An Exciting Look into the Thrilling Life of a Library Director

I’ve been busy the last . . . half year? I have no idea. I’ve lost track, really. I’m at the point where I don’t know what day it is, or what week it is. All I know is I’ve got my life written down on my Google Calendar, and as long as I look at what’s coming up in the next few hours, I’ve been able to stay on top of things. (More or less.) I keep thinking this busy-ness is going to ebb soon, but I keep being consistently wrong. (Some of that can be seen by how sporadic the blog has become the past bit. I do think I’m getting back to normal on here, but apparently it’s going to still take a while.)

It’s not that I mind being busy. I prefer it, actually. But I also really like having some time now and then to breathe. To have a few days where I can just sit there and think things through. Plan for what’s coming. Organize. I am, after all, a librarian.

So for today’s post, I thought I might show you one of the things that’s keeping me busy at the moment, since it’s something I imagine most non-librarians would even think of. (And it’s a process that I have often wished *I* didn’t have to think of.) What is it? An RFP for a new ILS, of course.

If you’ve been around larger libraries for a while, that sentence likely makes perfect sense. Since you haven’t, let me phrase it differently. A Request For Proposals for a new Integrated Library System. That’s still not clear? Perhaps some history will clear things up.

Back in the day, libraries organized everything in those wonderful card catalogs. There was no such thing as digital. You looked things up by author, title, or subject, and you had to be in the actual library that held the book in order to find it. With the advent of digital, we were able to broaden our horizons. In Maine, a group of like-minded librarians Voltron’ed up to form URSUS, a joint catalog between the University of Maine System Libraries (Orono, Portland, Fort Kent, Presque Isle, Machias, Farmington, Augusta, and the Law Library), the Maine State Library, the Bangor Public Library, and the Law & Legislative Reference Library. The goal was simple: be able to search one catalog to find the books in any of the libraries.

To do that, you need an Integrated Library System. This is basically a platform that allows libraries to do all the things they need to do in order to buy, organize, and circulate materials. It has the public interface (the library catalog you search when you’re looking for something), but it also has modes for cataloging, purchasing, managing serials and electronic resources, and more. Often, each library will have its own. In a system, it’s shared (which makes things more complicated, as it means you have to have all the libraries agree on the rules of the system. What checks out to whom and for how long, how late items are handled, what cataloging standards you’ll have, etc.)

URSUS has had the same ILS (more or less) for decades. It’s approaching end of life (it won’t be useable a year or three from now), so we need to replace it. Enter the RFP. We drew up a (long) list of the requirements we’re looking for from a new ILS, and we sent that out to ILS companies, who took a look at what we were asking for and figured out what it would cost for them to provide it. (There aren’t really a lot of ILS providers. There have been many buyouts over the last few years, and the market has consolidated a ton. These days, there are no more than a handful.) They sent those proposals to us, and now we have to decide which one to go with.

To do that, they’re presenting the ins and outs of their ILSs to us. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and Friday, I’m in 4 hours of Zoom meetings that are basically non-stop demos of what each platform can do. You might think that sounds like a good time. You would be very, very wrong. There are around 70 librarians in the Zoom sessions, each of us with different specialities. You’ve got the catalogers who want the ILS to do awesome cataloging things. The circulation folks care about how well the ILS handles check out and check in. The reference staff want to see how easy and accurate it is to search. To make things even more complex, the academic libraries generally want different things than the public libraries in each of these different areas, so multiply the opinions by two for each.

Once these presentations are done, the library directors are each handed a Bat’leth, a curved, bilateral Klingon sword that can decapitate its victim with a single stroke. We then go into a giant fighting arena fifteen stories beneath Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono. Many directors enter, and 1 exits. And that director is crowned High Ruler over all of . . .

Just kidding. That’s way more exciting than what we really do, which is Zoom and email for a few more days and weeks as we collect feedback, weigh costs, and come to a consensus about what the heck we’re going to do. (Theoretically. We haven’t actually gotten that far yet, so I’m keeping my Bat’leth handy. Just in case.)

Of course, you have to remember that while all these meetings are happening, the rest of my normal job is moving forward to. Without me. Which means I have to scramble to catch up to it in all of the extra time I just have lying around.

In any case, that’s about the size of things. I have no idea if you found this remotely interesting. (Probably about as interesting as I find 4 hour Zoom meetings), but if you’re wondering why my eyes are looking a bit baggy, now you don’t have to ask . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Texas Bound for the Texas Library Association

I’ll be heading off for Fort Worth the week after next, off to speak at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. I’m excited for this for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s the obvious “getting a chance to talk to a bunch of librarians.” I might be a tad biased, but librarians are, on the whole, awesome. They’re well-read, open-minded, and fierce supporters of reading and learning. If the world were full of more librarians, it would be a better place.

But this is also going to be an in person conference, and that makes me happy for many other reasons. It’s a step back to how life “used to be.” (As an aside, I recognize that we’re never really going to go back to how things “used to be,” but the more I’ve thought about, the more I realize that’s always the case. The 80s were different than the 90s. The 2010s were different than the 2020s. There are some who long for the times when things were “better,” but so far, all I’ve seen is the selective memory of folks who focus on the things that were good and ignore the things that weren’t. When people say they want things to be how they “used to be,” they’re generally just expressing nostalgia. That said, the pandemic made things change drastically, quickly. And returning to at least some elements of how things were in 2019 and before is a welcome change.)

Where was I?

Oh yes. In person conferences. The Maine Library Association is having an in-person conference in May, and I’ll be going to that, as well. I’m considering going to ALA annual in DC. The thought of having all those book lovers in one place is pretty compelling.

For the TLA’s conference, I’m just going to be on one panel. It’s titled “Blast From the Past: YA Historical Fiction,” so it’s definitely right up my alley. If you’re in Texas April 25-28, and you’re near Fort Worth, and you’re a librarian, then come on down! I mean, technically you don’t have to be a librarian. It’ll be a fun booky conference any way you slice it, but a lot of the panels might not exactly be up your alley. “Partnering with Your Principal to Support the School Vision,” for example, or “Thinking of Changing Your Integrated Library System?”

See what you’re missing out on? Maybe you should enroll in a library studies program. Just sayin’ . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Libraries Boycotting eBooks

I’m not sure how much knowledge of this has spread outside library land, but inside library land, one of the biggest pieces of news in the last while has been centered around Macmillan Publishing’s decision to change the way it sells eBooks to public libraries.

Publishers have come up with a number of wonky ways to handle the way they sell eBooks to libraries. Some of them have done it by charging libraries more for the product, or by restricting the number of checkouts a library can let an eBook circulate for. The basic concern on the part of publishers is that people will discover libraries exist, and if it’s too easy to borrow an eBook from a library, they’ll stop buying any eBooks at all, choosing instead to just borrow the book whenever they want. With print books, there was a “shelf life” of the book: once it’s been checked out too many times, the books physically begins to fall apart. Copies get lost. They get ruined by rain. They get eaten by dogs.

Libraries have to buy more copies to replace those copies, in other words. But with eBooks, none of that happens. Publishers worry that people will just stop buying books altogether, and that the bottom line will be seriously affected. To combat this, Macmillan’s new approach is to refuse to sell libraries any eBooks until after a book has been in print for 8 weeks. Those first few weeks are crucial to a book’s success, they say, and they want to be sure libraries don’t cannibalize that success.

Of course, librarians argue that they themselves are part of a book’s success. They buy eBooks. Many, many eBooks. Readers find new authors through libraries. Libraries promote authors. It’s been a formula that’s worked well for a long, long time. They say Macmillan is doing a blatant money grab with a thinly veiled excuse that doesn’t pass muster.

And here I stand, a librarian and an author. What do I think of the whole situation?

On the one hand, part of me can see Macmillan’s point. There are certainly already models in existence that follow the new model they’d like to establish. No one complains that first run movies aren’t available in a library when they’re still in theaters. They premiere in a theater and then, months later, they’re on DVD or streaming, and that’s when people can buy them and watch them at home. Except . . .

These are books we’re talking about. When they are released, they are released in a format everyone can buy them. Libraries want to buy them. Macmillan just doesn’t want to sell them to libraries, and that feels petty and artificial. Honestly, it feels like Macmillan is stabbing a long-term partner in the back.

I buy the books I want to read. I buy almost all of them on my Kindle, because that’s the way that’s easiest for me to read them. I don’t check them out from the library, because I prefer to read what I want, when I want. I really dislike having to wait for the next book I want to read, and I like knowing I can read that book whenever I want. Yes, I know the way I read books isn’t the best way for long-term health of book stores. Giving money to Amazon isn’t nearly as good as giving money to my local bookstore. At the same time, I believe in Reading more than I believe in the business of books. People should read what they want, when they want, how they want, and no one should be sent on a guilt trip for reading the “wrong way.”

When I write books and publish books, I want people to read those books. The way that would make me the most money is if they’d buy them in hardback in the first 8 weeks of publication. That has a big impact, since it’s what makes the biggest splash (putting books on bestseller lists, catching attention, etc.) But I’m not in this game to just get as much money out of people as I can on one or two books. I’m in the long game. I want to publish more books, and the way that happens is by more and more people being exposed to my books and finding out how much they love them. (Hopefully)

There used to be four ways for people to discover new books. Libraries. Book stores. Reviews. Word of mouth. Book stores have been severely hampered the last few years, as more of the big chain stores went under, having already driven the independents under. Thankfully, there’s been signs of a growing resurgence of independents in some areas, but it’s still not back to where it was. Reviews still play a part, as does word of mouth. You could argue online stores like Amazon have taken the place of brick and mortar stores.

But any which way you slice it, libraries still play a key role in exposing readers to authors. And libraries pay for the privilege to do it. They buy the books. They talk the books up. When they succeed, publishers succeed. At first blush, I can see the argument Macmillan is making. But the more I look at it and think about it, the more preposterous it sounds. “We want to stop selling books to you, because you’re making it so too many people are reading our books.”

The more people read those books, the more fans those authors get. The more fans they get, the their books are going to be in demand. Libraries are now threatening to boycott Macmillan over this issue. If I were an author published by Macmillan, I’d be very upset over the potential loss of readers. Maybe if I were an author selling a gazillion copies of my books, I’d be upset that I wasn’t wringing every last dollar out of my potential audience that I could. But I doubt it.

For the long term health of reading and the book industry in general, libraries need to remain in the look. Macmillan is abusing a long-term ally to make some short term gains. It’s true that having their books only be available outside of libraries the first 8 weeks might make it more likely fans would want to buy a personal copy. But you know what else is out there? Pirated, free copies. Streaming has shown that if you make something available reasonably easily for not too much money, most people would be fine paying for it. If you make it expensive and difficult to obtain, more and more people will just steal it. Is that really what Macmillan wants?

True, I get that “people will just steal it” is a pretty base argument, but so is “too many people are reading our book from the library” . . .

What will I do? I’m going to continue buying books I want to read, regardless of publisher. At my heart, I’m pro-author, and I’d hate for some people’s careers to suffer because of this. (And some careers will suffer. No doubt.) I can’t blame libraries for boycotting, though. Macmillan is trying this to see what they can get away with.

Why can’t we all just get along?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Bringing Board Games to the Library

When I was down at ALA this summer, I attended a session focused on board gaming and libraries. As an academic librarian, I’ve often looked with envy at the fun activities public libraries get to run from time to time. Movie nights. Festivals. Board games. So much of what I do is focused purely on the academic side of reading. Research. Information evaluation, etc. We do a few things more slanted toward fun, but I’d never really considered board games as a good fit for the library.

But while I was at that session, I suddenly found myself questioning that assumption. Why wouldn’t board games fit with the rest of my offerings? We have space where people could play games. College students love games. We do activities from time to time focused on stress relief. What was stopping me? What’s the point in being the director of a library if you can’t bring board games into the fold?

While that thought was still fresh in my head, I went with a friend to a board game cafe. (Thirsty Dice in Philadelphia.) It’s such a great set up. You’ve got all these games waiting to be played, arranged by type of game, number of players, difficulty, length of time to play it, etc. There are “board game baristas” waiting to give game recommendations and teach people how to play if they’re not sure. You can go in and spend hours playing old favorites or learning new ones.

Wouldn’t it be great to bring that to my institution?

I’ve decided to go ahead and give it a shot. There are a couple of issues that I’m not 100% sure won’t cause problems, of course. My plan is to have the games stay in the library (non-circulating), but I’m also planning to just have them out in the general area where people can see them and use them as they wish. I debated putting them back behind the circulation desk, but in the end I thought that would make it less likely that the games get used. Of course, with them out in the open, we run the risk of the games being “permanently borrowed” or of pieces wandering off. I want to believe that won’t be a huge issue, however. It’s been my experience that board gamers want to play games. If they have a game they love, they want to own it. If they want to own it, they want a fresh, pristine game to own, and not one that’s been communally used.

In the end, I decided I’d just try it out and see how it went. I have some games I’m donating to the collection to start things off, and I might buy a few more core games to get the ball rolling. From there . . . we’ll see. See if the games get used. See if the pieces go missing. See what the response is from students. At the very least, it’ll be a fun experiment. In an ideal world, I’ll start to offer some programming around the games. Have game nights. Work with some student clubs to run activities. Foster more gaming events. If things go well, it could be a really fun addition to our offerings.

Wish me luck!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Three Days of Retreats

I’ve got three days of library retreats in front of me. That might sound like it’ll be tons of fun to some of you. “Retreat” always used to bring to mind lots of fun images. Perhaps canoeing down a river, or maybe trekking across the fields somewhere picturesque. (In fact, the first retreat I ever had in Maine involved going orienteering, which was a whole lot of fun.)

I’m not going to say these retreats (one of which is two days, and one of which is one day) will be no fun at all. I’ve got friends who will be at both of them, and no doubt there will be laughter and food, but there’s also going to be meetings. Lots and lots of long meetings, full of sitting and talking. You see, these days, the meaning of the word “retreat” in my life has somehow changed to become synonymous with “day long meetings that involve free food.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of free food. (Perhaps too big a fan of it, if we’re being honest.) But I’m also not a fan of long meetings. Your brain starts turning to jello about four hours into a long meeting, which as around the time you realize at a retreat that you’ve got another four hours to go, and that resolution you made to stop at one brownie was pretty much laughable. You’re going to need five or six to get through this day.

“But Bryce!” you say. “You’ll be away from the office! Won’t it be great to have a change of pace? Mix things up a bit?” Typically, I’d agree with you. When the retreats line up in a row like this, however, I begin to feel a little daunted. Am I up to that much retreating? At some point, if you retreat too much, isn’t that considered a bad thing? Isn’t retreating cowardly?

The courageous thing to do would be to take a stand against retreat, I say. To plant my flag firmly in the soil and declare, “No! We’re not doing another one of these things unless it involves a canoe or a compass!” To stand like Gandalf before the Balrog that is twenty-one hours of meeting and boldly tell those hours to go back to the shadow. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.

But who am I kidding? Not only do I not have the flame of Anor tucked away in a pocket somewhere, I’m fresh out of flags to plant. And to be honest, there are actually important things these meetings need to get accomplished. Will there be padding? Sure. But we’ll also get some good stuff done. It’s the price we pay for progress.

So forgive me if I’m blog silent the next few days. I’ll be stuffing my face with brownies and doing my best to somehow get through so much retreating. Here’s hoping I don’t just retreat in one big circle and end up right where I started.

Wish me luck.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.