Job Satisfaction + New Job

I think it's a safe assumption to make on this blog that we all got into librarianship out of a love for the work, and not out of a love of money or fame or something. Unless some of you are rich and famous librarians and are holding out on me. Either way, I went to library school because I like libraries and wanted to work in one. Or, at least, I wanted to do something librarianship-related, in a library or outside of one. I never went in thinking "I will only work in a traditional library!"

Unfortunately, a combination of the bad economy, my self/relationship-imposed geographic limitations, and my relative inexperience as a librarian made it incredibly difficult to find any sort of meaningful work. As you know, I ended up working in customer service at a company that sells library supplies. As many of you also know, I have not enjoyed my time in customer service, for a number of reasons. The work is frequently dull, repetitive, frustrating, and unrewarding, and although our customers are librarians and therefore usually great, I frequently deal with them when they are frustrated or angry. It's the first time in my life I have ever been really dissatisfied with the work I was doing, and it has been hard on me.

The last few weeks I have been helping our international sales department, because I speak Spanish (not fluently) and the native-speaker who is a pillar of the department was out of the office. I was essentially doing a chunk of her job on top of mine, which was overwhelming (and probably how it feels for a lot of librarians who are dealing with layoffs of coworkers) but much more rewarding. The work was more interesting, and I was dealing with customers all over the world. I also got to use my Spanish several times a day. I'm back to doing my regular work for a little while now, but I realized how much I miss Spanish and will be making sure to stay in practice, since it apparently can come in handy.

But the best and biggest change is that I will finally be moving to a new department! I applied and interviewed for another position when it was posted, and I accepted it on Friday. Starting soon, I will be an Associate Product Manger for archival products. My new position will involve a lot of marketing, which I have less experience with, but I think it will be a good thing to learn. There are definitely some drawbacks to getting this job as opposed to some of the others I have tried for outside of the company, but there are a heck of a lot of positives. I am hoping that the biggest positive will be a dramatic increase in my job satisfaction, since I had strongly felt the lack of that in my life. I will be working with a team of people who seem absolutely amazing, and I will be doing more direct work with archival materials than before, which I think will be interesting and will serve me well in my career.

I am still interested in finding a place where I can have my relationship, meaningful work, and more sunshine than I get now, but for the meantime, this change seems good and much-needed.

Reference Question of the Day*

I had my first reference question at work yesterday! I was very excited. Since I work at a digital archive without physical holdings, I get very little direct patron interaction. It was kind of surprising to pick up the phone and find a real live patron on the end of the line.

I was nervous because I am not a subject specialist, and I'm still very much "learning the ropes" here. I'm not sure how the caller reached me, as he didn't seem to know who I am, but I suspect he called in on the general phone line and the receptionist (who's a friend) transferred him to me.

This patron was looking for help doing research in archives in the Ukraine. He explained that he was doing family research, specifically looking for more information about a relative who spent time in a gulag. I asked for his contact information and told him I would confer with my coworkers and get back to him shortly.

I asked around and found out that none of my coworkers has experience in Ukraine. Unfortunately, we have a very limited collection of Ukrainian documents (mostly from other countries) and don't have any strong links with archives there.

I didn't want to go back to him empty handed, so I did some quick research on our website and the web in general, and sent him the following information:

Hello Mr. Patron,

This is Laura Deal at the Cold War International History Project. I talked to my coworkers about your request, but unfortunately none of them has any experience with archives in Ukraine.

Ukraine's State Archives does have a good English website with contact information and advice for researchers: http://www.archives.gov.ua/Eng/ There are also many amateur genealogy sites on the web that offer suggestions for doing research in Ukraine, although I can't vouch for their accuracy.

At CWIHP itself, we don't have many Ukrainian documents, but some of them may be of interest to you, if you haven't looked already: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=va2.browse&sort=Coverage&item=Ukraine,%20Socialist%20Soviet%20Republic,

See this one in particular: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=va2.document&identifier=84E121B6-DB9C-2470-23741CA05745B42E&sort=Coverage&item=Ukraine,%20Socialist%20Soviet%20Republic,

Also, two years ago the Kennan Institute at Wilson Center launched a cooperative online exhibit with several gulag memorials/museums that might be of interest: http://gulaghistory.org/

I wish I could be more helpful. Good luck with your search and please let me know if you have any other questions.

I wanted to analyze our interaction a bit, so I dug up my old Reference 101 notes and looked up the stages of the reference interview:

1. Welcoming

Well, I kind of failed at this one. I forgot to introduce myself until the end of our conversation, although I did explain a bit about our archive to give him some context.

2. Gathering general information from the user and getting an overview of the problem

In retrospect, I wish I'd let him talk longer and explain his query in more detail. I was a little too over-eager to interrupt and say, "Yes, I think I can help with that!"

3. Confirming the exact question

Next time, I need to remember to repeat the question back at the patron and confirm that I understood them.

4. Intervention, like giving information, advice or instructions
5. Finishing, including feedback and summary

I think I did okay at these two, giving information/advice and providing a summary of our interaction.

Anyone else doing reference at their workplace? I really enjoy helping people with research, so I hope I get more questions in the future.


*Don't know if reference questions will become a regular feature for Klub Kat, but the title is an homage to Brian Herzog's awesome Reference Question of the Week posts on Swiss Army Librarian.

kopyright konundrum

Everything we learned in library school about copyright has boiled down into a lump of mush in my head, and that lump of mush doesn't like to be bothered. When I try to touch it, it just yells at me: "copyright is complicated! this is the real world, not some theoretical discussion! ask an expert! don't get us sued!"

So, here is what I came up against the other day.

A fairly famous vegetarian restaurant that we all know and love donated its archive to our library. It's great stuff -- menus, photos, artwork, correspondence, a handbook of policies -- and I got to do my favorite part of my job, going through it and pulling out fun little vignettes and stories to try to figure out what would get the media interested in covering the donation and the history of the restaurant.

To tell the story, I'd want to use both direct quotes and images from the collection. Some of the stuff is private and has never been published; some of it was "published" in the sense that it was distributed and made accessible but not in an official way by a publishing company (like a handbook of policies or flyers that were hung up around town); some of it is sort of published in an official way (like drafts of original artwork for a t-shirt design); some of it is definitely published and is still certainly in copyright (like actual pages from cookbooks).

What to do, here? Part of the question is whether we have permission from the donor. The gift policy, which I've heard about but not read myself, apparently does state that we can do what we want with donated materials, but it seems strange not to at least ask (tell?) the donor that we're planning to release things to the public.

Even if we do have explicit or tacit permission from the donor, though... can things that were never officially published be in copyright? What if it's an early version of something that was eventually published in slightly different form? What about personal (non-embarrassing, but still) images of people who are still around and might very well see them, if the publicity thing is successful?

The lump of mush is happy to know that these questions have been submitted to our copyright expert for official guidance and it will not be held responsible, but I think it's interesting/sad/weird/bad that this stuff is so complicated. Not me, or my very smart and experienced supervisor, or the curator of the collection, or the university archivist actually feels confident enough to answer them. I will report back when the expert weighs in.