Head Tale

After eighteen months, I had my final shift at Regina Public Library’s Outreach Unit yesterday.  (On Tuesday, I become Branch Supervisor of our Regent Place Branch.)

Although the strong emphasis on service to a marginalized community is a perfect fit for my own interests and values, I never thought this was a role I would’ve ended up filling – if only because it’s a very specialized area unlike other aspects of public librarianship – branch supervision, collections, reference, etc. – where there are more jobs and therefore more likelihood of finding work in those areas.

Here are a few random highlights of my time in the Unit…

– meeting a patron for the first time right after I started and her saying “Jason Hammond!  I’ve heard all kinds of stories about you!”  Turns out she knows a former RPL employee quite well and so he’d filled her in about me (luckily enough for me, the stories were positive – she’s a patron who won’t suffer fools!  Also a good reminder to treat everyone with kindness as much as possible – you never know when your words, actions or encounters will come back on you!) 😉

– on the other hand, one of my staff members got a phone call soon after I started.  “Please don’t let that *man* pick out any more books for me!” (My staff kindly re-assured me that they’ve all occasionally received calls from patrons who are unhappy with the items one or another of us has selected for their regular home deliveries.)

– the first time I got a dish of water for a patrons’ seeing eye dog (the dog has its own personalized water bowl in the unit!)  “Other duties as assigned” indeed!

– showing one patron a newly acquired Sara-CE machine which scans and reads pages of books, magazines, letters, etc. aloud to patrons.  He was so impressed, he started coming in every day or two to spend a few hours in the afternoon reading magazines and we even ended up getting a special subscription to his favourite magazine in the Unit as well!

– given the nature of who we serve – many elderly and/or ill patrons – it shouldn’t be a surprise.  But the reality is that it was a regular happening to get the news of a patron’s passing – maybe as often as once every month or two during my time in the unit?

– if pressed, I’d say the major accomplishment of my time in Outreach was a complete re-design of the Unit’s layout from what I like to call “traditional library”: bookshelf – aisle – bookshelf – aisle – bookshelf – to something that was a lot more open and accessible, well-lit and welcoming.  I was explaining the changes to a partially sighted patron who half-joking and half-serious said “Jason! Don’t you know that you’re never supposed to change anything on a blind person?”  I replied, “Well, if you agree to go along with this change, I promise we won’t change anything else in the Unit again for another twenty years!” 😉

– this isn’t my story so perhaps I shouldn’t share it.  But one of our patrons wanted to know if we had Braille children’s books so he could read to his grand daughter who was coming to visit.  Given our Unit’s mandate, it’s perhaps surprising that we don’t have *any* Braille items save a couple donated items.  Why?  Well, one thing I learned in this job is that very few visually impaired people actually know Braille – somewhere around 1 in 10 visually impaired people and the number is decreasing as technology improves to allow visually impaired people to access written material and really, just move through the world, in other ways.  How few?  When I checked with the local branch of the CNIB, they said they didn’t know for sure but estimated that there might be twelve people in all of Regina who know Braille.)  So anyhow, with no Braille children’s books available, one of my staff members went out and found a place to order it for the patron – and then bought it for him as a gift!  But then again, going above & beyond in the service of our patrons was a regular thing – beginning before I even started in fact.  I popped in to the Unit a couple days before my official first day, just as a staff member got a call from a patron who’d missed her delivery.  I said I’d be willing to take it to her myself and so ended up having a memorable visit with a patron in her apartment.  (Sadly, in keeping with an earlier bullet point, this patron passed away a couple months later.)

That’s only a small sampling of a few of the most memorable moments that popped into my head – I may add others in future as I think of them.