not quite a comeback

I’m moving! This upcoming week is my last one as a children’s librarian, which is sad, but my new job (with the same library system) is in a town I think I’ll be able to cobble together a bit more satisfying a life than up here, so it’s a good change.

See, I like doing storytimes. I like talking with kids about books and putting some excellent story or information in a young person’s hand so she can make new folds in her brain is awesome. But I’m not really a great early literacy specialist. I’m very conscious that when I do storytime I’m just reading kids stories and making them laugh, but we aren’t doing as much of that value-added educational stuff as real children’s specialists make happen.

My new job is on the information desk in a more urban branch. I think it’ll play more to my strengths so I can do really awesome stuff with our community rather than just the stuff I’m capable of doing. I’m planning to try to do more internet privacy/security type stuff and maybe help host the monthly librarian radio show and generally focus more on what we can do to ensure our librarianly freedom of information kinds of ideals from my place on the ground.

Speaking of which, there’s some interesting discussion of Vancouver Public Library’s shitty new Internet Use Policy out there. Check out Bibliocracy’s take Policy Politics Porn: VPL’s Public Internet Problem if you have a bit of time, or Metacate’s analysis of the situation if you want to read about it from a more pure policy-creation perspective: Shaking the Jar: VPL’s newly recommended policy on public internet use.

Also, and unrelated to the VPL thing, I’m no longer the co-chair of the BCLA Intellectual Freedom Committee. Doing committee work isn’t a very natural fit for me, and I didn’t feel I was doing a very good job of it. Then the time I spent worrying about how I was doing a bad job was building stress whenever I sat down to the computer and wasn’t addressing the issues at hand. That’s why I haven’t really been reviewing books in 2014. I’m much happier being off on my own to write my own shit as I feel like it.

I’ll be off on a vacation soon, but before then I hope to be getting some more writing up here.