June 13, 2016

 This morning I slept in and then spent an hour reading through an article for my practicum and started summarizing it. Then I got ready for work.

Today at work was the first day it felt like I actually had something to do, not just something to learn. I know I haven't been there very long but that is a pretty big step. I was still being taught things, and the learning process will continue for quite awhile, but I'm making progress.

The large majority of my day was spent finding books for my homebound patrons. The retiring librarian took two of my patrons, which was really nice of her. That left me with somewhere shy of forty books to find. That doesn't sound too bad but for each patron I was having to look at a large spreadsheet with all of the books they have received in the past. Some of the patrons are good at commenting on the books and saying if they liked them or what they didn't like them. Others seem to rarely comment. So I was having to go through and do my best to pick books I thought they would like with very little feedback. There is also the restriction for most of them that the books are large print, which we have a decent collection of but it is still much smaller than the rest of the collection. So taking all of that into consideration, I wasn't able to finish my lists until the last couple of hours of my shift.

I decided to try and start collecting the books and hit hurdle with the first list. Two or three of the books had been checked out since I originally created my list so I had to go back and find new ones that met all the criteria and were still on the shelf. One of the books showed that it had recently been returned but I wasn't able to find it on the shelf or behind the circulation desk, so that was annoying. I eventually got enough books for that patron. Then I went to find the books for the second patron and realized I had forgotten call numbers. By the time I went back through and wrote all of those down I didn't have time to get the books. I won't be there tomorrow so the other librarian told me to leave my lists for the assistant and hopefully she'll have time to go through at least one or two of them. And hopefully most, if not all, of the books will still be on the shelves and not checked out. We don't make our deliveries until Wednesday afternoon so I should have time in the morning to finish things up, even if the assistant doesn't have time tomorrow. I'm glad this is an activity that only happens once a month. But I do kind of like the challenge.

In other news, I helped a man find information on an old family name, castle, and crest. That was interesting. I helped look up and pulled books from the shelves about local history for a genealogist doing research. And I helped a lady whose first language was not English, come up with a password for a website. Passwords are hard enough to come up with when English is your native language, especially when they throw in all these strange requirements. She became very apologetic after she had to call me over for a third or fourth time but I was eventually able to help her through it, so it was a success. I also renewed a book for someone online after speaking with them in chat, answered the phone a few times, passed along purchase requests, and filled out an ILL request for someone. I did things today.

This was my second night closing. The first night I shadowed my boss closing upstairs. Tonight I was alone closing downstairs. I ran through the procedure this morning with one of the other librarians but I forgot most of that by the time I actually had to do it. It involved a lot of walking around and I sharpened a few pencils. When we had actually closed I had to take the cash drawer and lock it up. I was not told the drawer would shoot out so it did hit me in the stomach, but thankfully I was far enough away that it wasn't much of a hit. The weirdest part is that after we have closed and the upstairs person calls down to the circulation desk that all is good upstairs, I tell all the workers downstairs that they can leave. They have all worked there way longer than me and know way more than me, so it feels really weird that I all of a sudden have the authority to tell them to leave.

Now I'm going to go to bed because it is late and I have to wake up early for a haircut. I was supposed to get it cut today but I had to work. I am also helping with orientation and enrollment again at the student union for my practicum in the afternoon but it is only for an hour, which will be much easier than Saturday. There is a class meeting tomorrow night and she wanted us to have ideas for what our free choice activities will be. I'll be honest, I haven't really looked into that yet. I want to find some interesting sessions involving public libraries but I don't know what those are yet. I also need to look into the other assignments because we're supposed to be doing some research about a roundtable or something. I fly out next week and I feel very under-prepared.