Well, some small steps are being made in the library. I finally have a key to the public entrance to the building (someone made a duplicate key for me but they managed to copy the wrong one!) and have expanded the hours somewhat. The hours were 10:30 am – 12:30 pm M,W,F. I’ve added 3 pm – 5 pm to those same three days, allowing for the traditional lunch/siesta break from 12:30 – 3 pm during the heat of the day. Still ridiculously limited but I’m the only person actually assigned to the library at present. The SIL translation staff have their own keys, however, so they can visit anytime. I’ve also had a wooden book cart made so I can shift books around, having provided pictures and specifications of carts from American library supply vendors like Gaylord and Brodart from the Web. The current arrangement of books is very confusing, not to mention the awkward position of the librarian’s desk, so I would like to start rearranging soon.
All of the bookshelves in the library have glass fronts, to keep out the dust, and I have had a lock replaced where the key had broken off in the lock, along with repair to one of the shelf end-panels that had come separated from its metal frame from the weight of the books. If the doors are not locked they don’t close properly, and just hang ajar, defeating the whole purpose of doors in the first place. Additional bookends (another budget request!) might help keep the heavy tomes from pushing against the ends of the shelves and I’m having someone else make me a dozen more.
The library desperately needs some barcodes, which were apparently cut from last year’s budget! I’ve tried printing them using a template I found on the Internet, with little success. Lining them up with a networked printer located in another building doesn’t make it easy. It would be also be nice if there were money in the budget for a hand-held scanner and a small label/barcode printer, but it doesn’t look like this is the year for such luxuries. To my horror, I found that there were sheets of hand-written lists of items with made-up “barcodes” and am determined to clean up this mess if I have time. Some of the items listed have not even been catalogued and I don’t even know where the materials are! Not a good thing in a library.
I’ve also discovered that the current library software doesn’t support some of the West African characters and diacritical marks—not a good thing in a linguistics library. I’ve had a chat session with one of the company’s representatives about an upgraded multi-language module, but he wanted to sell me a total upgrade to the new version, recently released. $$$ And I’m having difficulty getting the academic affairs department to spring money for barcodes…
My fantasy is to standardize some of the library’s policies with the other SIL libraries in francophone Africa and to get our holdings up on a re-designed website. As of now it is almost impossible to find the Ouaga site! Betty Conn, from my church in the US, has recommended someone who is tentatively interested in doing it, so this is actually within the realm of possibility!
I asked Clémence, from SIL’s academic affairs, and who occasionally helps out in the library, to find out about visiting the new Mediathèque Municipale, a public library of sorts, to learn how they handle certain library basics there… I thought visiting might be good for networking, finding out where to get supplies, etc. This, however turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. Their barcodes, for one, had come from France as there was no local demand for printing...
Someone else told me that, for Africa, the mayor has actually accomplished a fair amount for Ouagadougou, and the construction everywhere was a sign of something... Clémence, at least, was more impressed than I was, and held out hope for the Mediathèque's future...
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