Week 5 - Traffic, Pizza and a Plea For Advice

Once again, my co-librarian was late... Fortunately, I had the phone list in my bad and was able to reach him and find out he was caught in traffic. So I called the branch manager at home, and she came over and opened up. That all went fine, and once the other librarian showed up, he elected to take the upstairs desk, where he could catch up on his magazines and watch a DVD. That didn't really bug me, since I'd just as soon have more patron contact while I'm new and learning. I was a little taken aback when he left for 15 minutes without letting me know and then came back with a pizza and large beverage!

Meanwhile, the circulation staffer wore his headphones most of the day, and must have sent about 20-30 text messages. This, combined with his really soft voice might have given the impression of surliness to some. Or at least to the elderly woman who came over to me and said "If your check out person hates people so much, he should get another job." Ouch! This presents a bit of a dilemma, because I believe I'm supposed to report any complaint to the branch manager. But like the shirt says, no one likes a snitch... But the branch manager seems to greet every elderly woman by name, so it's possible the woman knows branch manager and will mention her complaint to me. Argh, not sure what to do. Advice anyone?

There were a few other notable events, such as the failure of our internet connection for about half an hour. This is a pretty bad thing to happen, since the majority of Sunday patrons are there to use the internet. We called the Sunday supervisor to let him know, but basically there's nothing we can do other than put an out of order sign on the computers and apologize. Unfortunately, it means we can't do anything basic like look up books or anything.

A strange moment involved one branch calling looking for the phone number of a third branch... I read them the number off the phone list which is on a flyer all the branches have sitting out for patrons and they seemed pleased. Not sure why they felt the need to call us for help... Anyway, on to the patron interactions:

• A young woman, probably a teacher, wanted picture books about airplanes appropriate for preschoolers. This was the kind of request I knew was coming eventually, and still dreaded. There's actually a nice reference book that is basically lists of picture books by subject. The problem is, even though it had something like 50 books listed for "airplanes," who knows which ones we actually had? The branch manager showed me the quick way to solve this (which I then demonstrated for the patron so she could do it herself in the future.) In the system's online catalog, basically search for the topic you want picture books for, and use booleon logic to add "JUV" to the search. This will generate a list of all the children's books about the topic. Now, it's hardly perfect, since not all JUV books are picture books, but it's probably a good way to go, since you can limit the search to the branch you're in. Once again though, the limitations of SIRSI are frustrating...


• A middle-aged woman was looking for Thursday editions of the local newspaper from July. We keep four months worth, so I was able to dig them out from the back room. Apparently she was looking for some kind of probate announcement that was supposed to have run in the legal notices section of the classified ads. One interesting twist to this interaction is that I learned that the full-text database of the local paper does not include any of the classifieds -- only the articles -- so if she needed to check on an older announcement, she would have been out of luck.


• A middle-aged woman came in looking for a copy of Roddy Doyle's excellent novelThe Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Don't know how good the recent sequel (written a decade later), Paula Spencer, is.


• A 30something man, who turned out to be an adjunct history professor, was looking for a copy of Sebastian Haffner's 1939 memoir Defying Hitler, which I was able to find for him on the shelves.


• A middle aged woman was looking for four books, Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, Paul Bowles' classic 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, Nassim Taleb's breezy pop non-fiction exploration of randomness, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and Patrica Beard' Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley. The first three of which were checked out and I ordered from other branches for her. The fourth was just published, so I put in a request for her, even though its billing as "The inside story of the power struggle that rocked Wall Street's most prestigious financial institution" sounds like a real snooze-fest.


• A young woman was looking for Carl Rogers' 1961 psychology classic On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy, which I was able to find for her on the shelf.

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Week: 1 for 6
Year: 2 for 38