Week 1 - "Training, We Don't Need No Steenkin' Training!"

There was a great deal of confusion in HR over my hiring, and a a result, my branch didn't know I was coming until two days before I started. So my first day as an adult librarian consisted of me being shown how to "open the building" (ie. unlock doors, turn on lights, sign in, etc.), a very brief tutorial on how to login to the computer and navigate the ILS (our system uses SIRSI), and that was it -- I was on.

Fortunately, our branch is pretty quiet on a Sunday, so I only had five patron interactions in the four hours I was on:

• A woman called looking for Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire on DVD. Our copy was checked out so I referred her to another branch which allegedly had it in since she wanted it that day. For some reason it struck me as emblematic or ironic or some other "ic" that my first official interaction as a librarian involved the Potter franchise.


• A white woman in her late 20s was looking for audiobooks. I showed her where they are and told her about the system's new Overdrive downloadable audio books and gave her a flyer for it. She seemed pleasantly surprised.


• A woman called looking for Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea on audio. Her interest had been sparked by the miniseries that came out a few year ago, and she had been referred from another branch since SIRSI said we had it in the Juvenile area. Alas, I couldn't find it, and the circulation details said it hasn't gone out in 8 months, so it's probably missing. Unfortunatly, after I told her this, the woman wanted to ramble on about various other fantasy/sci-fi series (she liked Harry Potter, and the old Dragonrider series, but hated on Eragon).


• A white couple in their late 20s were looking for a whole bunch of stuff they had found in the catalog, but couldn't find on the shelf, including Tery Pratchett's Small Gods, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust. This proved to be rather a frustrating venture, since any or all of these could have been in many different places, and SIRSI can't be relied up to tell one the correct place. They could be in Adult Fiction, Adult Paperback Fiction, YA Fiction, YA Paperback Fiction, YA Graphic Novels, Juvenile Fiction, or in the back room overflow shelves for any of these -- all of which are in different places spread over two floors. After lots of running around, I found one in Adult Fiction, one in Adult Paperback, one in Juvenile Fiction, and one on a cart to be reshelved in the Juvenile room. As they followed me about, I felt like an idiot... Especially when I couldn't find any of three copies of The Amber Spyglass that our branch allegedly had in. I also told them about the downloadable audio books, and they seemed pretty psyched about that.


• An elderly white woman wanted to looked at the latest Consumer Reports info on kitchen appliances. I took her over to the Consumer Information nook, which I had noticed earlier. But that only had buying guides and magazines from 4+ years ago, and nothing recent. I know we have all that stuff online, but she didn't strike me as someone who wanted to deal with that, so I asked another staffer if we had more recent stuff in print. He showed me a drawer at my desk where all the more recent Consumer Reports (and maps, and NADA Guides, and Almanacs) are kept. So, I was able to help her out, but was left scratching my head over the logic of keeping the most desired items hidden... I thought libraries were about increasing access to information...

So what was my takeaway from my first day of being a professional librarian after spending two years in grad school to get the degree to qualify me to do this? Other than surprise that five of the six items I was asked to track down were fantasy or sci-fi related, it struck me as I drove home that the vast majority of my job could be performed by a high school graduate with decent customer service skills, good attention to detail, and a few hours training on the system's ILS and procedures.

Yeah, yeah, I know that's basically heresy in librarian circles, and that kind of talk got me in more than a few argument in library school, but consider the five patron interactions I had on my first day. Did any of those exceed my "high school" metric? No. In fact, I'm going to track this over time and see what happens -- so far, 0 for 5. Tune in next week...

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Week: 0 for 5
Year: 0 for 5