Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Blog June Post 2 - Be the Bomb!!

Ok today's mantra is Be the Bomb!!

Now if my hip flexor was feeling great I would be feeling the bomb because I would have participated in the 3 x 1km efforts this morning with my running friends.  Instead I toddled off on my own to do 8km.  I did get to see a gorgeous pre sun rise at the headland but I love the feeling of pushing myself through efforts - not while I'm doing them - just at the end so I feel I missed out a bit.

Anyway, back to Be the Bomb!!  I have been doing some recruitment for some casual positions recently and for me the big thing that resonated is that for a small town we have a lot of library qualified and experienced people out there.  The other thing is that most people don't know what we do as library staff.

So since I don't want to go into too much detail about applications received and quality of applications - because that is not something to share in the public sphere - I will just say that perhaps as a profession we don't do a very good job at letting people know or illustrating just what we do in our jobs in libraries - or perhaps we do such a good job, we make it look easy!!

Predominately, in our library it is all about customer service - knowing your customers, knowing your community, knowing what they want and knowing about the books they like to read and how to find the information they want - or even going as far to pre-empt their information needs so you have the access to the information they want.  So lots of professions have customer service as their main skill set (if that's what you can call it, but you get what I mean).  So lots of people have experience in customer service and this can be transferred to a library service.

Lots of people know how to know their customers and their community because we are not the only industry that does this.

But what about books and information.  What industry combines all of this and knows what information their community needs and when they need it??

Back to the part about people not knowing what we do.  Do they need to know what we do?  Or do they only need to get the end product - really how many of us care how that packet of chips got on the shelf and into the trolley - we just want to eat the chips??

Should we be like the farmers and start educating people about the process of getting the information to them?  What does it involve?  How do we go about it?  What skills are needed?  What hurdles do we jump to get the information?  Or do they really need/want to know?

So perhaps it is about being the bomb - get the right information to the right person at the right time - but let's not get hung up on whether the person cares about how you got the information.

What do you think?

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