Sunday, October 18, 2009

Day 3

Day 3:
Yet another set of interesting and different questions this week. Some questions of course were standard, but some were challenging. Probably the most challenging question came from a woman who was looking for a mathematics kit. I was not sure about how to search for the kits in the system, so walked with the woman back to where the kits are kept so we could just browse. We checked them all, but there were none that dealt with math. I asked for help from the children’s librarian, but even she was not entirely sure how to search for kits from other libraries. It turns out that kits were cataloged under “generic kit” with no details provided in the entry itself. We had to click on each kit separately in order to find out what the contents were which was a very time consuming process. In the end, it was taking so long that the woman decided against trying to request one for pickup and said she would just go and check at two library branches that are not far away from Verona.

The next difficult question I had that day came from a woman who was looking for a children’s non-fiction book about leaves. She needed to identify trees by looking at the leaves with her first grader. There were no books that included details about leaves in the early reader section, only books about trees and forests in general. Then, when I took the patron over to the older kid’s non-fiction section, she was concerned that the books that we found were too difficult for a first grader. Unfortunately, I could not find a middle ground for her, at least not at that library. She ended up selecting the easiest of the books from the older children’s non-fiction and helping her daughter with the reading.

Most of the other questions I had that day were fairly standard with a request for “Swan Lake” being the exception. I did not realize that it would be kept with the non-fiction books about dance and ballet. In between answering questions and staffing the desk, I read the policies manual and pulled books for the tops of the shelves. That was actually a lot of fun since it gave me a chance to pull some of my favorites and read through new books as well. It was especially gratifying when I saw kids and parents pick some of them up for check-out.

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