Am reading the Psychology of Everyday Things, which is helping sharpen my thinking, too.

There are other cases where the information could be valuable. One example:

If instead, as in my case, you are at UCSD and you notice that there is a copy at UC Irvine AND you have a friend there that you haven’t seen in months, you might want the information so you can decide to either wait X days to have the request processed and shipped to you, or you can drive up that afternoon, check out the book, and have a nice dinner with your friend.

…it all depends on how good your programmers are and how good your relationship with them is…

* misspelled word;
* parens closed improperly;
* wrong punctuation 2x;
* inconsistent spelling;
* inconsistent spelling;

I am a biblical scholar and graduate school professor in the humanities, and I’m caught up in Code Year! If anyone is on the fence, I assure you, you can do this. Thanks for the post!
Brooke

I wrote that paragraph you cited feeling cynical; it’s a bottom-line that we do not really want to think about either as an employer/manager or an employee. The fact is we all want to work at a place where loyalty is valued and employee’s continuous career growth and skill/knowledge building is encouraged and rewarded. The reality is, I hate to say, that there are chair warmers who do want to absolutely no more than the minimum of the job. And there are some of those organizations that rarely promote their own employees, hardly support their continuing education in any substantial way, are never clear on what skills and values they want from their employees (lack of mission and vision tied to everyday work tasks), and even fear their career growth worrying whether they would leave the current employer despite lack of incentives/rewards. Loyalty for those bad organizations would be pointless. I am also guessing that is the kind of place where maybe chair warmers prosper.

Probably as long as we are all humans, the loyalty argument will never cease to be played by both employers and employees. But what is important is to make that something meaningful. The retention of employees is of great value to an employer. It cuts down HR costs; a low rate of staff turnover contributes to the stability of its operation; the knowledge and skills of employees are valuable assets of an organization. But an organization has to be conscious about how to retain those assets within it and to find a systematic way to promote/encourage/reward their growth. It’s all in its benefit in the end. If not, it will inevitably suffer the continuous loss of talented people or the continuous failure to attract them in the first place. I just hope Harvard libraries won’t make that mistake while going through their reorganization efforts.

On the upside, the Harvard Library Transition team has said that staff who lose their jobs will receive training to help them get jobs at Harvard which may require new skills. Also if Jane Doe’s job is redefined in such a way that she has most, but not all, of the skills needed training will be offered so she can learn those new skills.

Previously, those offers of training have been inadequate. That said, this is a new management team making these decisions, so it’s not fair to penalize them for things they didn’t actually do.

In times in which permanent jobs are a joke, asking loyalty for employees is an absurd idea. The flip side of it is, however, that it would be equally silly for employees to think that loyalty itself would have any significant meaning

I agree with you here. However, staff are being told that their loyalty is important and necessary. First we had 3 years of doing less with more. My library head, and others, told us that our loyalty to Harvard’s library system & patrons would be the thing that got us through budget cuts & understaffing. Some people left, some people stuck it out.

Now we’re being told yet again that staff are important, we’re what makes the Harvard libraries a world class institution etc. My library head said we needed to “take a leap of faith” and trust that the transition team is going to do great things.

I think one reason staff freaked out is because the administration has been telling us that our loyalty to the Harvard library institution is valuable. Last week it was made brutally clear that they don’t care.

I really wish that seat warmers at upper levels of the library will be affected by this layoff. Sadly, some the worst offenders are seemingly untouchable and will probably remain.

One thing I think would be helpful is for someone to talk with staff about how new technology can improve the services they provide. A true collaboration between staff and management would be wonderful. Unfortunately, right now staff are told to just figure it out, and when they run into problems upper level management chastises them for being resistant to change. They’re not resistant, they want to learn but they’re not getting support for that.

On a final note I think it’s telling that neither Helen Shenton or Mary Lee Kennedy has offered apologies, or even sympathy, for staff who were stressed and upset by Thursdays discussions.

As a library patron, I love that I can borrow a device loaded with ebooks since I don’t need to wrangle with my own personal device to download the library e-book. On the other hand, as a librarian I have some concerns, one of which is having +90 books locked up in one device that can be checked out to one person only at a time.

I am curious to know if the concept of having single kindles available for checkout, loaded with multiple books, can be a solution to the suggested practice in e-book licensing to limit library lending to N loans for X dollars, since you would be lending the kindle, not the electronic version.

I can envision a future, though, in which professors have two dozen library kindles shelved above their desks, perpetually checked out, and essentially rendered unavailable to mere students for brose or read!