I took notes all day and have no place else to put my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project, so here it is. This would actually have worked better on Twitter, but I'm finding Twitter so sticky these days that I dared not try to post a continuous record while on the desk. This is a play-by-play account of a four-hour shift on the desk at the Peninsula College Library Media Center in Port Angeles, where I am technically a part-time Librarian and more realistically the Busy-Time-Backup-Person.
* Day begins with the usual cognitive exercise: memorize where I am parking the car. Parking lot is always full at the hour I arrive, so I can't choose to be consistent, have to cruise around until I find a hole and then recite the location to myself as I walk away from the car. I am carrying three tote bags today. More or less as usual.
* Long talk with my boss about a horribly failed reference transaction yesterday. I suggest a small practical ameliorative arrangement, we need a bigger sign by the catalog computer so people will notice it.
* Ask boss for search logs from the catalog. I want some idea how the students look for things, and what they look for. She will email some to me.
* Arrive at desk. Various bits of information are passed along about library users in the building, or about to appear in the building, or just left the building. Then since I'm there to cover, my co-worker tells me she will "return to the pit", the periodical room, where she is doing a massive weeding project. (It's one of the reasons I was hired, to cover the desk so off-desk projects can get done by others.)
* Conversation about keys. (I don't get to have one.) I am shown how to retrieve the most important key from my boss's office, but for the day I'll keep it clipped to my belt.
* Where is the pencil sharpener?
* Please would I unlock Study Room B? (Convenient that the key is on my belt.)
* Another staff person comes out of the back room, opens a drawer, and removes a key on a large block of wood. OK, far-enough key coincidences for one morning, kthnxbai.
* Do we have any kleenex? Yes, take several.
* Finally I get logged into the several places I need to be logged into.
* Student needs a book about Antietam. Check catalog, get call number, take him into stacks. Mention I also noticed we had a couple of EBrary titles which if this here book in hand doesn't suit he could read them online. He doesn't seem interested. He says he's never checked a book out, doesn't know what to do. Just give me your student number I say. He doesn't know it. (He is the first student I've worked with who can't recite his or her 895- number. Some of the international students are too timid of their English to say the numbers and hand me their student ID, but otherwise everyone can just rattle them off.)
* Student needs to find a VHS tape her professor says he showed in class when she was absent that she will find useful for her paper on August Wilson. Unfortunately he misremembered all the details about it, and Wilson is nowhere in the title or subject headings and this catalog system doesn't show note fields, so it took detective work to find. She stayed patient, which not all students would do. Found tape, set her up at the workstation that plays VHS, with the special headset that jacks into the desk.
* Student who comes in almost every day for two of the books on reserve for English 110 comes and asks for them.
* Student checks out book on Eli Whitney.
* Might mention that through all this the signup sheet for study rooms 1 through 7 is leading a lively life of its own. Only the big conference rooms, A and B, require our involvement, they have to be booked in the shared Outlook calendar. Also the newspapers on the west end of the counter are coming and going quite lively.
* A lull. Quickie conversation with colleague who also followed the iPad announcement yesterday morning. I tell him the rapture has worn off and I'm back to thinking I'll get a Nook this spring and a netbook later on when one of my other two machines dies. He says he's not doing anything until Apple cuts the umbilical to AT&T.
* Do we have a paper phone book for Everett, WA? No. Shall I call the public library and see if they do? No thanks, I can do that.
* Here are some sunglasses that were found "in the girls' room." I add them to the collection of found glasses on the east end of the counter. Last week it was a collection of found water containers.
* A lull. I am reading/winnowing email from the CJC-L (College and Junior College Libraries section of ALA) and CLAMS (College Librarians and Media Specialists of Washington State) email lists.
* Conversation with the library intern about some magazine boxes that seemed to be available. Yes the brown ones are available, I can take them to the library at Elwha (my volunteer gig).
* A confusion about available study rooms.
* My boss has already made a new stand-up sign to place by the catalog station.
* Instantly somebody sits down next to the sign, although nobody else sits there to look things up for the rest of my shift.
* Class ends in the big library classroom, a bunch of people stream out, and another bunch of people stream in for the next class. (Once the new classroom building is finished, there won't be such a crunch for spaces for classes to meet, but at present there two flocks of kids here on Tuesdays and Thursday who don't relate to the library at all, might previously never have set foot in the library, this is just where one of their classes is this quarter.)
* Student needs a... well she doesn't know what it's called. She needs things about tanning beds and skin cancer that are written by doctors. Hmmm. A journal perhaps? Yes! That's the word. I show her how to search in EBSCO for peer-reviewed journal articles, then have her log into one of the computers and do it herself so she can choose articles and print them.
* A student I have a nodding acquaintance with because she works in the Goodwill where I shop strides by in an impossibly pink diaphanous shalwar kameez, and black and white wool mittens. We nod. She strides back out again almost immediately, now also wearing a head set and singing loudly to the music only she can hear. Letting her walk out much simpler than shushing her.
* A student checks out Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Score one for the physical collection, yaay!! We have a little conversation about Zinn's death.
* Can I check out a headset? Oh, please can I have the old kind instead of the new kind? (Or perhaps the other way around. I forgot to write them in these notes, but the headsets come and go all day— check out, check in, rubberband up the wires, check out again— and all the users have preferences for either the old batch or the new ones. Occasionally someone asks for the set with attached microphone.)
* I have a little conversation with colleague about how we actually had the Howard Zinn book on the shelf. He had not heard that Zinn died, is distressed.
* Student complains that someone's music is turned up so loud that it's disturbing her even though he has a headset on. It's true, I can hear it distantly muttering all the way over here. I go back among the computers, find the noisy station and shush the occupant, also shush another student whose music I can hear once I'm halfway across the floor.
* I check my record at the public library to see if any more holds came in (it's a compulsion, I do it many times a day), and check their New Books list. Email a friend with a truly comic title from the new books. (What? Oh. Love from both sides : a true story of soul survival and sacred sexuality.)
* A late student gallops in the door, across the floor, and into the classroom.
* I help someone boot the previous scheduled person out of study room 6.
* A tutor wants to book Study Room B. My coworker has a terrible time getting me to understand how to put it on the shared calendar in Outlook. Eventually succeeds.
* The giant search log has turned up in my mailbox. I will start playing with it next week.
* Behind the desk we are discussing children's author Mo Willems. Someone reports meeting him at a conference; he was not a nice man.
* Frequent library user, community member not student, comes in to read the newspaper. Seems to be chewing on something. Coworker hopes he has has not been eating food out of the trash cans.
* I go on break. My coworker, who takes very literally the direction that all business she does should be done under her own login, logs me out of everything even though she's using the other PC at the desk.
* Back from break, log back in to everything.
* Having trouble with the printing system.
* A WorkFirst Work Study student has me sign her time sheet.
* Custodian is in a swivet because the new giant recycling bin on wheels is so full of discarded magazines he can barely move it.
* There's a question on CJC-L about the use of EBrary and Netlibrary books. I'm so interested in the topic I keep checking my email in case anyone has answered already.
* Discussion behind the desk of two skulls which are in large red zippered containers. Skulls? Yes skulls. They belong to the dental hygiene program conducted by Pierce College. Pierce thinks they have all their skulls back, but here are these two that are plainly still here. Someone will call Pierce College. (I'm not making this up.)
* Colleague says he is giving a class in research methods to some education students this afternoon right at the end of my shift, do I want to observe. Oh yes. (This is mostly what the library classroom is used for.)(It's got all these computers and a projection setup and so on.)
* Help with printing.
* A community user who used to be a student wants to know if he is still in the system. Not, but I can put him back in. I have a hard time getting his email address in there, and have made other mistakes in creating his record. I'm not exactly the sharpest newbie ever to join this staff, which has been together for years. I had trouble finding where to enter things in the same field last week. OK, maybe the system isn't altogether user friendly. There's about three places to edit address, and they all do different things.
* Student comes in with overdue ILL book. Can she renew it. I bring her to the ILL person's office.
* Leave desk. My work week at the college over. (Will be at the tribal library tomorrow.) Attend colleague's 'Education Search' class; a good proportion of these folks are paying attention, unlike the search class for English 101 that I observed earlier in the week.
* Fail my daily mental acuity test: I remember where in its aisle the car is parked, but not which aisle. It's not in the first three places I look...
