Alaska Bush Library Service

I gave a presentation at the Alaska Library Association conference last weekend. This week I will give another one today for the Alaska Society for Technology Education.  One of the interesting aspects of the two presentations is finding out who wants to know more about this program.

One colleague ask me to make sure that I mentioned how much time this has taken for me.  She wanted to make sure that I had talked about both sides of instituting Koha.  I did mention it because I know thatI need to rein in my enthusiasm for this program.  Five people attended the session at the library conference.  It will be fun to see how many people are at the session today.

I did have one librarian let me know that she was driving up to Anchorage a day early for a meeting so that she can be here this afternoon.  She wasn’t at the session in Juneau because she knew I would be here.  That gets logged as on of the biggest ego boosters I have had in this process.

Monday starts the training sessions with library aides.  They make a normal group of people when it comes to technology.  Some are raring to go with the program, some are willing to get into it, and some aren’t interested in it at all.

For the last week and a half I have been fixing MARC records in my spare time.  This means I take my computer home each night and purge lines that shouldn’t be in the records for hours each night.  Note to self, never make broad based copying in database records.  Each book record should have one line for each thing with very few exceptions.

The records look good, but not great.  My problem now is that I want them to look great.  I will upload what I have today and call it quits on editing records for four to five months.  I still have changes that I want to make so that it looks more like a union catalog rather than a collection of individual records.

Library conference is a week from now.  I have three or four posters to get ready and two Powerppoints to prepare.  The good news is that two thirds of my desk is clean.  Here is to working on the third part today.

I have to know when not to be bothered when a principal wants to talk about a program that I oversee.  Yesterday I had a pleasant surprise when a principal wanted to talk about the Battle of the Books program because participation is down.  He didn’t want to give me a hard time, he wants to talk to others in our district about why and what we can do about it.  I don’t know why my first thought is that someone wants to get on my case.   The results are in from the meeting, it seems that students these days have a lot of options now that they didn’t have before.  Participation in all activities seem to be down.