June 10, 2016

 I'm so tired. Physically and mentally. I just want to curl up in a ball and ignore the world for a few days. Sadly that is not an option.

Today I learned more things about the library and my duties. I can't necessarily remember the order in which these events all occurred but oh well. We learned about microfilm and the machines this morning and that was really cool. I don't think I've actually looked at microfilm since I was a Cub Scout but I remember enough from that experience to know that it is way simpler now. There are also way more controls that allow you to tweak the image and make things look better. I looked at a recent issue of the local newspaper but then I also looked up the one from when I was born. Or rather the range of issues from that time period. I found my birth announcement in the issue two days after I was born. That is pretty cool.

We learned about homebound deliveries today. Each librarian has six or so people that have books delivered to them. Some of those people make specific requests but it looked like more often than not they just have general guidelines and it is left up to us to pick five or six books to take to them once a month. My schedule is every third Wednesday, which is coming up next week, and I will go out with one of the other librarians to pick up the old books and to drop off the new books. There is a spreadsheet for each person with all the books they have received in the past and I took some time to start looking through those today. On Monday or Tuesday that is going to have to be a main focus so I can be ready on Wednesday.

We learned about personal reader's advisory which is when people send in an email form telling us about the types of books they like and we send back a list of books they may also like. The librarian said we typically only get two or three a month but it tends to go up over the summer. There have already been twelve so far this month.

We had a meeting with the lady who teaches the one-on-one tech classes and teaches people how to use assistive technology. Months ago when we went on a tour for school I learned about her job because we had a similar meeting, but it is different now that I will be working with her and the meeting felt way more informative even though it was probably a lot of the same stuff. I have a meeting with her next week to start talking about setting up the tech classes for the Fall.

We learned about the various different books displays, of which there are many, and we will be responsible for at least a few of them each. We learned not only the idea behind stocking them but also how to go about getting the books, adding them to a record set, and setting their status to being in a display so when people look up the book in the catalog they will know it isn't on the shelf. They don't actually know what display it is in, however, so they would have to come to us and we would have to look it up. I may or may not remember how to do that.

I think the last thing I learned today was how to navigate around the ILS system. It was just as confusing as I thought it would be based on what I learned in class. It is also fairly straightforward, there are just a lot of steps to get to what you want to do. And at this point I have probably already forgotten most of them. The real problem is the fact that I was shown how to do a million different things so the next time I try to do any of them they will all probably blend together. Thankfully I don't think I'll be left alone for awhile. Not until next weekend I think.

Soon I will be going to bed. I'm going to put a hot towel on my eye for a little bit and then it is bedtime. Tomorrow I am helping out with orientation on campus. For six hours. That should bring me up to around twenty-five hours, which means I am on track in terms of getting hours. I would have been way behind if I hadn't volunteered to work tomorrow. I'm hoping more opportunities come up in the coming weeks like the tour and instruction session and other random but informative things like that. But yeah, tomorrow will be another long day of outside-my-comfort-zone human interactions. It should be interesting. And uncomfortable. But on Sunday I get to sleep in, so I'm looking forward to that.