#chronicles of a queer library tech

[cumulohimbus]

It took me three days of drafting the email that would go out to all campus employees about the new reference collection I purchased for our library with the grant money I was awarded. I was real nervous to hit send on it bc I heard there's someone in administration talking about libraries being/becoming obsolete and admin are the ones who run everything and insisted almost the entirety of our former collection be uncataloged the past couple years.

I ended up getting so many sweet responses from coworkers across a number of different departments over the course of the afternoon though that I started tearing up. I'm so happy that there are people on campus who still care about our library and support me in the work I'm doing to try to bring it back to life. Preserving our library and providing our students with a safe, comfortable environment and accessible information means everything to me.

[dazzledbybooks]

The Lunar Chronicles meets Rook in this queer #OwnVoices science-fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer and Sharon Cameron. A secret beats inside Anna Thatcher's chest: an illegal clockwork heart. Anna works cog by cog -- donning the moniker Technician -- to supply black market medical technology to the sick and injured, against the Commissioner's tyrannical laws. Nathaniel Fremont, the Commissioner's son, has never had to fear the law. Determined to earn his father's respect, Nathaniel sets out to capture the Technician. But the more he learns about the outlaw, the more he questions whether his father's elusive affection is worth chasing at all. Their game of cat and mouse takes an abrupt turn when Eliza, a skilled assassin and spy, arrives. Her mission is to learn the Commissioner's secrets at any cost -- even if it means betraying her own heart. When these uneasy allies discover the most dangerous secret of all, they must work together despite their differences and put an end to a deadly epidemic -- before the Commissioner ends them first. Tarnished Are the Stars by Rosiee Thor Publisher: Scholastic Press Release Date: October 15th 2019 Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction, LGBT Links: Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43319680-tarnished-are-the-stars Amazon: https://amzn.to/2HbLT7j B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tarnished-are-the-stars-rosiee-thor/1130053238#/ Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/tarnished-are-the-stars Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Tarnished_Are_the_Stars.html?id=TJKCDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y Favorite Quotes: "For your tech-related inquiries, see a consultant when the moon sleeps and the kettle sings. It is a long four to the short nine." "Beneath the panel, a familiar machine ticked. Silver sheets fanned out like flower petals, interwoven with scarred flesh; the marks of metal from long ago still bloomed angry-red on his skin." "He wished she wouldn't. he did not deserve to be touched, marred by dirt and filth and the kind of blood no one could see." Review: Tarnished are the Stars by Rosiee Thor is such a great read. I really liked these characters so much. I really love Eliza but I will try not to play favorites. Let's dive right in to this great book. Anna has a mechanical heart. She tries very hard to keep her TICCER a secret. This one difference sets her apart from other people on the planet. I think it truly makes her special. Anna being a gear head wants to help everyone she can with technology that has been outlawed. If Anna were to get caught using this technology, she would die. Anna thinks the people are worth that risk. I really liked Anna's character because she is brave and determined. She wants to do what is right by the people even if it would cost her life. Nathaniel is on the hunt to catch The Technician. He wants to prove to his father that he  is able to take over the family business. Nathaniel just wants to be understood and treated like an adult. His father The Commisioner likes to keep him locked up. Once Nathaniel learns that he and Anna have something in common, he wants to learn more. Eliza works for the Queen. She is the eyes and ears. I think Eliza's story is very interesting because one minute she is an assassin and spy and then the next she is supposed to be engaged and reporting back to the queen. I feel like s hew went from having kickass experiences to pretending to settle down. I really loved how Eliza's personality just screamed off the page. I felt like I really got to know her and I want more. This book was so good. I really enjoyed the characters and the story line. I was routing for these characters the whole way even though at times they all wanted something different. Tarnished are the Stars definitely surprised me. You get some sci-fi, some fantasy, some steampunk, some romance, and even some adventure if this novel. I swear it has it all. Definitely pick up a copy today. I can't wait until Rosiee Thor's next book. She is an author to watch. Character Art: About the Author: Rosiee Thor began her career as a storyteller by demanding that her mother listen as Rosiee told bedtime stories instead of the other way around. She lives in Oregon with a dog, two cats, and four complete sets of Harry Potter, which she loves so much, she once moved her mattress into the closet and slept there until she came out as queer. Links: Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18157283.Rosiee_Thor Website: http://www.rosieethor.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosieethor Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosieethor/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosiee.thor Giveaway: Prize: Win a signed hardcopy of TARNISHED ARE THE STARS by Rosiee Thor (US Only) Stars: 15th October 2019 Ends: 29th October 2019 a Rafflecopter giveaway Tour Schedule: https://fantasticflyingbookclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/tour-schedule-tarnished-are-stars-by.html October 15th The Unofficial Addiction Book Fan Club - Welcome Post October 16th Utopia State of Mind - Guest Post Moonlight Rendezvous - Review + Favourite Quotes Book-Keeping - Review everywhere and nowhere - Review A Dream Within A Dream - Review October 17th L.M. Durand - Interview Luchia Houghton Blog - Review + Favourite Quotes Dazzled by Books - Review + Favourite Quotes Pages Below the Vaulted Sky - Review The Reading Chemist  - Promotional Post October 18th BookCrushin - Guest Post Novelishly - Review My Thoughts Literally - Review + Favourite Quotes TBR and Beyond - Review + Playlist + Favourite Quotes Fanna Wants The World To Read - Review October 19th Here's to Happy Endings - Review Morgan Vega - Review + Favourite Quotes Starlight Reads - Review + Favourite Quotes Arzo Reads - Review Confessions of a YA Reader - Promotional Post October 20th NovelKnight - Interview Bookishly Nerdy - Review The Layaway Dragon - Review + Favourite Quotes Musings of a (Book) Girl - Review One in a Million - Review October 21st Kait Plus Books - Interview Shalini's Books & Reviews - Review The Book Dutchesses  - Review + Favourite Quotes Novel Nerd Faction - Review + Playlist Library of a Book Witch - Review

http://www.dazzledbybooks.com/2019/10/tarnished-are-stars-blog-tour-review.html

[cumulohimbus]

In the 12th month of employment my workplace gave to me:

12 login errors

11 uncomfy chairs

10 cancelled events

9 printer jams

8 impatient teachers

7 greedy vendors

6 spammy phone calls

5 broken links

4 work study students

3 mismatched bookshelves

2 squeaky stepstools

1 lifetime's worth of chronic fatigue

[cumulohimbus]

I vet open educational resources as part of my job.

DO NOT USE PDFDRIVE.COM!

There is a high risk of your computer being infected with malware from pdfdrive.com.

I have looked at the other resources in this list as well, and so far they seem safe. 

Can for sure be trusted: worldcat.org (this is used in many academic and school libraries).

Almost certainly safe: bioline.org.br (run by scientists and librarians; a collaborative initiative between Bioline Toronto management office and the Reference Center on Environmental Information in Brazil), repec.org (created and run by volunteers and seems legit, if also complicated), science.gov (made available through an agency of the US government).

Probably safe, but be cautious: refseek.com (links to a number of reference resources like encyclopedias, dictionaries, and various other sites, a number of which I recognized and know to be safe), link.springer.com (part of Springer Nature, which is a research group, and whose home site seems to be safe; though I am wary of sites that offer free textbook chapters and the like - I would instead recommend starting with Springer Nature’s home site (https://www.springernature.com/gp) and going from there.

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

[cumulohimbus]

The Higher Learning Commission was in for a reaccreditation visit at my workplace today and a couple of students had lunch with them. When I showed up to the forum time for the EDI committee and bias incident report team, the peer reviewers told me I had a lot to be proud of because the students said a number of positive things about me and the library I run during their lunch. 😭

[cumulohimbus]

Fantastic work news today. Government bonding bill passed approving funding for the college to build a new facility and move their transportation and mechanics trade programs department into it. This means those programs will get upgrades to their space, and it means the college will be able to pursue funding for a new entrance to their main campus and a much larger, much more central student support commons, which would, in theory, include the library!!

[cumulohimbus]

This is my second time participating on higher ed job search committees, and let me just say, somehow this time is so much worse.

The search committees are for faculty positions...

(I'm just...I'm just the library guy, okay? I don't know everything that goes into lesson planning and stuff, but I'm doing my best. I wanted to be a teacher at one point too, maybe I still kinda do, but libraries are my new baby and it means I get to hang out with teachers anyways.)

I'm not allowed to say a ton because of confidentiality rules, but I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to say that it breaks my heart to read all these peoples' cover letters and CVs and have to grade them on who goes above and beyond the most. Like, they're all teachers, none of them are applying because they're looking for tons of money. They're all just talking about how much they love teaching. Some want to give up their current higher paying positions to go back to teaching because they love it so much. Some have compelling cover letters, some just wrote like three sentences. Some have fancy resumes/CVs, some are super plain. It makes me nauseous thinking about the possibility that the perfect fit for the job won't get interviewed because their little collection of pdfs didn't pander enough to the hoity-toity bureaucracy of higher ed.

All I know is I would give every single one of them an interview if I could, just to meet them and hear them talk about how much they love teaching. Fuck man...

[cumulohimbus]

Sometimes everything is kinda shit, but thankfully shit is a pretty decent growing medium so sometimes a cool plant grows out of it.

I got news today that my temp part-time library tech contract is not only being extended, but in many ways I'm being offered a promotion. They're creating a seasonal full-time library tech position that will give me approximately a 33% salary increase, plus health and retirement benefits, vacation time, and access to the union.

In a lot of ways this creates additional stressors for me, but in a lot of other ways it is extremely positive news, and it does relieve one of the more immediate massive stressors that's been keeping me up at night as I no longer have uncertainty about my employment for the next year.

Today has been okay. TvT

[cumulohimbus]

Stuck indoors yesterday, today, and probably tomorrow due to blizzard (and my vehicle that is literally rotting into oblivion). I hope my cat knows he's mandated to be present in any/all of my meetings since I'm working from home...

Gonna be working on libguides and a library escape room for National Library Week in April.

[cumulohimbus]

Gonna try to be as slick about this as possible bc I have zero intention of promoting or even mentioning anything related to works by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I'll be working on something in the library and get someone asking me for help finding access to the full text of an article, and every time I successfully locate said article, I hear in my head the guy from Starkid's AVPM saying "librarians are particularly good finders". If you know, you know.

Also, please, for the love of all that is good, send me better catchphrase ideas from something not related to HP/JKR.

[cumulohimbus]

Me: "Libraries are a vital component of Equity/Diversity/Inclusion work and initiatives. They teach information literacy and the skills to search for resources that a person may otherwise not know they have access to. They advocate for free, open access to high quality learning and practical everyday resources. They archive and uplift the voices of marginalized people. Our administration has a strategic plan based around EDI; it gets a lot of attention and resources. I think we should include our library in that plan. It will make it difficult for both our EDI initiatives and our library to be removed and/or continuously downsized in the future."

Someone Else (Willingly) in my EDI/Library Project Group: "Why does the library have to be an EDI thing? Why can't it be for everyone?"

Me: *aghast* "W-what do you think equity, diversity, and inclusion mean...?"

[cumulohimbus]

Yeah I rly do got them DSLs tbh. Sometimes I illogically wonder if that's what gets me misgendered still. Ah yes, the inherent gendering of...lips...

It's just sort of funny to me at this point. Like, yeah, I guess I'm a little short for the average dude, but my chest is flatter than most people my size/stature and I have an entire ass beard. Okay...

I mean, if I'm being mistaken for a transfeminine person though, that's fine; that's actually a compliment tbh.

[cumulohimbus]

Before:

(Sad, dull, so empty the space feels small, unrecognizable as a library)

After:

(Okay, I think we're finally starting to get somewhere)

I have books to fill almost the entirety of the new (old) shelf that I was finally able to get brought over and assembled, they just need to be packaged up and transported. I am directly responsible for nearly every single change to this space over the past 4-5 months.

My library ended up as small and empty as it is because the original library space at the college was evacuated due to not meeting building codes and needing to be demolished. The room the library is now in was the only space available, and almost everything was uncataloged in the move over per administration's commands.

I've only been working here since August of last year (2022). I am fresh out of college and was not expecting to be put in charge of an entire library, nor to be given so much decision making capacity. Since I started, there has been talk about libraries dying out and the general sense that some members of admin find our library basically obsolete (though of course they still milk the fact that they have a "functioning" library to the Higher Learning Commission so they stay accredited 🙄).

I have put the work of multiple people into trying to revive this small academic library. It is exhausting and unconscionably stressful as someone still new to the job force and without a Master's degree (for now) trying to work in higher ed around those with much more experience and influence. But I love my job so, so much; it's been such an honor to me to be given as much power as I have been to change this place, hopefully for the better. And I hope that the work I've done so far helps others see the same potential I see in my library.

Bonus picture of the word art I made on my white board shortly after I started working there TvT:

[cumulohimbus]

It is finally done! I have single-handedly vetted every single book that remained in my library's former collection. These were forced to be uncataloged by administration for a number of reasons, primarily that the former library space (seen in the images below) is not up to code and must be demolished in the near future, and the current library space is less than half the size of the original.

I started looking through our old books (and old they were; a solid majority having been published in the 1980s and 90s) back in October of last year, and I quickly found that there are many I believe are worth keeping as I have personally met students that I know would take an interest in them. I even found some rare books! This led to me drafting a plan (which my supervisor approved) to bring one of the sets of old library shelves over to the current library space along with whatever books from our old collection I deemed worthy of hanging onto for now (though I won't be re-cataloging them for the time being should that incense administration). In order to rearrange the space, I needed to completely go through the remaining books and pick out a fraction of them to hang onto, enough to reasonably fill a single set of shelves. If I had to make a guess there were probably close to around 1,700-1,900 books in total.

The stacks pictured below account for about 2/3 of the items we will be donating/disposing of. The rest are already in boxes off in a corner. I looked over each and every one of them by hand, taking into consideration a number of different factors about each before deciding which ones to keep and which to get rid of.

This maybe sounds like it would be fun or not take too terribly long, but with tons of other job responsibilities (largely in a different building as well) this was a massive endeavor to have achieved solely by myself. And it was really hard to have to say "we can't keep this" to more than half our former collection...if I could have made the call to keep all of it, there are really only a couple things I would have chosen to get rid of because they are simply so outdated that they no longer have any modern relevance. It hurt to have to be so selective, especially as someone who writes and creates various things in my free time. Like, people really took the time--months, if not years of work--to write and publish all of these books, and even if they're on subjects that I know little to nothing about or fundamentally disagree with, they were all still someone else's craft, someone else's passion. And I mean, I do think some books really ought to be destroyed, but those are a minority.

Anyways...time to give my library a bit of a makeover. I'm super excited to see how it's going to turn out!

[cumulohimbus]

Was notified today that I've been accepted into the Masters program at my first choice pick of universities *half-hearted obligatory 🎉👏🔥🌠📚*

I want to be happy about this, I really do. But I am so, so viscerally afraid of what will happen to me over the next year, and I feel utterly hollow and alone after recent losses.

[cumulohimbus]

Today I catalogued my first book!! It was one of the ones I purchased with the grant I got for my library. This doesn't sound like it would be difficult to do unless you've seen the labyrinthine back end of Ex Libris Alma and OCLC Connexion (or other library workflow applications) before.

Cataloguing is something you learn as like, a particular area of focus when pursuing a Master's in Library & Information Science. I am merely a doofus with a B.A. in Studio Art, but in order for students to check out the new collection, the new items need to be catalogued so I spent part of today teaching myself how to do it. I am both proud and weary 😴