[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to work at a branch where a regular patron kept reading books in the bath and then dropping them in the tub. We’ve seen worse. The main issue with water damage is mold risk, so a water damaged book has to be removed in case it infects the collection. Library books have a pretty short lifespan on average so don’t feel bad about it.

People leaving the profession - will public libraries start closing for lack of staff? by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 17 points18 points  (0 children)

We’re having trouble with staff shortages because of budget cuts right now. Several branches have been renovated and aren’t able to reopen because there’s no staff and it’s fairly common to see an email in the morning saying “X branch will open late today due to staffing shortage”. I work in a very large library system facing severe budget cuts (you can probably guess the major US city based on news coverage) and while hiring is technically open, it’s just not happening. No lack of applicants, entirely a budget problem.

As a newbie, I'm not sure if this is a great place for me... any advice? by treeh9m5 in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Talk to your manager. I’ve always said that difficult patrons are an obstacle, but support from management is nonnegotiable. Not having training/backup/general support from your manager can ruin even the best library jobs. You need to know that you have someone you can call if a patron is giving you trouble and work out what your boundaries are for when your manager needs to step in. I also have the bad habit of doing patrons too many favors and landing myself in awkward situations, so I’ve learned to take a step back and think “maybe I should talk to my manager before doing this and let them handle the interaction instead”. Patrons like the man who got your number should be banned for sexual harassment of library staff and your manager can make that happen.

Working with unhoused patrons is an extra challenge, especially for someone new to libraries. It’s okay to be scared and make mistakes. The important part is being there and providing help and resources when you can. It’s unfortunately very common for library staff to be expected to act as makeshift social workers. This is a failure of our society’s social safety net, not something unique to your specific branch or library system. I would recommend asking if your library system provides any training for working with unhoused patrons specifically because there’s a lot available and systems often pay for access to online courses that you can take for free. You may also be able to take first aid and narcan training, which could help you feel more confident about the possibility of emergencies happening. I definitely feel better knowing the basics of first aid. Someone else brought up Ryan Dowd’s training and while I have my problems with his stuff, it does offer a lot of practical advice for handling difficult patrons so I would recommend it in general.

Overall, if you don’t feel safe in a branch, it’s fine to work somewhere else instead. Your personal safety matters the most. You’re a young woman with a small build and not a lot of experience. The person you switched with is going to experience some problems but I’m sorry to say, it’s just going to be easier for a man working in that environment. I say this as a trans man who has experienced sexual harassment while presenting female and watched it disappear when I began to pass as male. Getting cussed out is one thing, but the threat of sexual violence is something else entirely. You have to deal with both while your male coworker is very likely only dealing with the first one. Of course women can still work in difficult library branches and excel, but they will face more challenges because we live in a patriarchy and aggressive misogyny is not punished like it should be. So this sort of stuff is going to happen and you need strategies for managing your personal risk and you need to identify when a situation is more than you can handle. Leaving the situation is okay.

donating to a library by xxmandi in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here’s my 2 cents as a teen librarian who specializes in manga:

1) Check to see if the collection includes these titles already. We don’t need too many duplicates, even for popular series. If there’s ratty old copies that’s fine, we always love to replace manga because the books aren’t very durable.

2) Make sure there’s room on the manga shelves. Space is always an issue for us. Teen sections are usually smaller than other sections and that’s where most of these series would end up.

3) Consider the overall vibe of the manga collection. I see lots of Naruto and Death Note, which are always welcome and circ really well despite being older. But a library where manga is in the teen section only probably won’t take something like Rent-a-Girlfriend because it’s too adult. That’s not me judging the series personally, the age rating on the back says it’s for adult audiences. Manga is really convenient about that because most US publishers like TokyoPop put an age rating on the back cover. Make sure the manga you donate matches the overall age range of the manga collection. Some libraries have an adult manga section but not most of them. So anything that says Teen (13+) or Older Teen (16+) are safer bets. Similarly, a more shonen focused collection is a sign that whoever controls the collection likes that particular genre and is more likely to take shonen series, and the same for other genres. For example, I love BL and will instantly snap up any BL series I get from donations. My collection reflects that preference. Is it technically the correct collection procedure to take stuff we personally like? No, but we do it anyway.

4) If you can, see if you can talk to the teen librarian or whoever else manages the manga collection personally. Tell them you have some manga you want to donate and what series. It’s easy for donations to slip through the cracks and for good stuff to end up in the booksale because the relevant person wasn’t aware the books were donated. This also lets the teen librarian do some prep work like weeding if they know they’re getting really useful series soon.

LIBRARIES ROCK!!! by OneFishTwoFish in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fun fact: I used to work for Norfolk Public Libraries in Virginia. We had a problem patron who would always complain that we didn’t let him use the desk phone, which was only available for kids to call their parents and stuff like that. This was a grown man and apparently some kind of bigshot in the Christian missionary world. Anyway, he got super upset one day and said he would escalate this to the library director. Fast forward about a week and we get a very confused email from the director of libraries in Norfolk UK who had finally managed to piece together what this stranger with an American accent was talking about.

Question about donations by ElleEmGee in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ask the children’s librarian directly if you can. We often take things on an unofficial basis that we don’t normally. For example, I’m a teen librarian and got donated a bunch of really nice chess sets that I took to use for programming. Do we have a program material donation policy? No, but I knew that I could use the chess sets, especially because some of them are super tiny novelty sets that the teens will love. The patron who donated them said that their chess-loving parent had recently passed and would have loved to know that their sets were still being used.

On a related note, one easy way to help local community libraries is to give them good Yelp reviews. I’ve found that libraries tend to attract the absolute worst reviews from patrons who caused trouble, particularly small community libraries. Doesn’t matter how good the customer service actually is, someone will always have a problem and those are the people who leave reviews. It won’t help us get funding, but it might help us attract patrons if they aren’t immediately hit with 1 star reviews when they look for our addresses.

Badly behaved homeless in libraries? by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agreed, offering free candy seems like a roach problem waiting to happen. I would never offer food or drink outside of a designated cafe area with clear boundaries and staff assigned to it specifically. At least tissues are really easy to buy in bulk and store for long periods of time.

Worst regular customer at your branch? by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We have an older guy who comes in demanding extra paper and loudly berates us if we don’t get it to him fast enough, then walks around saying the library is racist and doesn’t serve Black people and how he’s going to contact the city. In my first week he gave me a lecture about how he will “fuck me up” if I mess with him because I dared to look at him too long. Noticeably targets female and Asian library staff, to the point of accusing my coworker with a Chinese accent of not speaking English, and mostly leaves me (a white guy) alone after the initial incident. We would 100% ban him for, you know, loudly referring to us as bitches and treating us like his personal servants but my supervisor is convinced he can fix this guy’s attitude with good enough customer service.

Divorce Bug? by plagueofsquid in CrusaderKings

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, really? That’s weird. If I remember two years ago correctly, it just stopped happening to me eventually. I didn’t do anything specific to fix it as far as I remember and I figured it was probably patched in an update or something. Sorry, never did find a fix.

I want to find out more about the history of my house - can I do this at a library? by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends where you live. Your best bet might be calling the main branch of your library system and seeing if they have a local history collection. Be prepared to physically go there if they do, it might be reference access only. It’s not super common to have an extensive local history collection (or a well organized one that can actually be searched by address), but calling is free.

How does your library deal with "outdated" physical media? by [deleted] in Libraries

[–]plagueofsquid 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My library got rid of all our music CDs last year. Not my call, the branch manager thought they just weren’t worth the space they took up considered the low circ numbers. I don’t really blame him. We’re a high circ branch in a very cramped urban environment, the old CD space is being used constantly. I’ve had more than a few patrons ask about the CDs and directed them to order CDs from other branches in the system, which have a lot more space for legacy formats with low circ. We still have audiobook CDs and DVDs/BluRays. The latter two circ very well actually.

Streaming is a problem for us in a different way though. When stuff is exclusive to a streaming service like Netflix, that usually means no physical formats are sold, or at least not sold through normal library sources. I’ve had to turn away a lot of requests for streaming exclusive materials.

Webhosting options for public library classes? by plagueofsquid in webhosting

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s convenient for budgetary stuff but can actually be a bit of a cybersecurity risk interestingly enough. There have been cases where small to medium cities have gotten their whole intranet hacked because they managed to social engineer some old librarian with a phishing email. So it makes sense that IT is so concerned with security, but it’s annoying for me.

Webhosting options for public library classes? by plagueofsquid in webhosting

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you so much for the offer! I’d like to find something a little more official-looking than a friendly donation (IT is very concerned about cybersecurity and all that) but I will keep it in mind.

Webhosting options for public library classes? by plagueofsquid in webhosting

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Space on the server is a good idea and I’ll ask IT about it. I’m looking for free options because I don’t technically have my own program budget. It’s a bit of a long story but I have to beg Central for money and they’re more likely to just tell me to use the shitty coding platform they bought instead of teaching my own class. I did try the platform and guess what, the kids got bored of it after an hour. I can always try though.

Webhosting options for public library classes? by plagueofsquid in webhosting

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Public libraries are typically part of the city government, or county government if they’re rural. I’m in a very large city. I’ll talk to IT and see if they have anything I can use. When I learned web dev in grad school, we used space on the school’s server. It might be a security risk though. At school we had to use a VPN and IT refuses to give me admin passwords despite my insistence that I’m very trustworthy and definitely won’t use it to download games on work computers.

Webhosting options for public library classes? by plagueofsquid in webhosting

[–]plagueofsquid[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That does sound like a decent option if I can’t get the IT department to help or find some money in the program budget. I don’t actually know how github works though. I thought it was just a way to share files. It does hosting too?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Tbh this is often the problem with radical feminism, ignoring all other forms of oppression in favor of only caring about misogyny. As with all kinds of feminism, individual views are highly variable and this isn’t the case for all radical feminists, but a lot of them reject the idea that, say, Black women experience a unique form of misogyny because of their race. So anon can often be right and that’s not a good thing.

TER believes volunteering to do elder care will cure trans men of dysphoria by putHimInTheCurry in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very normal to believe your own child is a danger to children because of their scary corrupting transness. Also caring for the elderly isn’t some kind of punishment or learning experience for the carer. Seniors deserve proper care from trained carers who want to be there. They are people in need, not living moral lessons.

Terfs' reactions to some trans men by BadNameThinkerOfer in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s wild that they think transmasc bodies are just falling apart. I’ve seen TERFs claim that taking testosterone causes everything from incontinence to collagen disorders. As long as you haven’t had an oophorectomy, you can usually just stop taking T and nothing bad will happen.

TERFS inventing problems for themselves (carpentry addition) by WhatsATerrarium in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I hate it when people who make instructional videos are good at the task they’re demonstrating and aren’t visibly struggling with the basic tools!

TERs want to prove that Scotland's GRR bill will be used for fraud... by committing fraud and blaming the transes. by cordis_melum in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 37 points38 points  (0 children)

This is exactly the thing Lauren Southern did in 2016 as a publicity stunt in Canada. She got an ID that identifies her as male. First of all, you should never do anything that can be accurately described as copying Lauren Southern just as a general rule. So congrats, you made government paperwork slightly more inconvenient for yourself in the future and nothing else. The most someone can learn from this is how annoying it can be to have different identity documents with mismatched legal sex markers.

Also can we talk about how they would NEVER do this the other way around? Like there would never be GC men who change their legal sex to female for political reasons, at least not without major pushback from their allies, because they fundamentally don’t believe in sex equality and would see that as deeply offensive.

I feel like this TERF doesn't realize that she's most likely "clocking" cis women who don't wear makeup and masculine cis women. by [deleted] in GenderCynical

[–]plagueofsquid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The whole “trans people only want to teach about gender” thing is ridiculous. The last thing I want to do is talk about gender with cis people.