Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Lamentations

I am having a really hard time getting motivated to do anything this week. It has been a really interesting transition for me coming from a 4 branch suburban library to my current one-man band rural library. Obviously, the patron traffic and the budget are a bit...... less. I am really proud of the accomplishments my part-time person and myself have made over the last year or so. We have finally finished automating the collection which is a huge thing as you can imagine. We are showing consistently higher monthly circulation totals when compared with the previous year. I feel like our print collection is stronger and more diverse, especially in the children's section, just because I have 5 years of experience working in a children's department and knew authors and subjects where we were sorely lacking. We also really beefed up our Summer Reading Program, expanding it from K-5 to 3 yrs. to 6th grade.

BUT

I am at a point where I would like to do more programming and activities and am feeling some pretty intense opposition from my board. I have a lot of requests from patrons for storytimes, afterschool youth activities, and computer classes, so I know the public would be receptive. However, when I bring it up at meetings, I seem to get the giant brush off. I was told that they didn't want me using staff resources for things like that. Great. One problem is that I only have 1 day a week when I have someone else working with me, so that is the only day I can do programming. AND while I could schedule programming on all of those days, it is kind of nice to have a day where I can shut my office door and get "administrative" things done.

SOOOOO.... I'm just feeling kind of stuck. I would like to do "normal" library things and hopefully bring more people in to utilize us, but without support from my board I can't really do anything. I am finding it increasingly hard to motiviate myself to do anything of great substance because I just feel like what's the point? Do all librarians have days (weeks) like this, or am I just super lucky? *sigh* That's all. Just wanted to whine a little bit.

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