Day 2

Day 2:
This week had a few more complicated questions than I had the first week I worked at the library. The highlights were a few phone interviews with parents. One in particular was a little bit daunting. A mother called saying that her daughter had left her book report book in her locker and she needed to get a copy from the library so the report could be completed by Monday. The daughter did not remember the name of the book or the author only that it had something to do with ghosts, a place named Graymoss, and a blue cover with faces coming out of the ceiling and a girl with a scared look on her face.

My initial reaction was to think about the books that I was required to read in middle school and look for those in the catalog, but Tiffany advised me against doing that. She suggested that I get the mother’s name and phone number and call her back after doing some looking. Then, we just used Google to do a keyword search using what little information we did have and got a couple of leads that way. We looked those books up on the Amazon site so that we couple see pictures of the different covers, but none of the covers matched exactly. The closest match we came up with was “The Haunting” by Nixon, so we called the mother back and read her the reviews and asked her to check with her daughter to see if those rang any bells. The mother said yes, so I went and got the copy that was in the YA section. Sure enough, the cover had faces coming out of the ceiling so we were sure that was the correct one. The way holds are done at Verona is different than it is at any of the Madison branches that I frequent, so it took me a little while to be familiar with how we place books on hold there for phone pickup.

The other phone interview I had was easy since a father was looking for a copy of “There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom” and could not remember who the author was. An easily answered question, this just served as a reminder of how varied phone interview questions can be. Everything else was fairly standard.

This week I also did some weeding in the kids’ non-fiction section in-between answering reference questions. It was kind of relaxing and it did allow me to answering some roaming reference questions for some older kids that did not approach me while I was sitting at the desk.