Digital Libraries: Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive

Project

I chose to look for a historical project, as I'm personally interested in maintaining historically significant records and artifacts. I got on the government website that Jill provided for us and was amazed at the amount of work put into various statewide projects. I chose the Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive because I was curious how they organized a project so large, yet specific.

Organization Involvement

This project has been done with the work of several organizations: Washington State University Vancouver, Idaho State Historical Society, Oregon Historical Society, Washington State Historical Society, and Washington State University Pullman. They are funded by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Digitized Materials

This website specializes in historical (primarily 20th century) photographs of various ethnic groups (everything from African Americans to Finnish Americans) in the northwest United States. To be more specific, this includes family portraits, city dwellings/businesses owned by these groups, and pictures of artwork that represents these different ethnicities in these areas of the United States.



Mexican childrens' toys from the 1930s

This includes some moments from our nation's past that we now regret:



A Japanese internment camp in Portland, OR, 1942

Also included are various historical documents, such as deeds, business documents, ethnic society paperwork, and some personal letters written to family, friends, or for legal purposes. Occasionally, audio clips from ethnic radio shows are also available. Enjoy a Basque song!

Audience

The digital library was created as a combined effort to start discussion about the impact of ethnic groups not only in the Northwest, but in the United States as a whole. That said, the materials are great for students and historians, but they are presented in an easily accessible way so that any curious user could learn something and enjoy the materials the site has to offer. Their official statement says the site is for "any online researcher."

Project Background

The "about" section on this website states several important things. For starters, why they created the collection and what impact they hope it will have (they are hoping their project encourages other libraries and museums around the country to generate an interest in the variety of ethnic histories). They also explain exactly what physical areas are covered by the project as well as why Native Americans were not included in the project (extensive research and cataloging has already been done by a few of these participating organizations).

Overall Thoughts

I really liked the content this library had to offer, but I think it could have been organized in a more user-friendly way. For example, there is no way to select what type of material you want (i.e. photograph, audio, or document). However, I did appreciate that you could search by ethnic group, which would be massively helpful if working on a specific project.

Then again, I also recognize the amount of work that had to have gone into this project to make it worthwhile for users to visit it (and for them to have earned the grant to create it). This is a great resource with information that could have taken hours for a researcher to locate in different places.

Reference Blog #5

Today was not the last day I will be covering the reference desk in the near future, but it will be the last one I am writing about. (November 20th)

I got to do some different things today as the library was rather slow. For example, I learned a lot about interlibrary loans and processing them. Our library is involved in two different library link systems, one with academic libraries and the other with public libraries, all within the state. It is very heavily used (the most heavily used in the country, as of late) and so reference librarians at the Westerville Public Library play a big part in helping pull items for remote patrons, sending them off, and on the other end receiving items from other libraries and checking them out to our local patrons. Because these are special items, they must be checked in and out a certain way as well as obtain a particular label that makes patrons aware these items do not belong to us (or do, if they are remote patrons). Because it is so heavily used, we can have three full carts of items to process. Thankfully, we were slow today and I was able to participate in this process and get a grasp on what the reference librarians here to every day.

On that note, I think it's important to remember that the patrons we serve we don't necessarily meet face to face, or even talk to in any semblance of a conversation. However, we still participate in a transaction with them. In this way, it's really satisfying to see other libraries helping remote patrons. Ultimately, our jobs are public service. These relationships are valuable and should not be discounted as anything else.

Another thing to mention is that we do occasionally get reference questions in snail mail form. While I did not personally answer any of these, I have spoken with several librarians who do respond. Many of these letters are from patrons who cannot physically come inside the library; to be more specific, incarcerated patrons. Dealing with these patrons is different because there are additional privacy issues involved on the side of the librarian (especially the female ones). Sometimes they have to refuse information because patrons will ask for say, 50 pages of printed material. I hope to learn in the future what good policy is with communicating with these patrons (and quite honestly, to see if I personally agree with our current methods of communication, or if they could be improved somehow).

All in all I've learned a lot during my reference shadowing experience and I'm very grateful to the many librarians who advised me and graciously provided me with their time throughout writing my blog. (And thanks for reading it too!) I hope to continue working in reference and constantly learn new things to help patrons.

Reference Blog #4

I covered the reference desk again on November 10th with Erik Johansen, a longtime reference librarian. The greatest thing about working with Erik (that he's presumably learned over the years) is that he is superb at multitasking. He can help a patron in person while helping someone on the phone and scheduling something on the computer. In short, Erik is more than the ideal reference partner if you're at a two person desk: he's the ideal reference librarian I'm trying to become. And I'm not even saying that because Erik might read this. It's simply true.

With that in mind, I only watched this desk for an hour on this day, but it was a very busy one. As soon as I came out a patron approached me and asked me for help locating a Francisco Goya sketchbook. He didn't know any titles, so I conducted a search of the area where it might be (knowing it wasn't very big and we both happened to be standing near the art section) and decided to visually scan the shelves for a sketchbook he might be interested in. I shouldn't have been surprised that I wasn't able to find anything, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to look while we were there.

I asked him to come back with me to the desk so we could sit down at a computer and do some research to figure out a better idea of what he was looking for. He was able to identity the color of the book's cover, but no title or author. After doing some extensive searching in our system, SearchOhio and OhioLink (SearchOhio being the busiest library exchange system in the U.S.) and not locating the item, I googled the terms we had discussed and was able to find the item's title on amazon.com by having the patron locate the cover picture.

After doing all this I was able to locate the the title through SearchOhio and told the patron I would be happy to put it on hold for him. He provided me with his card and I looked it up. This particular patron had over $100 in fines, meaning he couldn't check out or reserve anything until he had paid it down to $5. I informed him of this and he shrugged and said, "Yeah, I know about that. Whatever." I explained the policy to him after which he left (without paying any of his fines).

This would not be abnormal except for the fact that I later found out this is a regular patron who has been made very aware of his fines. This has not been the first time I've experienced this, so I think it's worth writing about in this blog. Just because I am new (and relatively so) does not mean I will change policy or break rules. That patron spent nearly 30 minutes with me knowing that he couldn't get that item with any other librarian. Knowing that he spent my time having me look for an item in hopes that I would be ill-trained or be willing to make an exception is frustrating. How does someone gain respect in the public eye without physically being the person they see at the desk every day?

I've come across this same issue as I have been trained and now regularly cover several other departments in my library. As much as I want to love the patrons we serve (and usually, I really do), occasions like this make me frustrated. I don't want these interactions to influence how I treat other patrons, so this experience was a great way to measure if I was doing that or not. I paid close attention to my mood with the following patrons. It's important for me to remember that whoever comes in line next with perhaps an equally challenging search is probably nothing like the patron who knowingly wasted my time.

I guess in the meantime, until I'm more familiar in the public eye here, I'll hang tough and keep learning, one day at a time. After all, at least 95% of the patrons I serve are reason alone to develop an interest in reference librarianship.

(And just in case you do read this, thank you Erik!)

Reference Blog #3

I covered the reference desk again on November 2, this time with a non-reference librarian. The two of us had been asked to cover the desk while the reference librarians had a meeting. This person normally works in technical services, so we were both praying something extraordinarily difficult didn't happen that neither of us knew how to deal with.

This was an interesting experience by itself. The other person is older than me and communicated with patrons as well as conducted searches in a different way. Her knowledge of the catalog was immense, considering her experience in ordering and processing the majority of our library. However, I found that when a patron didn't know exactly what they want, I was able to quickly use some newer searching tools and databases that she may not have been aware of. To be clear, I am not saying that this person was unhelpful, we just performed the same functions very differently.

This leads me to the point that staying in touch with technology is a vital part of being a reference (I repeat, reference) librarian. The primary goal is to answer the questions of patrons, and the fewer resources you have at your disposal, the harder time you may have locating what the patron wants. At this particular desk it is necessary to work as a team since questions can come in through a variety of means, sometimes all at once. Knowing how to delegate these tasks should not happen because one person does not know how to perform a certain task. I guess what I'm trying to say here is being a reference librarian is always a learning experience. This is not only due to evolving technology, but evolving forms of communication (i.e. instant messenger, text, etc.) There are absolutely still things that I don't know how to do and being at the desk can be overwhelming. It can be very personally challenging to have a patron stare at you because you clearly don't know what you're doing.

That feeling is going away for me as I gain plenty of experience at the desk, and I'm enjoying learning new (and some great old) techniques.

Reference Blog #2

I worked at the reference desk again on Saturday, October 17th. This time I worked with the always lovely Mindy Van Houten. I know we're only supposed to be blogging about 5 hours working a reference desk, but why do 5 hours when they could use me for 5 shifts? Amiright? :)

It was a lot slower than last time, which was a double edged sword. Mindy and I knew ahead of time we would likely be slow because Ohio State had a football game that afternoon. (For those of you who aren't familiar with OSU, football is big here.) While this left me with more time to interact with patrons and really focus on helping them in every way possible, it didn't exactly give me a lot of new ways to interact with them either.

One of the questions from the interview that I want to return to that I think was incredibly important when it happened was what a rookie librarian should know when they're at the desk alone. This has happened to me a few times and up until this point, I sort of felt like a deer in the headlights. But this particular time I realized I had become a lot more familiar with some of the tools at my disposal and procedures to help them.

For example, I've become incredibly familiar with accessing both print and online versions of consumer reports for practically any item you'd find in or near a household. I've come to realize this is probably a staple of working in a public library. Members of this community are using a lot of our public resources, which is fantastic! Tamara Murray, one of our magnificent IT specialists created a large number of guides to our online resources, and I've found myself handing those out a lot. They give patrons a step by step guide to accessing and logging onto the website and conducting a search, including a screen shot in every guide (there are roughly 20 currently, but we hope to have a guide for all of our online resources in the future).

That said, the best thing about being slow was having time to spend with patrons teaching them how to search as opposed to doing something faster for them by doing it myself. It may take a few more minutes, but with the majority of patrons you can save the patron and yourself a lot of time in the future by providing them with the knowledge to conduct their own searches in the future. I've especially been trying to introduce patrons to the easy process of using OhioLink and SearchOhio, which allows them to order items from other libraries if we don't have them. A surprising number of our patrons don't realize it exists, even though the icons appear on the screen whenever they conduct a search.

Teaching a patron how to conduct a productive search is a much better feeling than doing it for them.

Freedom Trails

I thought I would share with you what I was busy doing!

Reference Desk Observation, September 26

I feel I should preface this by saying that this is not the first time I have worked at our reference desk. Because we are so short staffed, everyone has had to cover in other fields. Luckily for me and other library staff, I needed to complete this project anyways, so it worked out pretty great.

My first shadowing experience was on Saturday, September 26th. I worked with Nieca Nowels, the department manager of Adult Services. One of the first things I noticed was that the desk simply said "Ask Here." The old "reference" sign now lays on top of Nieca's desk, a memory of the library jargon that we often assume everyone understands. I think the "ask here" sign makes the desk much less intimidating and makes us librarians more approachable. Less smarty-pants, if you will.

We received our information primarily through two ways: phone and in person. While the library does operate an internet conversation with other patrons, more often than not, it is very difficult to reach a librarian immediately through these ways. With recent budget cuts in the state of Ohio, our situation is not uncommon. I found it exceptionally difficult to always practice good patron service simply because there were so many people steadily throughout the day. If I had been receiving e-mails, texts, and ims, I honestly don't think I could have done even a subpar job at communicating with that number of people. While this is not unusual for this library, especially on Saturdays, the low level of staffing is something we're all coping with.

I think it's important that I share with you who our patrons are. In short, they are everyone. Being in adult services doesn't mean children won't come up with their parents and pose questions, as they should be able to. Westerville is also a college town attached to Columbus, OH, so we have a large number of students. Being the only library in Westerville we also get the majority of its residents, as well as those of the booming suburban areas north of here whom, as of yet, have no closer library. We are swamped, to say the least.

The reference desk is also an area where patrons can borrow laptops and reserve meeting rooms. Although we are located right next to a large tech center (about 15 PCs and 5 Macs), laptops are the desired tool. While it is very easy to keep track of who has loaned out what (we check all items out on their card in addition to keeping their driver's license until the laptop is returned), it still means that a large number of people are waiting in line for requests that don't take up a large amount of time. Unfortunately, if one librarian is on the phone with a patron's question and the other librarian is helping a patron sign up for free computer classes, this can mean that a large number of people line up at the desk. And even more unfortunately, waiting makes patrons angry, which we sometimes hear about.

Like I said, I found it difficult to keep my head above water, much less spend the amount of time with each patron as they deserved. I genuinely felt bad that I couldn't have spent more time with them, asking follow up questions. I felt as if I were in a situation where I really needed to herd people along, especially when one patron attempted to enter a religious discussion with my not-so-enthusiastic coworker.

I'm hoping that the next time I work will be considerably slower so that I can work on two things:

1. Improving my interactions with patrons. Being more friendly and less hurried as well as following through with them until they are completely satisfied.

2. Having the time to respond to reference questions through other mediums, particularly e-mail and im since the library does not currently have a texting system set up.

I sincerely hope it is less frenzied next time!