Week 4 - The Rookie

The title of this week's post comes from the following interaction:
I arrived at the library about 20 minutes before opening. There has still been no key made for me, so the custodian is having to come in on Sundays to open and close the building. The lights are on, so I can tell he has arrived and I am looking in the front window to see if I can catch his eye. A patron helpfully tells me that the library doesn't open until 1. I say, thank you, I know, I work here, I'm trying to get in. He says to another patron waiting outside, must be her first week - and I say well, it's my fourth, but yes, I am new. He says, well I'd call that a rookie. So, a rookie, I am.

By my count there are 7 people waiting when we open the doors. 5 of those head straight to sign up for computers. Only one of our computers is down this morning - a great improvement over last week. Like last week, the first hour was very slow - I only had one patron interaction and that was a request for a pen and scratch paper.

The real stuff:

• A patron wanted to know if Iran's president was in the US. I did a Google News search to find out his scheduled (at Columbia on Monday, and the UN on Tuesday) and let her know.



• A young man was looking for mythology books. I directed him to appropriate part of the non-fiction section.



• A young woman was looking for A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Although our catalog showed that we had one copy available, it was missing, so I placed a hold for the patron.



• A patron came in looking for On Becoming a Person (this must be for a class or something, since Sunday Librarian 1 also had this request yesterday). Our copy had been discarded and she couldn't wait for a hold. She needed the book today, so unfortunately she was out of luck.



• I received a phone call asking if our wifi was working. Answer - Yes!



• An elderly gentleman came over and asked where we kept the mp3 players (which contain preloaded audiobooks). I walked him to the appropriate section, while he explained that his wife was using them to read all the classics. I thought this was pretty great!



• A patron called me over to her computer because she said it was freezing. It wasn't actually freezing, so there wasn't much I could do to help her.



• A patron came in and asked if we had Blonde Ambition - we did have a book by that title, but it was a YA book and I didn't think that was what he meant, so I did a quick search on Amazon to see if there was another book by that title. There was - a biography of Anna Nicole Smith, which is the book he meant. We didn't have it. He then asked for the new book by Bill Clinton - Giving. Our copy was checked out and he didn't want to place a hold. He then asked for the latest by Hillary Clinton, but she hasn't published anything since Living History, which he had already read. Finally he asked if we had anything by Sylvia Brown. One book, My Guide, Myself, showed up in the system, but both copies were missing. So 0 for 4 for this patron. The annoying thing about this interaction was that the patron would ask for something and then walk away, so that I had to follow him around or raise my voice so that he could hear me. It was very disconcerting.



• A patron called me over to his computer to ask why he "couldn't move on". After determaining what he meant (the website wouldn't let him go anywhere but the homepage), I let him no that this was because the website's server was down (which the page that was appearing said) and that he would have to try again some other time.



• A patron came in looking for "Web of Man" which he described as an ecology textbook from the 1960s. There was no book by that title in our system, but a search of Open Worldcat found Man in the Web of Life, which was the book he was looking for. Unfortunately our system still didn't have the book (nor did any of the other local systems), but I was able to give him a slip with the correct title, author (John Storer) and publication year (1968).



• A patron came in looking for Black No More. Our copy was checked out, but I placed it on hold for the patron.



• Another branch called for a shelf check for The Ludlum Triad by Robert Ludlum. Our copy was on the shelf and I was able to trap the hold for their patron.



• I showed a patron how to print from the public access computers. Although I knew how it worked in theory, this was the first time I had walked a patron through it and I was gratified to see that it worked in practice too.



• As per usual, I also helped a patron get on a computer using a guest card, although she also got a library card while she was there, so she'll be able to use that next time. And finally, 4 weeks, I had my first question about where the bathrooms were!