Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Evening Shift in the Life of a Children's Librarian

12:50p - Arrive at work. Greet coworkers, put things away, change my shoes (there is snow EVERYWHERE!).

1:00p - Check email, check staff blog.

1:13p - Work on evaluating damaged books. We're each responsible for certain sections of books and when books are damaged, we evaluate them to determine if we can fix them, if we want to replace them, or if we want to withdraw them. The funniest "damaged" book I ever got had the following note on the damaged slip: "Cheese in pocket." I opened it up and sure enough there was a small piece of American cheese in the pocket. :)

1:57p - Take a stack of damaged books to our Technical Services department to be withdrawn or fixed.

2:00p - Attend training on the Evanced online summer reading module. We're going to use it this summer and it's going to be really interesting to see what happens since it's very different from what we've done in the past. The training is a webinar, which is like a conference call but with an internet screen on a projector so that all the participants can see what the trainer is showing you online. A librarian from Adult Services covers our desk so that everyone in the department can attend.

3:00p - Training is over so I head back to the office where I sort through my files and get rid of a huge stack of papers that I no longer need. I get about halfway through my files when...

3:30p - I meet with a representative from an audiobook vendor. The previous rep was promoted, so this is a chance for me to meet with the new guy. I talk to him about our needs and he talks to me about how they can meet those needs.

4:00p - Back to my desk to continue organizing files.

4:25p - Take another stack of damaged books to Technical Services on my way to lunch.

4:30p - Lunch break!

5:00-9:00p - I'm on desk. I generally work Thursday nights and they're generally pretty slow. Tonight was no exception, so I work on some audiobook kit weeding and my "missing" list. Every so often we get a printed list of items in our sections that have a "missing" status. That means that we've looked for them on the shelf and they were not there. When we get a missing list, we look for the item one last time and if it's not there we decide whether to replace it or to withdraw the record from the catalog.

I also grab Clementine from the shelf and start reading through it a little bit. In a couple of weeks I'll be reading this title to a group of kids at a local school on their lunch time.

8:50p - We start shutting down the games computers and let everyone know we're closing. We help them find any last thing they're looking for and make sure everyone's downstairs before shutting everything down.

9:00p - The library's closed! Time to go home and watch The Office and 30 Rock!