This week I was back in the adult room, but it was awfully slow:
- One minute after we open, a woman with a strong South Asian accent calls with a grammar question. She wanted to know which sentence was better: "Currently, I am working as a teacher's assistant at ____ Elementary School." or "I currently work as a teacher's assistant at ______ Elementary School." Since I'm not so strong on grammar, I carefully told her that I thought both sounded grammatically correct, but that I thought the latter was a little smoother. She seemed OK with this and thanked me.
- One of the first people using the computers was a middle-aged black woman. She clearly didn't have a lot of experience using a computer, and the woman next to her was helping her with some basic stuff. Eventually, however, she needed help drafting an email replying to a job advertisement. I basically ended up rewriting her response, explaining the changes as I went. She was super-duper grateful.
- A middle-aged white woman came looking for "non-junky" educational videos on science, travel, geology, etc. for her kid. We looked over the DVDs together and I agreed that there wasn't much. She said there used to be a bunch of videotapes, but neither of us could find them. I took down her info and promised to leave a message for the branch manager to call her. As it turned out, the branch manager called in, and told me where the videos were (on a table in a back room), and so I called the patron back and told her how to find them. Hopefully she got the message and was satisfied...
- A white mother and her young son brought Dugald Steer's The Dragon's Eye: Dragonology Book 1 in and wanted to get Book 2. It took about ten minutes of poking around Amazon.com and the rest of the internet to establish that Book 2 hasn't been published yet!
- A young woman, possibly Hispanic or Middle Eastern or South Asian, was looking for Justin Marozzi's relatively new biography Tamerlane: Sword of Islam. We didn't have it in, but I was able to put a hold on it for her. This led to a general discussion of Central Asia. This went on for a while before she mentioned that she was also interested in books about society and culture in North Korea. As I suspected, we didn't really have much of anything on that -- seeing as how it's arguably the world's most closed society. However -- I just happened to have recently read two books that provide glimpses. The first is a crime novel by a former Western intelligence agent: James Church's The Corpse in the Koryo. the other is French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, which is not a graphic novel, but graphic reportage of his time in the North Korean capital on business. I described them both to her and she was excited to see them, so I had them sent over from other branches.
- A middle-aged white woman came in looking for Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, and I was able to pull it out the shelf for her!
- An elderly white man came in looking for Edith Wharton's The Reef, and I was able to find it on the shelf for him!
- A young woman came in looking for a general European travel guide. These are hugely popular, and consequently, usually out. However, most people don't know that we have older travel guides back on the shelves. So I was able to dig out a Fodor's from 2004.
MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
Even though I helped patrons in a bunch of different areas (grammar, writing, reader's advisory), none of them had anything to do with my MLS... You could argue (maybe) that finding the books on North Korea would, except that I knew of those books from my own personal interest.
Week: 0 for 8
Year: 4 for 57
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