Modernizing Your Budget

Most librarians will stay well within the strict confines of their given budgets, which is the worst thing you can possibly do. If you run out of money in the book budget, the salary budget, paper for the copier, paper clips, etc, it's your own fault. Instead, staff the library 24-hours-a-day, let the water in the bathroom sink run like Niagara Falls, buy up really expensive rare volumes of manuscripts you don't even need and make sure that every computer station has a 30" flatscreen monitor and an Ipod. You'll be out of money by the end of the first fiscal quarter, necessitating your parent company to tap into the emergency fund, and probably quadrupling the budget for next year. They're never going to give you more money because you asked for it, you've got to show them that you need a bigger budget. Some librarians actually take pride in running a leaner department (or 'doing more with less,' as the kids say nowadays). Those librarians are doing everyone a real disservice. Take a cue from our Republican friends: running up huge deficits is cool. You want to be cool, right?

Updating Your Dumb Blog at Work

One word: Don't!

Bathroom Breaks, Taking More Than You Need When Working With Annoying Co-Workers

Feel free to just leave the reference desk for 15...hell, 20 minutes at a time when working alongside annoying co-workers. If pressured to provide your whereabouts, your excuse will be: "I have a bad case of the shits, dude."

Utilization, Using the word

Something they should teach in library school...

u til ize (tr. v.) To put to use, esp. to find a profitable or practical use for.

USAGE NOTE: Many critics regard utilize as an unnecessary and pretentious substitute for use. But this is not true in all cases. Utilize can mean "to find a profitable or practical use for." Thus, the sentence The teachers were unable to use the new computers might mean only that the teachers were unable to operate the computers, whereas The teachers were unable to utilize the new computers suggests that the teachers could not find ways to employ the computers in instruction.

From The American Heritage College Dictionary. 4th edition.

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Resume, Updating your

An academic librarian shouldn't have a resume, but a curriculum vitae. This is apparently Latin for "long boring resume" and can be referred to as a "C.V." for short. A CV should contain a list of every meeting you've ever attended, every association you've ever been on the mailing list for, and every time you've spoken within earshot of your Dean or Department Head. Ever written a letter to the editor of your local weekly newspaper? Heck, throw that in too!

CVs, being longer than traditional one-page resumes, require more than the traditional one-page cover letter. You should try to summarize -- in narrative form -- every single item that is listen on your CV. Brevity won't get you a job, but prosaic self-congratulation will!

Expert search committee member,
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Professional Associations, On Avoiding Like the Plague

Professional Associations can provide valuable information, opportunity for networking, the wherewithal to consolidate opinions, and the ability to form or change paradigms within a professional field, except in Library and Information Science. Avoid all library associations as if they were deadly diseases, even if your employer pays the bill. A good librarian boycotts these aloof cliques in order to one day start up a totally new rad association for librarians who are fed up with the present 'system.' Such future association might be named Nü Skool Liberians or possibly Infopro's On Da Loose or some other similar awesomely-named title. There might be a microchip implanted under the member's skin for identification purposes (thereby making sure that old-schoolers don't try to infiltrate the new association).

Meetings, How to have effective

Are you finding that your meetings aren't as effective as they could be? Here's plan!

1. Have a pre-meeting meeting to discuss what will happen in the meeting.
2. Have the meeting (as usual).
3. Have a post-meeting meeting to discuss what just happened at that meeting.
   

This works best when the three meetings are back-to-back-to-back. Also, a change of scenery helps give attendees a fresh perspective, so move the meetings from room-to-room.

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