Week 11 - A New Begining

This week marked the start of my switch to the branch I will now be based at. The two techs, one LA (library associate), and other librarian I met all seemed nice, and the first ten minutes were spent showing me around the branch. It's an old Carnegie library, and is filled with nooks and crannies. Plenty of junk stashed in back rooms, a real project of a place. It's allegedly next on the list of branches slated for renovation. Like many other branches, the children's area is upstairs, and the other librarian seemed eager for me to work up there. This struck me as kind of odd, since at my previous branch, the other librarians seemed to like to "hide out" upstairs. After a slow first hour, I started to see why she was so eager not to be up there.

This new branch is in a more economically mixed area, and the bulk of my duties in the children's area involved babysitting the use of the three computers and making sure all the kids who were waiting to get on didn't get too unruly. Theoretically, this is all automated using a reservation system named PHAROS, but I had to keep helping kids sign on, and hunt around to tell people it was their turn. Basically, after that first hour, the computers were in constant use the whole day. There were a few black kids, but it was overwhelmingly Latino boys, roughly 10-16. For the most part they seemed to be gaming, checking out girls on Facebook, or looking at cars.

Aside from that I had a few other things to do:

• A kindergarten teacher came in with a long list of books she was looking for. I helped her a bit and tried to explain that it's way more efficient to look everything up online from home, and then just grab the books that are here, as opposed to searching on the shelf for each item.


• A woman came in looking for books in the Amelia Bedelia series, so I looked up what we had in the catalog and let her know.
  
• A teenage black girl was looking for Walter Dean Myers' The Beast. We had it, but it was down in the YA section, which I took her to.

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Nothing, I got nothing this week.
Week: 0 for 3
Year: 6 for 68