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Library Day in the Life Round 4 - Day 3

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 -


Today there were actually things happening in my schedule. Due to a random alignment of circumstances, I actually got to help grab hold items this morning. Sometimes I'm amazed by how little time I actually spend in the stacks, so grabbing holds is as good an excuse as any to get me doing that.


Then I spent an hour in our phone room and double checked that I had the right outline for a computer class I'd agreed to teach for a co-worker at 10. A few months ago we were finally able to offer computer classes to the public again, but there have been numerous scheduling headaches as we get used to offering this service again. The class I ended up teaching wasn't too bad. It was part one of our Computer Basics series, and since I usually teach part two, it was more just reminding myself what information needed to be covered in this particular installment. As usual for a Basics course, it was a diverse group full of questions. One lady even brought in her laptop because it's running Windows 7 and she wanted to make sure she knew how to use that particular operating system. For the first time offering a Basics class, I actually taught through the entire 90 minutes. Usually I teach for an hour and then spend the last half hour letting them pepper me with random questions. This time the teaching and Q & A were a lot more mixed together.


Once I cleared everyone out of the classroom I walked straight into a staff training session for our new microfilm/fiche reader/printer machines. Most of the the standard film reading and printing I probably could've figured out playing around with it myself, but what was really cool is that these new machines work with computers so you can scan images of the microfilm to save to a flashdrive, email, etc. The program that lets you do that, also has a lot of neat features for basic editing of the scanned image, so I think patrons are really going to like this service once we get it up and running for the public.


After lunch I was back in the phone room for a busy two hour shift. There were a lot of fun reference questions, but I still managed to sneak in a little ordering in between calls.


At 3 my day finally stopped having structure and the nagging sinus infection I've had all week told me I should go home, but I caffeined up and got a few books cataloged and even managed to tackle a problem item that had driven me nuts Tuesday night. Basically the book is a fictionalized biography of a real person, but they tried so hard to make it look authentic that it was hard to tell if it belonged in the fiction section or the biography section.


Somewhere in there I also filled out my version of my annual review paperwork. For some reason the City forgot to have me do my annual review at my anniversary and wants me to do it now, so by the end of the week my supervisor and I can hopefully get that out of the way.


After the last two quiet days, today seemed even busier than what I wrote down, but that's all I can remember right now.

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