Wherefore art thou Mentor?

Yes, I have been assigned a mentor but she is persona non-visible. She did stop in my office once since I have been here and tell me I should join the county library association. Not so sure about that advice? Other than that, I see Sleepy only at library meetings – otherwise it is behind closed doors for her. I am not sure why. Maybe:

• She doesn’t like her fellow faculty members.
• She is very introverted.
• She just likes to keep a low profile – no one knows what you are doing, no questions about what you are doing…

Compulsive Book Shuffling

Staff I

As part of Program Review, I need to speak with each staff person and get sense of what they do, any concerns that they have about their work processes and hopefully get them to buy into the documenting of their workflows. Steady doesn’t believe that they will cooperate so my first question is “why not?”

What is up with the staff. Twitchy says they have withdrawn and no one knows why; it is a big mystery…
I have heard them say that they are afraid to complain about anything because something bad will happen. Like what, I wonder?

Schedules Abound

Library is schedule obsessed. We keep Outlook schedules and Reference schedules and Instruction schedules and an odd schedule on another drive in Word table format. Why, you (and I) ask? The only answer I got was that we have always done it that way and we will continue to do it that way – with an implied “Stop asking questions.”

Weeding – Long Overdue

I don’t know when the last weeding of the collection was done. It has been a long while since. It seems that it is not a priority and why would it be? It is not something that has an obvious parallel to other faculty’s responsibilities.

It is actually considered a professional responsibility but the library faculty do not seem willing to spend their precious time on something that they have to defend as a necessary part of our job. I see this as another conflict for faculty librarians. They want so badly to “look” like other faculty members that they trivialize or just ignore those tasks that are specific to our jobs. Most of these tasks seem to be oriented toward the technical services of Library.