Legal Research

Librarian Hobbies!! Here are the results.

By admin

Well, we had great participation in the librarian hobbies survey! Thanks for the over 1500 responses!

So, with great anticipation, do librarians differ markedly from our clients? Are we some odd subgroup of hobbyists? Well, now we know and, as GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.

Drumroll . . . .

Here are the most popular hobbies, in rank order:

Yep – and the added ‘open-ended’ comment hobbies contained some interesting, um, hobbies. Read the list below. One comment on my blog also regretted that we didn’t include political activism in the list. I’ll consider this if I ever do this survey again. However, given the current political climate and elections, I don’t know if they meet the criterion of leisure time ‘fun’ anymore.

Here are the top 12 in an easier format (the only difference is that I added photography to the librarian poll since I made a mistake and forgot to use it on the first poll):

And lastly, here is a comparison with the list from the last poll of library user hobbies.

And you’ll note excitingly that librarians do align quite nicely with the hobbies of our users.

What can that mean? It could mean that you have enormous talent right on staff to do programs and make resource selections for our users! And that’s wonderful! Have you inventoried the hobbies of your staff and colleagues? Could they do a program? Can they make a webliography of great articles from your databases? Could they describe the library’s resources that support their hobby in a blog posting or newsletter article? Whatever we do, let’s not waste the talents of our talent!

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on October 31, 2010 (boomark / email).