Year 2, Day 83: 12/3/12

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me!  I've heard it said, that sometimes having someone from the outside taking a look at the way things work can be useful.  Today I saw the opposite of that, when someone who knows nothing about how a library works enforced their "view" of how things should work on a process they knew nothing about.  I was ready to throw something, I was so angry today!  When we need guidance and support, we get someone's individualized view of things and their absolute blindness to what they really need to be focusing on.  Now we have to try to work around and through this person rather than with them. They weren't done either - the conversation continued after the meeting when they took their time to try to convince me that we needed to restructure a pre-planned space so that we could create individualized spaces that were themed by subject areas.  I'd say that if we were building a graduate library, then that would be right on the money.  But we are not, and our library is very much undergraduate focused (as is the norm).  We can't tell the students how to use the libraries and the spaces - no matter how hard we try to do this, the students will do what they want to do and change anything we institute.  We can put up a sign that says "social sciences" but the odds of only students studying in those areas sitting there are slim to none.  The same can be said for the new computers - they will have powerful multimedia software on them...but most students will be doing something other than multimedia work.  Okay, off of my soap box for now...but I'll likely have to get back on it soon!