Week 3 - Books in the Dumpter

This week I learned a little more about various procedures -- like what to do if the building's on fire, or if someone falls down the stairs, or if a kid barfs. All useful tidbits that I will share if the occaison warrants. In the meantime, here's my log of patron interactions for the day:

• A middle-aged white woman was looking for any of Sam Llewellyn' nautically-themed mysteries. There were a number available in the system and I placed a hold on three: Maelstrom, Clawhammer, and Death Roll. I'm a crime fan, but I'd never heard of this series. As a librarian, it's good to know about themed genre series though.


• A young white woman was looking for Hermoine Lee's 870-page doorstopper of a biography Edith Wharton. I'm convinced that contemporary biographers are wildly inept, as no one seems to be able to write one under 600 pages. Somewhere, I hope the remainders of these are being used to build houses... Seriously, how many people are going to sit down and plow through almost 900 pages on Wharton? Our copy was out, and I offered to have one sent over from a different library. However she wanted it sent to a location I wasn't familiar with, at which point a more senior librarian stepped in and took over. I'm not sure what ended up happening, but when the woman was leaving, she seemed pretty annoyed and was complaining to her friend.


• A teenage white woman was looking for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This relatively straightforward request was complicated somewhat in that the two or three copies that used to be in the Adult Fiction section were all missing. However, there was an ancient copy listed in the 800s (Literature) section that we managed to find for her. Don't get me started on why some things are in the 800s... Anyway, not a book I've read -- although I have, of course, seen the famous film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson when he could act rather than just ham it up.


• A young woman called from another branch looking for a copy of Orhan Pamuk's Snow. It was where it belonged on the shelf, and I pulled it for her. Not a book I've read, although I did read another of his and found it pretty uncompelling. When she came in we had a brief conversation about book clubs and how one often puts off reading the book until the last minute. Her friend was looking for audiobooks for a car trip, which gave me another chance to tell people about the downloadable Overdrive stuff.


• A young white woman needed to use the internet, but didn't have a library card. I gave her a guest card and showed her how to log on.


• A young white couple asked if I knew a good place to buy a couch! Since distance wasn't an option, but price was, I suggested Ikea and West Elm.


• A young woman called looking for Irene Hunt's Across Five Aprils, which I didn't immediately find on the shelf. Then, I went back and checked the computer and found it in the Young Adult Paperback section. Never heard of it, but it's a Newbury winner from 1965 about the Civil War.


• A young woman, possibly a girl, called to ask if we had any free magazines. As far as I know, we don't, but I directed her to another branch, where I know there is a big trunk of donated magazined.


• A man called looking for help with the "Playaway" version of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans he had recently checked out. Playaways are basically cheap little MP3 players that are preloaded with audiobooks - kind of an interesting format. The selection is somewhat limited (only about 20 or or so titles per branch) and I haven't seen a title that's sparked me to try them out. I had to turn him over to the senior librarian, since I don't know anything about the devices. I later figured out how to pop the back and replace the AAA battery.


• A young white man was looking for DVDs and pointed out our woefully non-alphabetical selection.


• A middle-aged white woman needed help logging onto the computers and using the print card system.


• A young white man was looking for books on yoga. Here's a case where not knowing the Dewey system by heart slowed me down a lot. I had to go into SIRSI, search for "yoga" in the title, and scan the list of result for the right Dewey number. Yoga is a little bit of a pain, because it appears in a few different areas, such as Eastern Philosophy as well as Health.

So, a little more variety this week -- a few things I had to learn about, but still not any significant challenge.

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Week: 0 for 12
Year: 0 for 28

This week was the opening of the NFL season, and I was expecting things to be relatively quiet. Despite what I've logged above, they were, so I ended up doing some really basic stuff to fill the time. For example, at one point, the circulation worker was pretty backed up, so I went over to help check out books at the second computer. (However the scanner wasn't working, so I ended up typing in all the barcodes by hand, which took for-ev-er.) At another point, I went outside and emptied the after-hours drop box (almost gashing my hand in the process). One of the two boxes wasn't locked, and were someone inclined to go around the city checking these things, they would have struck a jackpot of about twenty DVDs and thirty books with this one. Normally, this is something the circulation staff would do, but since there was only one working, he couldn't leave the disk. Then, toward the end of the day, I started working on alphabetizing the DVDs. Got about halfway through before closing, and am curious to see what shape they're in next week.

Which brings me to the title of this week's post. Our branch has a pretty active friends group, and their annual book sale is next weekend (conflicting with the central branch's own sale, don't ask me why...). They've been sorting through donations like crazy, and had about fifteen bags of books to throw away. I fully understand that there are some books that just aren't salable, but I'd just as soon see them offered to local artists to make into altered book art, or at least recycle those that can be... But as a newbie, I'm not going to sit there and argue this with my boss -- not to mention the PR fallout were the local media to learn of books in a library dumpter. In any event guess who got called in to haul the heavy stuff out? Yep, that's how Week 3 ended for me, throwing out books.