Us vs. them - it's not the way it's meant to be.

Beginings of some thoughts on employer / employee relations over at Pandoras Blog

Natural selection?

So. Last week at work I had to do an almighty ball-ache of a task. I had to compare our database with two other commercially / freely available databases, in terms of their coverage of journals in a particular subject area, and selection of articles from those journals. It's not something that I do every day - so when it proved that my manager wanted more than the rough jist given by my initial assessment, I switched to the only other setting I seem to have: go in to minute detail and spend hours and hours trying to get it just right. So anyway - I was working on it for days trying to get it in for this morning's deadline. I e-mailed the two page assessment (with 40 pages of appendices) from home at 7.45 on Saturday night.

My original point was not to whinge about how much work I have on. Hey, I'm sure we can all do that. I won't even mention the piles of journals waiting to be indexed after all the time I didn't spend on them last week. But I suppose it is connected. The upshot of the exercise was that the other databases, both considered separately and jointly, offered much better coverage of the particular subject we were looking at, in that they were able to comprehensively include all articles from many of their key titles.

My question is how? How many staff do they have working on this that they can have journals lists of 300+ titles and be comprehensive in their inclusion of articles from the majority of them. We can be forgiven for not having as good coverage - it wasn't a particularly core area - but the extent to which we failed was quite remarkable. And if I'm honest we're not even able to be that comprehensive with those titles which are absolutely key to us. We have to operate a selection policy - only items of reasonable length of relevance to the department's business areas are selected for indexing, possible abstracting & inclusion on the database. If we tried to include everything we'd get even more ridiculously behind than we already are. We just don't have the staff.

Our abstracting and indexing unit - (responsible for abstracting, classifying and adding subject keywords to the records of many books - selecting, cataloguing, indexing and abstracting chapters from books and articles from journals) - until recently consisted of three professional staff, and 0.7 of a library officer (para-professional post who inputs items onto the database for us). Whatever 0.7 of a person looks like I'm not sure I want to know. I say until recently, because now we're down to two professionals.

Me being librarian of the unit, I'm required to do a lot of management type work / nonsense - the best part of which I'd rather not, so essentially there's probably 1.6 people working full time on indexing the stock and journal content of a large specialist library. What are we supposed to be - superheroes? We had a backlog even before the cuts. (New ways of working are hopefully going to help us not get much worse, but there's still a monstrous amount of work to be done.)

Or is there something I'm missing? Are you involved in this kind of work? How do you / your library go about it? How many people are employed populating the database? Ok, I'll confess, I don't spend every minute of the day frantically inputting onto the system, I go to the loo occasionally. Make myself a cup of tea, have a bit of a chat with my workmates - even god forbid read a non work related e-mail. But I have to preserve whatever is left of my sanity somehow. Don't I?

New broom, sweep clean

I've been blogging for a while over at pandoras-blog, spilling my thoughts and poetry and other such nonsense out at the unsuspecting world. Over time though, my blogging desires have become broader - and it seems logical to maybe give each group of thoughts a home. Go on, sue me, I'm a librarian. I love to classify things. Consider this Pandora's blog 004.67. / TS / 02, whatever. And hopefully this will mean I don't bore the people who go to pandoras-blog for the poetry to tears by blithering on about knowledge management, thesauri and taxonomies.

Anyway, my plan for this little baby is to use it to explore some of the library /work related themes that bother my cerebral cortex along the way. I hope to provide some useful links and resources. I should specify that I currently work in a government health library, so the stuff I come up with may have a little bit of a bent in that direction. However I'm also interested in people management, and hope to say a bit about that too.

Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't. Lets see shall we?