It was a quiet day at library today. The big excitement was that three of our internet access computers were down when I arrived. As we only have 5 adult internet computers, this is a huge deal. The reservation software will not tell you what is wrong with the computer - so I have developed a system for dealing with this. I add myself to the queue and promote myself to the front. Then I enable one computer at a time. This ensures that this computer will be assigned to me and I can check out the computer and see if it is in fact working and should remain enabled for the rest of our customers. Today I was able to reenable all three computers, which helped the computer reservations to run smoothly. Internet access is a huge deal in libraries - and I think it is so important for libraries to do their part to bridge the digital divide, which is so very real (even in the neighborhood for my branch, which is relatively affluent).
Other interactions were as follows:
A patron called looking for four children's books: Lights of Winter (not in the system), Nine Days to Christmas (available at another branch, I placed a hold for the patron), Pancho's Pinata (on the shelf at our branch, placed it on hold at the circulation desk), and The Night of Las Posadas (not in the system).
A patron called looking for You: Staying Young, which was not in the system yet. I expect that it will be purchased, since we have others in that series and they are quite popular, but I went ahead a filled out a purchase request for the patron as well. This way it should be placed on hold for her once it is in the system.
Another patron came to the desk asking me to submit a purchase request for Day of Empire, which was recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. This happens not infrequently on Sunday. Folks in the branch read the book reviews in the Times or the Post and then come up to see if we have a particular book. Often we don't - either because it is so new that it hasn't been processed yet or because we simply hadn't planned to buy it. I think it's great when patrons request books. It ensures that we are buying books that will circulate, shows them that the library is responsive to what they want, and fills in gaps in the collection.
One of my regular young patrons came up looking for books on fish (639s), Skateboarding (796.22 - but we didn't have any in our branch), Soccer (796.33), and Math (510s).
A new young patron came looking for books on States (973-9), Countries (940s-990s), and Maps (912).
And that was it for my day. I imagine things will pick up next week when everyone is back in town.
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2 comments:
got here via my own comment thread, where you left a nice note regarding my frustration with the library, um, experience in this city thus far.
i have a city library system related question that i was hoping you all could answer! i'm wondering, given my extremely low rate of success in finding new(ish) books in the system - books like faludi's "the terror dream" and enright's "the gathering," which won the booker for chrissakes! - is there any kind of reciprocity deal with neighboring city libraries? i know the system has interlibrary loan, but i wondered if the big guns in the area had some kind of separate deal where you can check books out of their system w/ our system's card.
could this pie in the sky wish possibly be true?? probably not. but just checkin.
The only reciprocity in place is that people who live in the metro area can get library cards from pretty much any surrounding jurisdiction. So, one might, for example, get library cards for the city, for County A in State X, for County B in State X, for County C in State Y, and for County D in State Y. (In practice, most people just have a card for the jurisdiction they live in, and then maybe one for the jurisdiction they work in too). While it would be convenient to have a "unified" card that would cover all these jurisdictions at once, I think that would have to overcome a lot of technical barriers involving the interoperability of systems, how that card would be used to access various databases and downloadable products, and soforth.
Oh yeah, there is another reciprocity thing. In one neighboring state, which we'll call Maryland just for fun, the county systems all participate in a statewide unified catalog. So, if you search that separate catalog (which is pretty clunky), you can use your county card to get books from other county systems in the state. That's a pretty cool, if totally unpublicized, service.
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