Hello fellow professionals and blog followers!
PLEASE NOTE: I will mention people by their position relative to mine and not their name as I feel that it's not appropriate for me to name them specifically unless I have their permission first. Also, I apologize for the sheer length of this post, future installments will be much shorter, but I feel it's necessary to frame the proper understanding of what I am doing here.
So, this entry will provide you with a little background knowledge to my position. Now, the mission of the National Commission for St. Kitt's and Nevis is pretty important - however if you just click on that little hyperlink there you should be redirected to their website which will give you the low down on what they do and why they do it. I'm more focused on the tasks at hand that I am going to be dealing with right now.
When I accepted this position through the intermediaries at Conley International I accepted the following contractual obligations:
- To help organise, and arrange the physical and digital collection of materials, and other important footage and information in the centre;
- To assist in designing and recommending policies and procedures for selecting, processing, circulating and weeding of the physical and digital materials;
- To help capture, organise, and arrange the digital footage and information to be placed on the website of the National Commission;
- To assist in the collection, storage and dissemination of footage, both digitally and via hard copy version from the activities of the National Commission for UNESCO;
- To design a checklist for evaluating the Centre’s programme;
- To design appropriate forms for use in the Centre: membership forms, overdue forms, etc.;
- To organise, and help recommend a range of services that can be provided by the Centre;
- To introduce a logical pre-established scheme for organising items in the collection;
- To conduct document processing – prepare bibliographic items for the shelves using library science standards;
- To plan for/advise on the computerisation of the collection, and other related information;
- To design and to post visual symbols and devices to direct users to specific resources in the Centre.
This seemed, at the same time, to be a lot of work and yet also so little. I had some appreciation of the scale of my task, but was suspecting that I would encounter a "Iceberg" moment when what I had signed on for revealed to be a much bigger undertaking. So far, it hasn't worked out that way, though I am still holding my breath for when the other shoe drops.
Today was my first day actually working at the National Commission and after getting the tour from my supervisor I was assigned my work space. I was given a report compiled about 4 years prior by another MLIS professional which gave a run down of what the National Commission had to do in order to develop an accessible collection available to the people of St. Kitt's and Nevis. It was short, but extremely well written and I found myself wondering why many of its recommendations hadn't already been implemented in the interim at first.
It's important for me to remember that St. Kitt's is still a developing nation and that it doesn't always have the correct expertise or personnel available on hand to rapidly advance their objectives - after all, that is what I am here for. With that in mind, I put my focus on how I could best implement the recommendations in the report towards my contractual obligations while also remaining grounded in what the status of the collection was in the present and not back in 2007.
The contents of report itself mentioned the layout of the collection, it's recommendation to use the Dewey Decimal system to organize it, signage, the need for a ILS system and Z39.50 protocol as well as proper facilities, policies and procedures to facilitate loaning, fining, returns and other sundry library tasks. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it actually does entail quite a bit of work when taking into consideration the limited space the collection has to be stored in as well as the fact that the collection is still rather haphazardly arranged and will need to be completely reshelved in the future once a cataloguing system is in place and ready to use.
There was also a follow up report that had been filed a little while after the main report from 2007 that reiterated many of the points in the main report. What I found particularly interesting is that appended to it was a quote from a vendor who had sold an ILS system, along with Z39.50 software, scanners and processing materials to the public libraries on St. Kitt's sister island of Nevis. Now, I don't believe it is ethical for me to get into the nature of that particular deal as it was probably a confidential deal (the reason it was appended in the first place is a little weird), but let me say this much, it was from a major vendor from the Western Hemisphere (which includes Europe and the Americas, so try guessing - though you will most likely not be able to guess correctly) and it quoted what I thought was a reasonable price for a public library system throughout 2 or 3 locations. I won't say exactly what it was, but upon further reflection, it occurred to me that it may be more than the people who do the budget would be willing to spend.
I was actually a little impressed with it and it had clearly been appended to the report by someone who thought that they were getting a good deal and thought we may be interested. I did a little investigating of it online through it's website and through searching on the internet for libraries which used it and were satisfied with it's performance. I decided to raise the issue with my supervisor as we were scheduled to meet at 1:15.
In the meantime, I took notes from the main report as well as physically inspecting the materials that had been placed on the stacks and drew the following conclusions:
The collection lacks;
- Access to up-to-date information
- Fast, easy, retrieval through multiple access points
- Efficient inventory and storage
Also there were no policies officially in place for Collection Management, lending or any other regulations or policies instrumental in the functioning a special collection like the one at the National Commission. Now, as you may have noticed, these were all spelled out in the contractual obligations above, but I still came in expecting something. Prior to obtaining my MLIS I did a year long internship at Dalhousie University's Killam Memorial Library and I think the experience spoiled me as an established library can seem much more comfortable than getting a special collection off the ground.
It was at this point that I was starting to feel a little out of my depth - it was temporary for reasons which shall become apparent in a little while.
I spent my time making notes on the report and the contract in preparation for my meeting with my supervisor and was pleased to know that the original librarian who drew up the report would be joining us to put our heads together and come up with recommendations.
I'll be brief, we discussed the collection and I also raised the issue of the appended price quote for the ILS system above. I also mentioned that if money were an issue that there were opensource options to elect, but that as they were often made by volunteers that they could stop being updated and we'd be stuck with an obsolete system in a few years. It was at this time that my library colleague suggested a completely web based platform known as LibraryWorld, which fulfill all of our needs for a modest cost of only about $395 (USD). We also discussed the present state of the collection and how it would be organized. UNESCO has very exact specifications of how it wanted the information to be organized in the collection - which is not exactly Dewey Decimal or LC standard. Finally, me and my fellow library professional agreed, that before any policy was written, regulation formed or catalogue put up, the collection had to be weeded. I was very pleased to find we agreed on this issue. There is no sense cataloguing an item that will need to be discarded, and there is no sense taking up valuable shelf space in a very limited space with duplicate copies of materials.
The meeting went on for a little bit with my supervisor getting the idea to contact their contemporaries in other National Commissions in the Caribbean to see what ILS software they may be using to guide us, however, upon researching LibraryWorld, as well as receiving some advice from my fellow DAL SIM grad Brian Dewar who used it to get his library collection in Regina up and running, I must say that I plan to recommend it's adoption by the National Commission if a more suitable option doesn't present itself.
After our meeting, I began writing a Weeding policy to begin tackling the collection. It felt really good to be working on it, employing the knowledge I had learned from Joyline Makani in the Collection Management Class at DAL SIM. I felt like I was on fire, writing my first policy regarding a concrete, tactile task I could start doing to immediately benefit the collection. CREW, MUSTIE and community assessment all came rushing back to me, though I still needed a little help from this helpful webpage - however it's only because I knew CREW and MUSTIE existed in the first place that I knew to check those terms on the web. An official booya to my colleague Joyline Makani for teaching me this valuable skill.
When I was working on this policy, the fear, doubt and unreadiness for this task began melting away. An immediate, identifiable need was just what the doctor ordered and really shook me out of my fear of the job. This I would like to point out was an important observation and piece of advice my professional mentor Linda Bedwell, also of Dalhousie university, gave to me before I took up this position.
So, I had a good first day, wrote my first policy, have a concrete task to begin tomorrow, have an ILS I'm recommending for purchase and have used and/or received great advice given to me by Joyline, Linda, Brian and my colleague Mike Steeleworthy.
All in all, a good first day.
