I had intended to write about event planning today, but Joanne has been out for much of the day over at the Hayti Heritage Center working to hammer out some technical difficulties for a humanities event taking place there next week. So I will come back to that topic later this week and instead talk about how the department functions, based on what I've seen so far.
I think that a lot of people (including, for awhile, myself) have this notion that public librarians sit around all day and read books. I also think that SILS tries hard to dispel this notion. One the very first day of INLS 501 last semester, Dr. Pomerantz told us "If you are here because you love books, run." (This was, in retrospect, quite funny because we had just finished going around the room and saying why we had decided to attend SILS. A good two-thirds of the replies were iterations of "Because I love books."
Having spent a little time in a public library setting, it's a little easier to see where he was coming from. The library, at least the marketing division, is more of a business than an idyllic place where everyone sits around reading books all day long. It's more akin to working at an office: we sit at desks and do plenty of dry, business-y tasks like grant writing, recordkeeping, and spreadsheet maintenance. Department meetings are not about books we've read but rather about how we can save some money on printing costs or meeting quotas. It's very apparent that visibility is essential to the library's survival, and the staff seems grateful for any publicity they receive, even if it's as small as a blurb cut from the local newspaper. (Gina carefully saves these for BoT meetings and they are subsequently archived.)
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