A Day in the Life of a Librarian: Day 1

I read about a blogging event going on this week, and decided I'd like to participate. It's called "Library Day In the Life" and the challenge is for those working in libraries to blog about the details of their day for one week. My main reason for doing this is for the general public and potential future library employees to get an idea of what we really do-- not what you THINK we do!

This first one will be a little boring I'm sure, let me find my voice for this project! I'll only explain the everyday stuff the one time, other days I'll keep to the highlights.

After driving a maniacal 30 miles to work on the Chicago tri-state, I arrive a few minutes before we open at 9am. I work for a small suburban library at their Adult Services reference desk as a librarian.

9:00am - Fire up necessary programs on staff computer... Millennium for the online system and catalog, VAM for managing our public computers, Meebo for IM reference.

Take statistics sheet for last week, tally and add up counts for AM questions, PM questions and any children's questions. File it away with a post-it noting the totals.

Check library email, forward a couple items to other departments. Print out a flyer for local play auditions that was emailed to us, asking if we'd post it. Put it up in on the community board in the foyer. Check my work email for messages from work-related lists, any emails from staff over the weekend. Looks like we'll be attending webinars for Tutor.com soon.

Check library blog for new posts. There's one about holds for book discussion groups. Also log into Firstsearch/OCLC and check Resource Sharing for any new requests or messages. Nothing yet!

9:35am - A phone call from a regular gets passed around to multiple staff members until I finally can explain the answer to his question in a way that he understands. A team effort!

10:00am - My desk partner and I field some patron questions. I help one man in using our online catalog here in the library. We go through the process of looking up an item, finding it's call number and walked him over to show him how the nonfiction shelves are organized.

10:30am - Receive a couple phone calls from a patron trying out our new Overdrive media service. She's interested mainly in music and e-books, and is wondering about both how the checkout process works and some technical details about downloading the media console. Answer to the best of my ability-- we're still learning too!

11:00am - Attempt to figure out the title or author of a book from a patron who remembers neither, but knows what the cover of the book looks like and that it's autobiographical and quirky. We don't figure it out despite my web and image searches on Google. Can't win 'em all! But know I will probably keep trying the rest of the day just to satisfy my own curiosity.

11:20am - Log a regular onto our 15 minute internet computer, since she forgot her library card. Policy says we can't look up their numbers for the hour long public stations, but at least we can get them on for a short time.

11:40am - Patron logs in a sheet from the adult summer reading program. This year the theme is "Master the Art of Reading"-- made for some really nice promotional material. I design much of our signs, brochures, posters, etc. and it makes the design process fun when there's a strong theme with a lot of possibilities to work with.

For every full sheet-- four books-- they get an entry into our monthly raffle. We already pulled for July, but we'll have some final raffles at the end of August at our closing reception.

11:45am - Circulation brings over hold cancellations and overdue notices for OCLC items. I check the cancellations to see why they might have been taken off, put any back on that need to be and look for alternate places to get items that we can't get within our consortium. Sometimes I have to call for direct loans on items from nearby libraries, other times I have to call the patron. No calls to make today!

11:50am - Help out a regular who asks for a female author that might appeal to her husband, so that he has something different from his usual picks. Nothing geared towards women, so I try a mystery author? Maybe Kathy Reichs' skeletons will interest him.

12:15pm - Lunch (half hour)

1:00pm - Holds over the telephone. Pull one from our shelves, request the other from another library in our consortium.

Trying to pick a book for my October book discussion group. I want to pick something to get us in the mood for Halloween but am between two books.

1:20pm - Holds holds holds...

1:45pm - My department head is putting together our next newsletter, and when asking for the next set of new books we both realize we haven't been getting the usual report that I use to do automatic holds and put together the list of new books. Oops!

2:00pm - Department head helps me make decision on book discussion group. Joe Hill it is! I've been wanting to read his stuff for a long time, I've heard he's very good. Then again, when you're Stephen King's son you have big shoes to fill...

2:20pm - Have a copy of the book list I need! Right now I'm looking at some web resources mentioned at a local history meeting I went to last week. We talked about researching the history of one's house, and someone from the Chicago landmark commission came to explain how they approach the process and what resources they use.

2:45pm - In the midst of placing holds and accepting summer reading forms I'm also working on the automatic holds and our list of new books for the fall. We have an automatic holds program we offer for patrons, where they select favorite authors (out of a limited list) that they would like to automatically be put on hold for. I'm the "automatic" in that equation, when I get the lists of new books coming out I grab our list of patrons who have signed up for that author and put them all on hold.

3:00pm - We get a fax of an ALA interlibrary loan request form from a local library that is not inside our consortium. It's a children's book, so I have to make a quick trip upstairs to the children's department to pull it.

3:20pm - A member of my book discussion group came in to sign up for a program we're having Tuesday night. Our group is meeting this Thursday morning, and it sounds like it'll be an interesting discussion!

3:30pm - Trying to help someone looking for a Discovery Channel program on DVD. Can't seem to find it anywhere, and doesn't even seem like it's on DVD at all. Another tough one that's not 100% solved.

3:45pm - Another phone call about a few books... I've still barely gotten anything done on the automatic holds!

3:50pm - Now we have two requests on OCLC! Better take care of those...

3:51pm - That was easy! One was lost, one was checked out. But I guess the report of automatically ordered books was not the one that I needed, so scratch the small amount of work I actually got to on it-- I'll have to wait til tomorrow to get the report I need.

4:00pm - Quick snack in the back room. I have another 30 mile drive to look forward to, so no dinner until after 6pm for me!

4:15pm - Patron calls in to ask if we can retrieve envelopes he left at a computer he was using. Logged him off and left them at the front desk to pick up when he has a chance.

4:30pm - The staff member working the night shift comes in just as my department head and I are trying to unravel an internet usage mystery. Turns out, a patron had a typo in their record in our system-- oops!

5:00pm - After tying up loose ends I leave for the day.