Week 4 - "The Easiest $100 You'll Ever Make"

After two weeks of "training" by the branch manager, I'm now back to working by my own wits and ingenuity. Since I still don't have a key and the librarian with the key was a little late, that meant convincing a building engineer to let me in when he came to check the AC system ten minutes before opening. A few minutes later my co-librarian arrived and checked the voicemail, learning that the circulation staffer had called in sick. So, that left just the two of us to run the place for the day. What that means is that one of us sits upstairs in the children's room and basically does nothing (since that room doesn't get much use on Sundays), while the other person takes care of both circulation (checking books out) and the reference desk. I chose to do the latter, since sitting upstairs would be kind of a waste of time, in terms of learning opportunities, and the other librarian seemed awfully content to disappear up there with the Sunday newspaper (aside from the 20 minute trip s/he took to Safeway).

As it turned out, despite the increased traffic generated Friends of the Library booksale, things were pretty quiet -- which was a good thing, since I was flying by the seat of my pants on the circulation desk. SIRSI is such a cumbersome and non-intuitive system that trying to sort out people's problems was pretty frustrating. Some typical problems included dealing with fines, a woman who'd checked out a DVD, but one of the two discs was missing, a woman whose sister's nanny had used her card and not returned any of the items, and other such mundane stuff. But there were only a handful of non-circulation interactions:

• An elderly woman came in looking for a book on hold, Stendhal's The Red and The Black. We didn't have it on hold, but it was on the shelf, so no harm done. This is one of those classics that I'm seriously unlikely to ever read: a 600 page satire of post-Waterloo French society? I think not...


• A middle-aged woman called looking for Mark Salzman's The Laughing Sutra, which I pulled and held for her until she came in a few hours later. I've heard of the author, but not this particular book. Apparently it's a kind of fantastical young adult book published about 15 years ago. Must be for a book club, since you'll se in the previous post that a patron at Sunday Librarian 2's branch was also looking for it.


• A young woman, whom I'd talked to a few weeks ago, asked for a reminder on how to access the downloadable audiobooks. I gave her the flyer with the URL.


• A middle-aged man called and wanted assistance with the system's downloadable audiobooks. The problem was that he knew more about it than me! He'd gone through a video tutorial, read through all kinds of help pages, and now wanted to know whether he should use Overdrive or NetLibrary or both. As far as I knew, the library didn't even subscribe to NetLibrary, so it was fairly embarrassing to sit there with him on the phone as he directed me to the page on our system's web site that detailed that we did. This raises the semi-interesting point of how the system keeps us librarians abreast of the latest services, databases, and events. I assume that we would all get emailed updates with this sort of info, but since I have yet to get an email account, I can't verify that yet. Will post about that later when I do.

This last one is the only interaction I might classify as requiring an MLS, however since I didn't have the training/info to deal with it, I ended up looking somewhat foolish.

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Week: 1 for 4
Year: 1 for 32

In any event, the day went by pretty quickly thanks to all the circulation work I did. One semi-good thing about getting a lot of circulation work in is that it helps you understand just how porous the system's databases are. For example, there's no obvious way to merge patron records in the event of duplicates (which happens quite a lot, pretty much whenever people lose a card). Or the surprising number of books I checked in that had never, in fact, been checked out!

At the end of the day, the other librarian came down to shut down the joint and we traded smalltalk, and I learned that s/he was a regular full-time librarian and the Sunday hours were overtime, which s/he characterized as "the easiest $100 you'll ever make." Badda-Bing!