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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Day in the Life of a Children's Librarian

8:40a - Arrive at library, turn on lights and computers in department. Put my stuff away.

8:55a - Take an armful of letters (seriously, about 55!) upstairs to upper circulation and feed them through the postage machine. These are letters introducing myself and advertising our services to local preschools and daycares. I'm hopeful that preschools will call and invite us to read stories to their classes or bring their classes to the library for a field trip.

9:10a - Stop by business office and say hi to N.

9:15a - Back in the Children's office. I want to go to the reference section and shift some books around, but I figure I need to work on the book order first. I put together an order for one of our vendors and email it to him. We don't work with a lot of sales reps, but this one offers a better discount than our main vendor and free shipping, so we try to order the publishers they carry through our sales rep.

9:45a-12:15p - I work on putting together a couple more orders (we place separate orders for fiction and nonfiction and Spanish books because they come out of different budget lines). I type up purchase orders for the orders.

12:15p - Lunch time!

12:45p - Back to Children's. I'm scheduled on desk but A offers to cover the desk so I can mess around in the reference section. I start shifting the books.

12:45-2:00p - I shift reference books. They need to be weeded, but we have enough space on the shelves (especially since we are not really ordering any print reference for the foreseeable future) that by shifting them I can open up almost three bays. This is where our Spanish language books are going to go - right in the front so that everyone knows we have them!

2:00p - I attend a meeting of the Website Redesign Committee. Originally we'd hoped to have money to possibly hire someone to design a snazzy new website. Unfortunately, the budget got cut. Fortunately we have an awesome tech team who have actually designed a really nice website. We give our input and discuss any changes we'd like to see.

3:05p - Back on desk. H is nice enough to cover for me a little longer so I can finish up the shifting.

3:35p - Done with shifting! I dust the empty shelves and they're ready for the Spanish books! Now that we have a nice new place for them, I'm just hopeful to get the funds to order more books sometime soon...

3:35p - 5:00p - On desk. I look over the small pile of reference books that I selected to weed. I'll go through them more thoroughly later with the input of my staff, but there were some that I knew I could withdraw today.

After I finish with the weeded books, I page through a Scholastic catalog because there are some nonfiction books I'm going to order.

5:00p - A arrives to cover the desk for the evening shift and I take off, trying to make it home before my apartment office closes. (I made it!)