What I further found funny was the fact that I had to wake up a kid from sleeping  the other day.  I told him you couldn’t sleep in the Library and he said “Really, we are not allowed to sleep?”  And I thought, No, you are supsosed to be studying Mr.-I-have-2-AP-classes-and-Honors-Chemistry.  It made me chuckle really.

I have really clamped down on drinks in the Library.  There is a tea shop across the street and seniors go there and bring back drinks for other classmates who can’t leave campus.  One girl had a tea and I told her it had to be taken outside the Library and left on the table.  She looked at me said “Ok” and then went back to typing and made no movement to do what I asked.  So I stood there and said “I meant now.”  She looked startled and said “Oh ok” and then complied.  In the future I guess I need to be explicit.

Another girl had a container with a snap top and I told her the same thing.  She said, “but its not tea, its water and its empty.  See?” and then she proceeded to turn it upside down.

It was not water, it was tea.

And it was not totally empty.

Needless to say she was embarrassed but got the point.

In other news I was given permission to order the spine labels I need from Demco but I have to go through their Taiwan supplier.  I was also given permission to order some other labels I need but found out they do not do wire transfers so I need to talk to the accountant at school and see if we can pay with a credit card or paypal.

Most of the elementary classes have come into the Library this week.  I explained to them the rules and let them look around.  Hopefully next week I’ll have enough books on the shelves for them to check out.  I have to stop processing books though cause I ran out of book tape and am waiting for that to arrive.  I should have checked the other day to see how many rolls of book tape we had, but I didn’t think about it.  Had I done that i would have realized we only had the 1 roll and i could have ordered more before I ran out.  So I ordered 4 rolls this time and will make sure that I don’t run out.

The kids start next week so I am gearing up for that. I made rules based on what the staffs aid the problems were last year and posted them.  I think the main problem was the kids were expected to use the Library as study  hall but it sounds like they were unsupervised.  I hope my presence can help them be focused and make the Library a useful space.

In other news, I successfully inventoried all the books on the shelf.  I know that Follett Destiny keeps track of your collection, but while checking in a stack of books I found a number of them that were not in the system.  Plus, one whole section of the Children’s picture books were not in the system.  So I spent the last week and a half scanning every book in the Library.  I found a good deal that had barcodes but had not been cataloged.  So I think my first step will be to get those taken care of.  We have about  7,000 books on the shelf now.  I am excited to see how many I’ll add to the system in the next few weeks.

I me the Secondary school teachers this week.  They all seem nice and I think I’ll get along with them.  They have been in the Library and we have talked about what they expect from me and the Library.  I can’t really order new books now because there is such a backlog.  But hopefully once I get things paired down we can order more things.

The school is nice.  I am not sure if it is bigger than I expected or smaller, but it is a good size I think.  I saw the Library and there is a lot to do.  There are boxes of books that need to be cataloged and processed.  Over 30 boxes of withdrawn and discarded books donated by another international school plus over 30 new books that were purchased by the school from Scholastic over the last few years.

I can tell it is going to take a long time, but hopefully I’ll be able to get it in shape soon.

Hsinchu is known for its high-tech sector (the “Hsinchu Science Park”) and has offices of many foreign companies there, both business. manufacturing and some R&D. The school I’ll be at (Hsinchu International School) was founded by the Dutch company Phillips, for the purpose of educating the children of their employees. Phillips no longer has as strong a presence in Hsinchu, but the school remains, as does its mission and its original name.

Image from http://www.pin1yin1.com

So while people call it “Hsinchu International School”, its legal name is still “Hsinchu Dutch International School”.  There are a few other schools focused on foreign education in Hsinchu: “Hsinchu American School” (which today I found out will be where another friend will be teaching) and “Pacific American School” .

It has been very hot in Taiwan lately and friends report it to be about as hot as it has been here in Pennsylvania which I find interesting because the fount of all internet wisdom (wikipedia) claims Hsinchu has a nickname of “The Windy City” which would make me think it is cooler, but I guess sometimes the internet is wrong.

And in case you wondered: Hsinchu [spelled Xinzhu in Hanyu Pinyin and not Wade-Giles] 新竹,  literally means “new bamboo”.  Two of the surrounding suburbs mean respectively, “North Bamboo” (竹北) and “East Bamboo” (竹東).  Can you guess where they are in relation to Hsinchu?

I was able to go to sessions on nurturing early reading habits, including programs that could be done at school and at home and a few on helping ESL learners to read. I was also able to meet a few other international school librarians which was beneficial. I had planned to blog more about it, but like all other conferences I was too tired at the end of the day to do so. I did offer a few tweets from a few of the sessions, so I guess that counts?

Right now I am just focusing on going to Taiwan in 2 and a half weeks to begin my new job. I am very anxious and excited to go.

At the Conference the opening session was given by Mary Matalin and James Carville. They spoke mostly on how the diminishing number of media outlets is actually causing a rise in independent news sources, but not a rise in more news stories. Most of the news outlets are covering the same stories rather than causing more coverage of new events. Towards the end, James Carville spoke passionately about the need for more action to help Louisiana. He wrote an article for the Times-Picayune [link] as well as a longer version that appeared on CNN [link].

Mr. Carville makes some good points but I would illuminate them here. I’ll leave that to others, as that is not the point of this blog. But his comments were further illuminated in a session I attended where Drs. Ivor van Heerden and Stephen Nelson spoke on the geological problems associated with New Orleans as well as how they were ignored by the Army Corps of Engineers. Their slide decks have not been put online yet, but Dr. van Heerden has written a book (which I just began reading) which discusses many of the same issues. It is called The Storm and so far seems pretty good. An interesting New York Times article can be found here as well.

All in all, it was fascinating to go to SLA. It was also timely (although the conference was planned over a year ago) that it was held in New Orleans as the gulf is once again embroiled in another disaster. And even then, more drama ensued.

Blah, blah, blah.

I didn’t believe it when it first started in the late 90′s with the first eBooks. I was working at a Library that bought 6 of them and loaded them with genre related materials (one was SciFi, the other Mystery, etc.) and made them available to check out. We had a long procedure for checking them in and out (making sure there was this cord and that cord and the stylus…). And as I recall from distant days I think I only saw them checked out a handful of times. After a year or so, they were not requested and that was the end of that.

Fast forward 10 years to today. Technology has improved, people are more tech savvy (maybe? we hope?) and eBooks have taken off. [They have even been made fun of as seen in this comic] I’ve seen people on the train reading from their kindle or iPad. I’ve been a little envious, but I am not an early adopter kind of person. So when my Grandpa hinted that I might be getting an eBook reader for graduation (“Every new Librarian ought to know how to use one” he said) I hopped on the web to see which ones my local public library offered.

Turns out, they don’t.

In fact none of the Libraries in the consortium (3 counties with a total of 22 Libraries) do. So I sent a suggestion. They use overdrive for their audiobooks, so why not add eBooks to the repertoire? Money. The response was as follows:

“[The Libraries] made a decision to keep the focus to audiobooks at this time because the budget for the collections we purchase for use with this service is very limited and [we] don’t want to dilute the value we are providing in audio content, and no additional funds for ebook format have been made available.”

I can respect the funding issue, especially given the budget cuts that surround us. But I don’t think adding eBooks to the collection would dilute the audio collection. Certainly it would if you gut the audio section, but this is about collection management. Everyone knows that not every audiobook you buy (or every print book for that matter) is sought after. I have seen some audiobooks that have only been checked out 3 or 4 times in the course of a year. The same goes for printed books. So for a Library to say they don’t want to damage the audio content collection seems a little of base to me. Further more, it alienates the “new” reader who might not have used the Library before.

Maybe the new reader is used to purchasing books from Amazon or some other vendor and reading them on their new eBook reader. What if you offered them to check it out FOR FREE at the public library. Just as simple as purchasing it online, and you can count it as a book circulation just like those audiobooks. Why not?

How can Libraries provide what their patrons want if they aren’t willing to take a risk and offer it? Who knows, they might find eBooks check out more than audiobooks. But if you don’t offer it you’ll never know. As for me, this Librarian who is pretty darn inclined to use his public library, now has one less reason to.

For those of my readers who are at this moment thinking, “Is he crazy?!” I can assure you that, yes I am. No, not really. Many of you might not know that from November 2007-2008 I lived in Taipei, Taiwan and studied Mandarin Chinese. Since that time I have sought a way to merge my two loves of Libraries and Chinese together. This job affords me that chance.

The school is an English-taught school so I wont use my Chinese during the day, but maybe I will as some of the younger students are still learning English. The staff and students are from all over the world, and this excites me.

I will be responsible for cataloging a processing a backlog of books that were ordered by the previous Librarian who was only there last year for a couple of months. I’ll also be responsible for developing the rest of the collection and helping provide the materials the teachers need for their curriculum.

The city is an hour southwest of Taipei where i lived before. A few of my friends from Taipei are now in Hsinchu so I hope to reconnect with hem. I’ll also make occasional forays into Taipei and of course explore more of Taiwan than I did before.

Hsinchu is known as the Silicon Valley of Asia so it is modern and there are a number of foreigners there. I am sure I wont have any problem settling in.

I will be returning in October to present as part of a panel at the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference and am quite excited to do that.

As always you can contact me by commenting or sending me a message on twitter.

What opponents don’t take into account is the current job market. I have been looking for a job for over 8 months. I have applied for over 80 jobs. I would have applied for more, but there weren’t any more to apply for. I have applied for jobs in small towns, big towns, towns in the middle of no where, towns in towns where I didn’t want to live. Yet nothing.

The problem is there are simply no entry level Librarian jobs out there. Too many large libraries have cut funding and cut budgets causing a glut of unemployed Librarians with experience. These Librarians are the ones getting the jobs over newly minted Librarians. When I attended PLA I talked to Librarians from all over the US, and they concurred. They said they would rather hire a Librarian with the 2-5 years experience, because quite frankly, they were willing to be paid as much as a new entry level Librarian.

Forbes recently called the MLS one of the Worst Degrees to have a Masters in [source] . I am not sure why they said that. Is it because we don’t get paid much? Is it because there are cuts all over? Or is it because there are no jobs for new entry level people? It is hard to say but logic follows: if there are not entry level jobs, why produce more Librarians?

I know people are attached to their Alma matters.  But who are the ones having a fuss about he program closing?  Are it the current students? Are it the alumni (who all have jobs)?  I for one think the job market is too tight to have any more Librarians minted because I for one would like to find a job.

[Andy on Agnostic, Maybe has written a similar post on why some public libraries should be closed for now]