April has begun, and though the average temperature is still in the 40’s, we’ve at least chased away most of the snow. Even so, when I had the pleasure last week of attending the Michigan Library Association’s Spring Institute – a conference for youth and children’s librarians and library staff – the view from my 15th floor window showed a few too many specks of white falling past.
Since I am so new to library work, last week was both especially fun and increasingly tough. We started the week off by closing the library to train the staff for the catalog migration that was implemented on Wednesday. Then, soon after the migration we discovered that well over 1,000 patron records had been compromised during the switch and went about fixing them. While everyone else continued working on that for the rest of the week, I got to travel up to Battle Creek, MI for Spring Institute, where six talks per day informed me of the latest innovations in the younger generations’ library services. Talk about a lot of learning!
SI was incredibly fun, and I got to meet fun authors like Susin Nielsen and Jim Benton. Nielsen’s book The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen won the MLA Thumbs Up Award this year. (I’ve since read it, and it’s quite good!) I also met many other fun people who work in libraries all over the state of Michigan – including one library that services an entire county, including a real-life ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE that has 30 students K-8th grade! Who knew places like that still existed?
After a full week of workplace learning, I almost feel like I need to learn it all again. So much was crammed into my head in so short a time that it’s hard to tell if anything stuck! But one thing I know for sure that I learned, and won’t be soon forgetting, is that I love that I’ve been given the opportunity to work among such an awesome group of people. Library people are awesome! They are people who love to knit and craft and do cool science-y stuff with kids. They love the work they do and love going to conferences to chat with others who do the same kind of stuff. But they’re also the kind of people who can write the entirety of The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory during a one hour session that doesn’t interest them. Prufrock!
In short I can safely say that for the first time ever I’m glad I work where I do, with the kind of people who really like working there, too. Yay libraries!