About once a week I work a 10-6 shift instead of a more typical 9-5 one. With one staff member on holidays and one having called in sick, today happened to be particularly busy day starting as soon as I arrived, an hour later than usual.
So I thought I’d do a list of a few thoughts and events from the day…
– We had two story times, a pre-school one from 9:45 – 10:15am and a toddler one from 10:30 – 11:00am, both of which were super busy.
– Helped one person wanting to apply for jobs. It makes me realise how much I (and society in general) take computer skills for granted. The guy’s looking for a labour job but because he doesn’t know things that I consider basic (how to attach a file to an e-mail, how to use copy, cut & paste), something that should be straight forward turns into a stressful, time-consuming ordeal. (You should see how happy he was when we found one job posting that had a phone number listed in addition to an e-mail, doubly so when he called and got an interview for 10am tomorrow!)
– And sometimes the basic things aren’t so basic at the public library either. For security reasons, our public computers are quite locked down compared to what you can do with your own personal computer so things like adding an attachment to an e-mail or printing a PDF occasionally end up being a lot harder to than they should be.
– on that last point, I’ve discovered that the solution to 99% of problems patrons are having on our public computers is to let them log-in on a staff computer (mine or one at the front desk) and watch as the attachment now magically opens or whatever!) 😉
– I’ve walked by it a million times but someone wanted a book in our “Psychology” section and I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it was. (One problem with a bookstore-style cataloguing system – things don’t necessarily make logical sense as to where they’re located. With Dewey, he’d have said 301.035 or whatever and we’d have gone right to the book he needed. But with bookstore style classification, you have to roughly know where the various categories are located in the branch or else!)
– after story time, a young mom wanted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle books for her 3.5 year old son. We didn’t have any in so I checked the catalogue and ended up offering her a TMNT video game for the X-Box which was the only TMNT item I could find in our local collection…and which she took instead. Can’t decide if giving someone who wants a book for their kid a video game as an alternate selection was good library service or bad! 😉
– I wrote a paper about the ethical obligations of librarians in library school (Should we give people information that we personally disagree with or know to be false? How political should you be at work? Is the library truly a neutral space? Stuff like that…) that I may post someday. I thought of that as I contemplated a partnership offer from a local non-profit which makes sense for a lot of reasons but which I’m still not sure if it’s the right route for the library. (Luckily, that’s a decision for someone at a higher pay grade!) 😉
– I used to be really active in connecting various librarians around the city and province, mainly through the monthly “Books to Beers” pub nights I organized as well as some social media stuff I did for local librarians. When I hear about a new librarian that I haven’t met is when I miss that activity the most! 🙁
– beyond eating at home most days and paying less for gas each month than I did for my bus pass, I realised another way that moving to a branch will save me money: I don’t chip in as much for donations/gifts/”my kid is selling chocolates” type offers. When I was at Central, I made a point of always donating to all of these offers (within reason). I figure as a librarian, I’m the highest paid in-scope employee group and can afford it, it’s a nice way to get some good karma, and usually the requests *were* for good causes. So I don’t donate as much as I used to now that I’m at a branch but I did remotely chip in for a good one today.
– had another patron who had frequently used our photocopier/scanner but couldn’t get her latest scan to open on our computers. We tried a different computer, re-setting the scanner and a variety of other things with no luck (before I got involved, she apparently even drove home but the scanned PDF wouldn’t open on her home computer either.) Tried the above mentioned solution of seeing if it would open on a staff computer but got the same “This file is corrupted or incomplete” message about her PDF. As a test, I scanned the document and e-mailed it to my own e-mail which I checked on my iPhone. There, it opened without any problems even though it still wouldn’t open on any other computer – staff or public – at the branch. She did the same on her own iPhone – same result. So I have no clue where the problem lies – perhaps a recent update to Adobe Reader on Windows machines has broken something? Or an update is needed to un-break that something? Very weird anyhow and I hate to be flummoxed, especially by technology stuff!
