Having Too Much Fun

Here I am having too much fun.

Hello, my name is Marf and I work in the children's room of a public library. The photo above is me with some puppets. I wish I had video, but I just don't have time for putting something like that together. But I bet people would watch it. I have had requests to go to other libraries and demonstrate how I use puppets, but I can't get away because of scheduling.

This is my job: buying puppets with taxpayer's money and playing with puppets during worktime. One half hour every other month or so, kids get to watch me play with them. We spend this money on puppets and my time because free puppet shows like this bring parents and children into the library.

Long about fifth grade, coming to a puppet show at the library starts to seem uncool. This is patently ridiculous thinking because I put in sly bits that appeal to the adults in the room and go right over a younger child's head. Adults tell me how much they enjoy our puppet shows. I have to appeal to them because they're the ones that drive the children to the library. But there is always the older kid who thinks this stuff is beneath him and starts digging in his heels about going to the library. The pre-teens and teens get their hormones on and the next thing you know, nothing an adult says is right.

Librarians have been casting around for decades for a way to entice these kids back into the library and one of the the ways they hit upon was video games. Some librarians (married to someone with a better income, no doubt) already had some cool video games at home that they could bring to work and share one night with the kids. The rest of us had no idea what these things were. Let's face it, most of the librarians are girls and most of us tend to think of girlie activities. Gaming does not always rise to the top of our fluffy little brains. I've been to demos at state library sponsored functions where a librarian talks about bring her son's Dance Dance Revolution pad and game to the library and how popular that was. But funding being what it is, some of the more rural libraries can't afford to invest in expensive games we don't even know how to play, much less set up.

Here's where our state library helps us out. They buy the games that are most popular for this sort of thing and then loan them out to their public libraries. But that still leaves us sort of in the dark as to how to use them or set them up. Most of us here need an IT guy just to take a new PC out of a box and set it up. Who ya gonna ask about how this goes together? The state library in Nebraska came up with an elegant solution. They made a promotional video showing how they set up the games (Rock Band right out of a new box) and how they are played and posted them on YouTube, a social site that hosts videos, so that the librarians in their state could preview the new acquisition and decide if it looked like something they were brave enough to try, because these gaming night things really work. They certainly made it look easy! And they sure look like they'll know what they're talking about if someone calls them and asks how it hooks up.

Pure genius! Unfortunately, someone mistook this for librarians having too much fun. The state auditor in Nebraska decided that buying, videoing, and distributing these games was inappropriate use of public funds. Further, use of social sites by librarians was also a waste of tax money. I can understand that in these difficult times, people are looking for ways to save money, but this was very little money and you have to look at the bigger picture.

The internet is a place where our customers spend more and more of their time. We buy bookmobiles to go to our patrons. We set up branches to put our libraries closer to our patrons. Our presence in blogs, on Flickr, and elsewhere on social sites (even Second Life, a virtual world I've bored people about elsewhere)is another way to make us accessible to our customers.

Social networking, by the way, can be used to save money. What wastes more time and money: librarians from all over the state driving to the state library for a class on how to use some new technology or each librarian sitting at a computer and watching a 10 minute video of the important stuff? Which leaves a smaller carbon footprint? The librarian would have to watch that video a whole lot of times to even come close to the expenses of driving, parking, having lunch (because there's no point in having someone drive for over an hour just to demonstrate something for 20 minutes - they have to work up a whole half day's worth of instruction), and the compensation for the hours wasted in travel time.

I use YouTube (well, not very often, but I know how and I have an account), I blog (look around you, this is a blog) which I use to share information, I created a social network on Ning for sharing ideas about programming for children in libraries, and I follow other librarians on Twitter (where I learned about this idiotic auditor in Nebraska). In a previous post I blogged all my notes from a conference I attended so that not only my co-workers but anyone else could learn what I learned. In another post I blogged about a conference I attended virtually in Second Life from my home that I would not have been able to attend at all. As far as I'm concerned, our state library should be using social networking more, especially Second Life which could save loads on travel costs to the annual conference. At least they had the good sense to introduce us all to the concepts. They probably don't use the social tools more because every year they have to cut back on their budget and everyone there is wearing so many hats they can't see straight anymore.

So, Marf, what's your point?

My point is, there is hardly any difference between my puppets and the video games. They are both used to entice a certain age group to the library and not everyone knows how to use them. A quick demonstration of how easy it is encourages the neophyte. And my final point? Well, that the Nebraska auditor is an ass, of course, and now I expect our state auditor to come after me and my puppets. Thank you so much, Nebraska taxpayer, for making our jobs just a little bit more horrible.