Ops Report Card: applying IT best practices to library systems teams

Posted on July 29, 2024 by davidwitteveen

I used to joke that my career goal was to not be running a help desk when I’m 50.

I was the IT Manager for the University of Melbourne’s student union for many years. I only decided to become a librarian after my department was centralised and I was offered a voluntary redundancy for that role.

When I actually turned 50, I was the Team Leader Customer Support for OCLC in Australia and New Zealand. So I was still running a help desk. But I was also studying my Masters of Information Management, and it was the middle of Melbourne’s brutal COVID lockdowns, and I was happy to have a stable job that could be done from home.

After the lockdowns ended, I moved to La Trobe University to be a systems librarian. And for the last six months I’ve been managing the library systems team at RMIT University Library.

Which technically is not a help desk. But there are a lot of similarities.

The recent CrowdStrike worldwide outage and the British Library’s report on the learning lessons from the October 2023 cyber-attack on their systems both emphasise that library systems administration is still IT systems administration, and the same best practices apply.

Which is my roundabout way of linking to the Ops Report Card.

The Operations Report Card

In the site creators’ own words:

The Ops Report Card is a list of 32 fundamental “best practices” or “capabilities” that high performance sysadmin teams do. Use it as a checklist to examine where your team needs improvement.

I found this site several months ago, thought it seemed both sensible and useful, then promptly lost it in the great jungle of the internet because I couldn’t remember what it was called. I kept thinking it had “maturity” in the title, so all my searches for “IT maturity” or “help desk maturity” didn’t work.

I found it again by a suitably circuitous route – I’d linked to it in a Reddit comment, and I found it by trawling through my old comments one by one.

I have now added the link to my Toolkit > Library Matters page, so I can find it again.

And while I’m at it…

The 32 best practices

A. Public Facing Practices

  1. Are user requests tracked via a ticket system?
  2. Are “the 3 empowering policies” defined and published?
  3. Does the team record monthly metrics?

B. Modern Team Practices

  1. Do you have a “policy and procedure” wiki?
  2. Do you have a password safe?
  3. Is your team’s code kept in a source code control system?
  4. Does your team use a bug-tracking system for their own code?
  5. In your bugs/tickets, does stability have a higher priority than new features?
  6. Does your team write “design docs?”
  7. Do you have a “post-mortem” process?

C. Operational Practices

  1. Does each service have an OpsDoc?
  2. Does each service have appropriate monitoring?
  3. Do you have a pager rotation schedule?
  4. Do you have separate development, QA, and production systems?
  5. Do roll-outs to many machines have a “canary process?”

D. Automation Practices

  1. Do you use configuration management tools like cfengine/puppet/chef?
  2. Do automated administration tasks run under role accounts?
  3. Do automated processes that generate e-mail only do so when they have something to say?

E. Fleet Management Processes

  1. Is there a database of all machines?
  2. Is OS installation automated?
  3. Can you automatically patch software across your entire fleet?
  4. Do you have a PC refresh policy?

F. Disaster Preparation Practices

  1. Can your servers keep operating even if 1 disk dies?
  2. Is the network core N+1?
  3. Are your backups automated?
  4. Are your disaster recovery plans tested periodically?
  5. Do machines in your data center have remote power / console access?

G. Security Practices

  1. Do Desktops, laptops, and servers run self-updating, silent, anti-malware software?
  2. Do you have a written security policy?
  3. Do you submit to periodic security audits?
  4. Can a user’s account be disabled on all systems in 1 hour?
  5. Can you change all privileged (root) passwords in 1 hour?

Applying this

I’ve put a note in my team calendar to work through this list in December. That seems like a good time to review what we’ve been doing, and to think about which practices we’d like to adopt in 2025.

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AI in the Library – Clarivate’s Alethea

Posted on June 15, 2024 by davidwitteveen

Yesterday I saw a really fresh and useful idea on how AI tools can actually help students learn, rather than just regurgitate answers at them.

Summary and sources

I work in a university library. We’re starting to get vendors pushing generative AI tools at us.

Most of them are basically Microsoft Copilot, but using academic sources. You ask the tool a question. It turns your question into a search, generates a summary based on the top search results, then links to those search results so you can verfiy and dig deeper.

(I call this the “summary and sources” approach to AI.)

Examples include the legal database Lexus+ AI, the science database Scopus AI, and the general library search tool Primo Research Assistant.

But yesterday I had a meeting with some Clarivate representatives, and they told me about a new product they’re developing: an AI-driven tutoring tool called Alethea.

AI that asks questions

The idea is that while a student is reading an article, Alethea prompts them with questions to make them think deeper and read more closely about the article.

I love this idea. I love the idea of AI asking questions instead of providing quick (and sometimes wildly inaccurate) answers.

Of course, we only saw a slide show presentation. I do not know yet how well the tool lives up to the potential.

But an AI that asks questions rather than generating answers seems a direction in which AI actually enhances human capacity rather than just replacing us with a cheaper, shitter version.

The library at scale

I was thinking about what the perfect endgame would be for these sort of tools in the academic libary, and the vision I came up with was just the old fashioned reference interview, but at scale.

My university has about 90,000 students worldwide. There’s no way a library can employ enough librarians to help each student one-on-one, just as there’s no way ninety thousand students could all use the same card catalogue.

AI offers the potential for the library to offer its services at the scale required. We just have to make sure the tools actually provide a good service.

What I’d like to see

I’d like to see AI that…

  • Asks the user questions to clarify what they’re after, like reference librarian would
  • Asks the user Socractic questions to deepen their thinking about a topic
  • Can help the user evaluate articles by, for example, identifying key articles in a field, or pointing out that the results of a particularstudy have been disproven
  • Recognising that a question or topic is too complex for it to handle, and referring the user on to an actual human librarian

Postscript

WordPress now offers an AI Assistant to “optimize key details of your post”.

For a laugh, I clicked the Improve Title button for this post. This was its suggestions:

Take that, machines. You still can’t improve on me.

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Starting the ALIA Continuing Professional Development scheme

Posted on January 28, 2023 by davidwitteveen

I started working at La Trobe University Library a year ago next week. I finished my Masters in Information Management about 6 months ago. And this month, I finally got around to upgrading my ALIA membership to the Professional level.

Which means it’s time for me to get started on the ALIA Continuing Professional Developement (CPD) scheme.

Basically, this scheme is to encourage librarians to keep their professional skills and knowlegde up to date. If you complete the required CPD in a year, you get to add a little title after your name.

Requirements

The requirements are:

  • 30 hours of CPD per year (measured from 1 July to 30 June)
  • A total to 120 hours of CPD every three years (so, an additional 30 hours on top of the annual requirement)

That translates to about an hour a week. Which seems very do-able.

What counts as CPD?

Oddly, there’s not a clear defintion of what counts as CPD on the website. The best defintion I could find was in a tiny font at the bottom of their 100+ Ideas for your Professional Development document:

If you learn something new that has an impact on your future practice, then it’s PD.

The documents gives plenty of examples of PD:

  • Professional reading (journals, books, blogs, etc.)
  • Attending library events and conferences
  • Training and education
  • Mentoring or being mentored
  • Writing about the industry (inc. blogging. 😉 )

Specialisations, Competencies and Skills Audits

I assume you can just do generic library-related CPD to count towards the scheme. But ALIA does offer 10 different Specialistions to reflect the needs of different types of libraries. The Specialisations include Schools, Public Library, Government, Health and – most relevant for me – Research/Academic.

Within each Specialisation are Competencies – the sort of things librarians should be able to do. Under the Research/Academic specialisation, for example, the competencies include Awareness of the scholarly research lifecycle and the policies, practices and trends that impact the research environment, and the different roles of libraries in supporting research as well as teaching and learning and Apply technology and systems to manage research outputs and other scholarly information resources, and support teaching and learning.

ALIA also provide a Skills Audit template. This lists several skills under each Competency, and asks you to rate your abiltiy in each one to help you determine what sort of PD you would benefit from the most.

ALIA also provide members with a CPD Logbook on their website so we can track what we’ve done. You’re also expected to write a short reflection on each piece of PD.

All this feel suspicously like filling out a character sheet in Dungeons & Dragons.

Working through it

It took me about half an hour to read through the webpages about the CPD scheme, and write up my own summary (which is one of the best ways for me to learn something).

I hit a bit of an issue when it came to selecting a Specialisation: the Research/Academic specialisation has a choice of three different streams: General, Teaching and Learning, or Research.

I wasn’t sure which one was the most appropriate for me, as a systems librarian. I’m guessing the Teaching and Learning stream is for subject liasion librarians. Research could be relevant. In the end, I decided to go with General.

The Skills Audit worksheets are provided as PDFs. I spent about 15 minutes copying that into a Google sheet, which is easier for me to work with long term. Then I spent about an hour completing it.

The hardest part of completing the skills audit was not really having a basis of comparison.

Next steps

I need to do an hour of CPD a week, write up a short reflection on each piece, then log it on the ALIA website.

Where do I want to start my PD? These are the three things that come to mind based on that skills audit:

  1. Write up an Introduction to University Libraries to consolidate all the ad hoc knowledge I’ve picked up along the way.
  2. Refresh my memory on how to evaluate the quality of journal articles, etc. beyond just ticking the “peer reviewed” facet in the discovery layer.
  3. Research the sort of metrics other libraries collect about the usage of their discovery layers.

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A late #AusLibChat

Posted on October 17, 2022 by davidwitteveen

I missed the last AusLibChat for personal reasons. But I’d actually written out my answers beforehand. Rather than waste my answers, I thought I’d share them here.

The topic was Decoding Selection Criteria. You can read the other responses on Wakelet.

Question 1 – “A high level of digital literacy”. How would you demonstrate this requirement?

A1: Google the definition of digital literacy. Look at the skills listed. Write down work you’ve done that demonstrates those skills. Focus on examples that best show off what you’re capable of: blogs written, research conducted, online training delivered, etc.

Question 2 – “Awareness of emerging trends and issues in librarianship”. What trend/s would you discuss?

A2: Describe a change/improvement you’ve made to take advantage of a trend. List 2-3 key issues you think affect the library & role you’re applying for. Describe how you stay on top of industry trends: journals, conferences, groups.

Question 3 – “Willingness to participate in delivering programs to a broad range of audiences”. How would you describe your willingness for this responsibility?

A3: List the programs you’ve delivered to a broad range of audiences. 🙂  Describe the potential issues (level of technical knowledge, different goals).

Question 4 – “Experience in and knowledge of cataloguing”. How would you address this if you hadn’t previously worked as a cataloguer?

A4: Do some research. Read this: https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2015/05/cataloging.html and https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/06/ten-essential-qualities-for-success-a-new-cataloging-librarians-guide-from-a-supervisers-perspective/ Admit your shortcomings, then list achievements that demonstrate you have the personal qualities of a good cataloguer: attention to detail, following procedures.

Question 5 – “Highly developed oral & written communication skills”. How would you relate this criterion to working in a library?

A5: List your best examples of communication. Have you written reports, documentation, LibGuides? Have you given conference presentations, delivered training, led projects?

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Applying for a job when you don’t meet all the requirements

Posted on September 17, 2022 by davidwitteveen

OCLC’s Melbourne office are advertising for a Customer Project Manager to help implement their library management system.

Now, I used to work for OCLC, but I don’t any longer. So this is not an official statement.

But… now is an excellent time to apply for jobs you’re interested in, even if you don’t meet all the selection criteria.

Because employers are desperate. There’s a worker shortage. Employers aren’t getting the number of applicants for vacancies that they used to. They’re having to hire workers with less experience than they were looking for, and then train those workers up.

That’s hard for employers. But it’s a great opportunity for you.

Why you have a chance

Let me reiterate: I do not work for OCLC. I have no special insight into this vacancy.

But I’ve hired lots of people in past. And I recently was part of the interview panel for a vacancy at my current work place. And two things became very clear to me.

Firstly: there are not many qualified applicants for roles at the moment. That means iff you apply, there’s a good chance you will be interviewed.

Secondly: some of the applicants we did interview wrecked their chances because they couldn’t answer basic questions about the role, or their experience.

This sucks for the applicants, and is a waste of the employer’s time.

But it means that if you put some effort in and do some preparation, you can make your application really stand out, even if you don’t meet all the selection criteria.

So here’s my advice on how to improve your chances of landing a job when you don’t meet all the criteria. I’ve included examples in italics to help clarify what I’m saying.

Step 0: Think like an employer

Vacancies are a problem for employers. It means work isn’t getting done, or staff are having to work extra hard to cover the gap.

In their ideal world, they would hire someone who has the exact skillset they need, someone who can be plugged in and start doing the job straight away without any training or guidance.

But this is never going to happen.

The next best option is to hire someone who is motivated, enthusiastic, has at least some of the requried skills, and is willing to learn the rest.

Your job is to show the employer that that someone is you.

Step 1: Do your research

Employers want to know you actually understand and are interested in the job you’re applying for. Some basic research can help you demonstrate this.

Who is the organisation? Go to their website. Have a look at their products or services. Watch their videos. Look at who their customers are. How do those products make their customers lives better? Is there anything interesting or exciting about the organisation that grabs you?

What is the role? Google the job title to get an idea of the typic duties and responsibilities. How does it help the customers? How does it help the company? What sort of work is it?

EXAMPLE: Looking at OCLC’s website, I can see that…

  • OCLC is a global library organization that provides “shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large.” 
  • Their products include WorldShare Manaagement Services, EZproxy and GreenGlass
  • The benefit these products provide is to improve library efficiency
  • They’ve recenty released a new WorldCat.org. Clicking through to the information page tells me WorldCat.org is “the only site where anyone can explore billions of items from a global network of thousands of library locations in a single search.”

Doing some quick research on project management:

  • Project managers are responsible for ensuring all the tasks in a project are completed on time and to the approriate quality
  • They usually have to collaborate with a wide variety of other people, so good communication skills are important
  • There are two main methods of organising a project: the waterfall method, and Agile.

Step 2: Call the employer up

Most job ads include a contact phone number or email address in case you have questions. My experience is that it’s pretty rare for applicants to actually use this.

Which means if you do call them, the employer is more likely to remember your name.

Call them. Explain you’re interested in apply for the position. Ask them for more details about the role.

And then ask them if they’d consider your application even if you don’t meet all the selection criteria. Discuss with them how you might fill in those gaps in your skillset. Bring your ideas, and ask them for theirs.

Some example questions:

“Hi! I’m interested in applying for the Customer Project Manager position you’ve advertised. Can you tell me anything more about the duties of this role? Is there a guide to the implementation process that I could read, for example?”

“Would you consider my application even if I don’t meet all the selection criteria? I don’t have years of project managment experience. I’ve been doing some research and I think that’s something I could learn with some online training, and maybe some mentorship. What are your thought?”

Step 3: Write a strong cover letter

Your cover letter is your best chance to argue the case for them interviewing you. Keep it short. A good format is:

  • First paragraph: one sentence explaining which role you’re applying for, and where you saw the ad.
  • Second paragraph: one or two sentences explaining why you’re interested in this role.
  • Third paragraph: A sentence starting with “I can offer you…” followed by your best three or four qualifications for the role. (I usually put these as dot points, to make it easier for busy employers to read them.)
  • Fourth paragraph: a sentence or two acknowledging the areas where you don’t meet the critera, and explain how you’d overcome that if you got the job.
  • Fifth paragraph: wrap it up politely.

Example cover letter:

Dear OCLC,

I am writing to apply for the position of Customer Project Manager that was advertised on your website.

I am applying for this position because I believe libraries play an important role in sharing knowledge, and by helping libraries implement your products, I would be helping them become more efficient.

I can offer you:

  • A graduate diploma in library information science from Blatherburg University
  • Two years experience working in the Blatherburg Public Library as a junior systems librarian
  • Experience using and configuring library management systems such as Sierra
  • Experience running our recent project to implement a new self-check mobile phone app

I acknowledge that I do not have the years of experience in project management that you are looking for. But I believe that this is a skill I can acquire with a combination of online training and mentorship from experienced staff.

I hope to hear back from you soon.

Yours,

Hopeful Applicant.

Step 4: Prepare for the interview

There are some standard questions you should expect in an interview. So you can think about what your answers will be ahead of time.

Use examples of your past work in your answers. And use the biggest, most complex and most difficult tasks you’ve done as your examples. The employer is trying to judge your skill level, so talk about your best work.

And you can bring notes with you to the interview. Don’t read out prewritten answers, but having some dot points to help jog your memory is fine.

Common questions you can expect include:

Why are you interested in this job?

This is often a warm-up question. Answer with your personal qualities that match the requirements of the job, and a ‘big picture’ statement of the value that role provides.

“I enjoy detailed-focused work, and I enjoy helping libraries operate more efficiently.”

Can you tell us about a project you’ve managed?

Obviously, employers will only ask this question for project-related roles.

What they’re looking for is evidence that you understand the goal of the project, that you used a clear methodology to ensure the project stayed on track, that you used logical thinking to overcome any problems you encountered, and that ultimately the project was successful.

So make a note of the answers to these questions:

  • What was the goal of the project?
  • What methods did you use to ensure the project stayed on track?
  • What problems did you encounter? How did you solve them?
  • What was the outcome of the project?

And if you don’t have any experience running projects? Get thee to Google, and do some research. If nothing else, it will show you’re motivated enough to try and understand the position.

How do you communicate with people of different levels of technical knowledge?

Communicating with people is a big part of project management. And not everyone has a lot of technical knowledge.

If you have experience, make some notes about how you managed this, what worked well and what you’d do differently in the future.

If you don’t have experience, do some googling and at least understand the theory.

Do you have any questions for us?

Of course you do. Not only is this a chance for you to learn more about the job, it’s another chance to show that you’re genuinely interested in the position.

Some questions you could ask are:

  • What sort of training is available if I get the job?
  • What does a typical day in this role look like?
  • What are the big challenges facing this organisation?
  • What’s the best thing about working for this organisation?
  • How does this organisation help staff balance work and their personal lives?

Conclusion

This is a good time to be looking for work. There are a lot of vacancies, and not many applicants. Which means employers are considering applicants who may not have all the skills that employers were hoping for.

So it’s a good time to be looking for work, and a good time to apply for jobs that are the next step up for you in terms of duties and pay.

Finally I want to say: I used to work for OCLC, and I loved it there.

It was such a great learning experience to be part of an international company, and to work with such a wide variety of libraries. I only left because my career goal was alway to work in a library, not with them.

This Customer Project Manager role is a great opportunity for any aspiring systems librarian to learn a lot about how library managment systems work and are configured.

I hope this advice helps you find a job you love.

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Serendipity: a case study

Posted on August 14, 2022 by davidwitteveen

I was trying to write a joke about astronomy yesterday, and ended up researching the ethics of marketing to teenagers.

In library science, this is called serendipity: the accidental discovery of useful information while you were searching for something else.

It’s when your searching the library shelf for a book on machine learning, and stumble over one on fuzzy sets, or when you look up the Australian Defence Force on Wikipedia and a few links later you’re reading about how we lost the Emu War.

Serendipity is the black magic of library science. There’s an element of luck, of stars aligning. You can encourage it, but you can never quite control it, or where it will lead.

It’s how I started out learning about time travel, and ended up learning about teenagers.

Consider this a case study. It’s a bit more interesting than a bunch of random links.

It started with time travel

It started with a video: Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes.

I read a bit of science fiction, and I’m pretty sure it was a Charles Stross book that introduced me to the idea that travelling faster than light means you can effectively go back in time and violate cause and effect. But I never really understood it.

Then this video showed up in my YouTube suggestions, and it’s the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard. It’s such a clear explanation, I shared it to Twitter.

And then I followed that tweet up with a joke.

My secret power

You see, the video is by David Kipping from the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University.

The Cool Worlds Lab researches exoplanets that are cool enough to support life. Hence the name. But I knew immediately that I had to make a joke playing off the difference between cool-as-in-temperature and cool-as-in-hip-and-fashionable.

The problem is I am a middle-aged librarian. I am not cool. I have no idea what people consider cool. I can do weird, or nerdy, but not cool.

Of course, being a librarian, I do have a secret power: I can look stuff up.

I pulled out the card catalogues. I dusted off my volumes of the Dewey Decimal Classification. I lit a candle to S. R. Ranganathan, and offered up prayers to the gods of WorldCat.

Then I did what everyone does, and googled it.

“What’s cool with gen z?”

I didn’t even have to refine my search terms. I was halfway through typing my first search phrase when Google suggested what’s cool with gen z?

There is a huge amout of material online that tries to answer that question.

Google have a Cool Book to summarise what teenagers think is cool. There’s nothing revelatory in it: teens like smartphones and sneakers and YouTube. Also Oreos, apparently. Also they think Google is fun and fuctional! Isn’t that lovely for Google?

Business Insider’s 2019 The State of Gen Z report that goes beyond just consumer preferences. It says:

  • Gen Z likes diversity: 48% are non-white. 62% see diversity as good for society. 35% know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns.
  • 55% think America is going poorly. 54% think humans are causing climate change. The “overwhelming majority” think Donald Trump is the biggest issue facing America.
  • They really want to legalise weed.

There’s some brand stuff in there too: Gen Z like Nike and McDonalds and Amazon and Netflix.

Here’s another report, this time from a company called GWI: What Gen Z really think and why you should care

  • They’re stressed: 45% of Gen Z say they’re prone to anxiety compared to 25% of baby boomers.
  • They want to learn new skills (61%) and be successful (62%)
  • In the US, climate change is their biggest concern out of a list of 21 worries – something that’s overtaken concern about infectious diseases.
  • They’re becoming tired of picture-perfect content on social media – “Gen Z’s interest in celebrity news and influencers dropped by 26% and 15% respectively since Q2 2020”

As I said: none of this is revelatory. If you’re active online, you’ve probably picked up most of these trends just from the ambient culture.

Which makes me wonder: if you can pick most of this up just from being online, why are there so many surveys and reports about Gen Z?

Ethics

Because marketing. Because there’s money in teenagers and what they think is cool.

It makes my skin crawl.

Teenagers are a vulnerable population. They are still developing neurologically, psychologically and socially. And all of the reports I linked to above are essentially telling companies how to manipulate them into giving you money.

It’s unethical.

My only hope is we can use the tools of Capitalism against itself, that these reports can be used by teachers and youth librarians and YA writers to show teenagers how companies are trying to manipulate them, and to give them some weapons to defend themselves.

Conclusion

Ironically, none of these reports helped me write my joke. It took an ad on an unrelated to article to remind of one of the more popular young musicians out there.

Is that serendipity? Or just the random stuff of life on the internet? I don’t know. This whole post is, frankly, little more than a way to make some random links appear like a coherent set.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall my tweet about the video:

And my joke:

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MIDYEAR MILESTONES

Posted on July 31, 2022 by davidwitteveen

I set myself three goals at the start of the year:

  1. Finish my Master of Information Management degree
  2. Pass my probation at work
  3. A personal health-related goal, which I’m not posting here

I didn’t want to get too ambitious. The last two years have been draining, and I wanted to keep my goals for this year achievable.

Which was probably a good idea. I caught COVID in March, and four months later I still have some post-viral fatigue and trouble concentrating.

This has been – to put it mildly – inconvenient.

Writing assignments has been a struggle. Focusing on work has been a struggle. I lose track of what I’m doing. I forget things straight after I read them. I’m tired most of the time.

So I was a bit startled to find out this last fortnight that not only have I passed my probation at work, I scored a High Distinction for my final Masters subject.

Huh.

Finishing my Masters meant I had to choose whether I would graduate in absentia or in person. 

The last two years of lockdowns have not been great for celebrating milestones. I didn’t do anything to mark my 50th birthday. And my farewell when I left OCLC was just a Teams meeting. So it was tempting to graduate in person.

Two things put me off. First: the graduation ceremony isn’t until December. And secondly: COVID hasn’t gone away. I’ve been risking concerts and some art events, but I still wear a mask inside public buildings, and I still don’t really feel comfortable in a crowd.

So I decided to graduate in absentia. 5 years of work and growth and learning end with an email saying my testamur is being mailed to me. I tried to log onto my Uni email account this morning and found that they’d disabled it.

Oh well. Most of the lecturers I wanted to say thanks to have already left – RMIT is shutting down their Master of Information Management program.

Meanwhile, my work at La Trobe University Library has been great. 

I ended last year fretting about whether to apply for the Discovery Specialist position there, as it would mean a pay cut. That problem resolved itself within a month or so when I was promoted to Coordinator, Library Discovery Platforms on a salary slightly higher than what I was earning at OCLC.

My love of working at La Trobe is only slightly tempered by my frustration that this post-COVID brain fogginess has meant I haven’t gotten my head around their systems yet as much as I would like to. But even with my limitations, they seem very happy with my work, and my final probation review was mostly a formality.

So: that’s two out of three goals for the year achieved.

The health goal is still a work-in-progress. COVID has rather messed that one up. I’ll see how I go.

I’m not setting myself any extra goals for the rest of the year, other than building my knowledge of Alma and Primo and all the other systems we use in the Library.

There are some things I would like to do: make another zine, run some roleplaying, make a dent in my pile of unread books, maybe even start work on another novel.

But those are nice-to-haves. I’m going to be gentle on myself if they don’t happen.

Meanwhile: I have my LIS degree, and a job in an academic library.

I guess this means I’m a librarian now. 🙂

Posted in library nerding, studying information management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

How to begin well…

Posted on February 27, 2022 by davidwitteveen

I’ve been at La Trobe University Library for three and half weeks now.

It’s been exciting, but also exhausting. There’s so much to learn, and there’s a backlog of tasks from since the previous incumbent left.

Which has meant I haven’t had a lot of spare brain capacity to step back and think about how i’m approaching my new job.

But it’s something I do want to think about.

My manager and I are both big fans of Alexandra Perkins’s talk ‘Making Yourself Redundant on Day One – Internal documentation to teach the next hire what you’ve learned‘. The gist of Perkin’s talk is: document what you learn when you start a new job, so it’s there for the next person in your role.

In that spirit, one of my probation tasks has been to document everything that I’ve needed as part of my onboarding: accounts I’ve needed created, systems I’ve needed to understand, processes I’ve needed to know.

Meanwhile, ALIA announced the next New Librarian’s Symposium will be on the week of 24 July 2023. I’d like to start giving talks at library conferences.

Given La Trobe is my first ever real job in a library, the most obvious topic would be: how do you make a good start at a new job?

What I’m trying to do:

  • Have clear probation goals. Get regular feedback whether you’re on track or not.
  • Know how you learn.
  • Document as you go.
  • Schedule time to revise what you’ve learnt.
  • Work with your manager to keep the workload reasonable.

Things I’m still working out:

  • Remembering everyone’s names, and what they do. (My last office had 20 people in it. My new workplace has 100.)

I’ll keep thinking about this…

ELSEWHERE

I finally caught up on the newCardigan cardiCast where Hugh Rundle interviews Auckland University of Technology Universtiy Librarian and excellent person Kim Tairi. They talk about learning to be a library leader, reconnecting with her Māori heritage, AUT embracing the open source library management system Koha, and some tips about personal branding, and Tairi engages with social media.

Also: Russian has invaded Ukraine. I have been doing a lot of doomscrolling, trying not just to understand what is happening but to find some glimmer of hope that this doesn’t end with Kyiv under a puppet governemnt and endless human rights violations as they try to quash any Ukranian resistance. The Guardian has a list of practical things Australians can do to support the people of Ukraine.

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New Year, New Job

Posted on December 31, 2021 by davidwitteveen

After 4 years as Team Leader Customer Support for OCLC ANZ, I’ll be starting a new job in February.

The role is Discovery Specialist at La Trobe University Library. It’s exciting (new job! new opportunities! progress on my career goals) but also slightly terrifying – I’ll be supporting a system I have never supported before. So there will be a lot to learn.

Fortunately, Ex Libris have their Primo Adminstration course online. So I’ll be getting stuck into that in the new year.

Right now, I’m packing up my old job into tidy packages, ready to whoever takes over the role from me. It’s a slightly melencholy process. A lot has happened since I sidled up to a guest lecturer in my Masters degree and said “OCLC sounds like somewhere I’d like to work one day. Can I have a chat with you about what you’re looking for?”

I’ve loved working for OCLC. I’ve learnt a huge amount of what the theory I’ve been learning in my studies looks like in the real world. I’m met wonderful people. I’ve worked with colleagues around the world, and while I won’t miss the late night video meetings due to time zone differences, I will miss being flown to the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States to meet my colleagues.

In an ideal world, I’d be there another six months while I finish my Masters, and only then would I start looking for something new. But we take our opportunities when they present themselves.

One big change in the new role is that I won’t be a manager.

That’s fine. I’m happy to focus on building my technical skills for a while. But I am concerned that my managerial experience will slip further and further down my resume. I want to get back to managerial positions one day. I think I’m pretty good at it. (Also: the pay is better.)

In fact, I’m toying with creating a zine about it, a sort of Guide for New Managers. When I was first promoted from a technical role to management, I found I was really upset that my technical skills atrophied without me really understanding what new skills I was developing in their place.

Julia Evans has a great little zine called Help! I have a manager! about how to work productively with your manager. It would be nice to have something similar that looks at the nuts-and-bolts of management from the other side of the table.

The trick is keeping is small enough to be doable while being detailed enough to be useful.

I’ll keep thinking about it.

Meanwhile: happy new year!

A photo of me: a bald white man, with retro glasses and a short grey beard.
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Book Guardians

Posted on May 11, 2021 by davidwitteveen

I had to intervene with an aggressive tram passenger last Saturday night. He was threatening to punch another passenger. I told him not to. It ended about as well as I could have hoped: no one got hurt, and the aggressor got off the tram.

Afterwards I did some reading about bystander intervention and de-escalation techniques. I was even thinking about writing a blog post about it. Library patrons can sometimes act up and be violent. I still remember seeing a patron at the State Library of Victoria swear, throw a chair across the public access computer desks, then sit down as if nothing had happened.

So intervening and de-escalation are good skills for librarians to have.

But… I just don’t have the heart in me to write about it now. The confrontation on Saturday left me sad and annoyed. I posted a big long rant about it on Facebook, and now I just want to not think about it for a while.

Maybe I’ll come back to it later. Or maybe I’ll get caught up in uni assignments and forget all about it.

In the meantime, have something utterly charming: a 20 minute documentary about the Reykjavík downtown library:

It’s made by by Jiaqian Chen, a Chinese national who vlogs about living in Iceland.

That library looks utterly gorgeous.

Also, it seems like every second person in Iceland is some sort of musician. One of my favourite bands in the world is Icelandic: Kaelan Mikla make excellent gothy synth-punk.

I guess I need to add Reykjavík to my list of cities I need to visit when international travel resumes.

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