but maybe you'll be interested, especially the CAPSEA stuff. There are, after all, only about a dozen SEA librarians in the country (collection development librarians, that is), so this information is not necessarily out there.

Highlight:

The highlight of my day actually came at the very beginning. When I was signing up for Library Day in the Life, I skimmed through the list of participants, and there are two that are my friends (at least on FB). The first, Leo Lo, wasn't a surprise because he's pretty active in social networking and 2.0 kinds of stuff, and I knew that about him.

The second, however, was a big and pleasant surprise. Áine Lynch is a librarian at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown in Dublin, Ireland. I met her in May when I went on a photography holiday in the Andalucía region of Spain; she was my housemate for that entire week. The two of us shared a 3-bedroom, 2-bath apartment in Torrox Pueblo. I was really tickled by the fact that I ended up with another librarian for a housemate. (For the record, we were the only librarians in that group of about 20 photographers and painters.)

Anyway, when I was looking at the list of participants, I was shocked and excited to see her name. I guess I didn't really think of this project as being international in scope. But I was also thrilled to see that she has a library-related blog, Gutenberg's View, which I skimmed through this morning. I have to say that I was impressed by what little I read; her writing style is engaging -- informative, but fun and concise (unlike this post!). Even though we spent a whole week together, we were focusing on learning photography and taking pictures and didn't really talk as much about librarianship. So, I'm glad to see this side of her. So, thanks, Library Day in the Life!

Conclusion:

This post is really long, and it's almost midnight (it's taking me 2 1/2 hours to write this!). I just want to say that I'm glad that my email was surprisingly light today so that I was able to do a lot of what I set out to do today. Oftentimes, I feel like all I do is read emails and do associated work, so I'm glad today wasn't like that. I'm also glad that this project is happening this week because it actually gets to highlight what I do as an area studies librarian (and this isn't always the case). Since I think I may be the only area studies librarian participating in this project, it's good to represent in that way.