Week 13 - Busy Like a Beaver

This week I came in and finally was shown the schedule for the rest of the month. Which is how I learned that I am the defacto Sunday Children's Librarian for the branch through the end of the month...even though I know little to nothing about all the specialized children's materials... As if to drive the point home, in contrast to last week's deadly slow Sunday, this week I was kept pretty busy with various requests:

• A black mother came in looking for the kids DVDs and I directed here about three feet to her right to where they are shelved.


• A teenage Hispanic girl wanted books about Mexico, so I showed her the shelf where we have books about every country in the world arranged alphabetically. I also explained the difference between "Great Britain" and "England" to her.


• The same teenager later also wanted books about the painter Diego Rivera which showed his work. I did a quick catalog search and unfortunately all I could find in our branch were several skimpy illustrated books in the biography for kids section. The one book that was supposed to be in the adult section wasn't there, so I explained how we could get books from other branches for her. She said it was just for personal interest, not school, but would like to see more, so I took her to the adult librarian on duty and he sat down to help her.


• A teenage black girl needed a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol for school, and of course she needed it for tomorrow. The catalog said we had two different copies in the Children's Room, but I couldn't find 'em on the shelf. She asked me to see if the Main Library had a copy, so I called down there and put one on hold for her. She was clearly glum about having to trek downtown for that, so I poked around the room a bit and found a copy face out on a windowsill display, for which she was super grateful. This is one problem with creating "displays" in windows or just along the tops of shelves, unless you're the one that's done it, there's no way for anyone else to know where a book is.


• A white man with a very thick accent of the British/Scottish/Welsh variety came in desperate for any of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. His daughter has read them all, but wanted to reread them in anticipation of the film version of The Golden Compass. All we had was book 3, The Amber Spyglass, but he seemed plenty pleased with that. He also wanted to see if we had any books in Hilari Bell's Farsala trilogy, which we didn't. But we did have Shield Stars, the first book in her new Shield, Sword, and Crown series, which he was plenty happy with. He left saying, "Hopefully these will keep her quiet for the rest of the day."


• A Hispanic girl and her mother came in looking for "chapter books," which was rather daunting, since per my lack of knowledge noted above, I had no idea what a chapter book was. (Apparently these are simply books for kids that are broken up into, uh...chapters...) The girl specified that she was in 5th grade, and somewhat desperate, I did a quick Google search for "5th grade chapter books" and found the following list from the San Francisco Community School. I jotted the author names down and just started pulling books for her to look at. The mother asked me if the books were marked by grade level and I said I didn't think so, which as far as I know, is right... I left them with a big pile of books and went to help someone else. When I checked back to see if what I'd given them was OK, they seemed satisfied, although I doubt they'd have said anythhing if they weren't.


• A Hispanic boy somewhere in the 12-14 range needed Sean Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens for school. Alas our copy was not on the shelf where it was supposed to be, which bummed his mother out because they had taken the bus here. And when I checked around the system, every copy was either out or missing -- clearly a popular title. The mother asked me to write a letter to his teacher explaining the situation, which I did.


• The same boy also needed material relating to the Cuban Revolution (the 1950s one). I gave him the two books on Cuba from the kid's section, Richard Crooker's Cuba and Kumari Campbell's Cuba in Pictures, each of which has about two pages on the revolution. Then we expanded it to the adult materials, where I gave him Lonely Planet's Cuba guidebook (since they usually have pretty decent potted histories of their locations), Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History (published by Yale University Press), and Marifeli Perez-Stable's The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy(Oxford University Press). I know giving scholarly books to a little kid isn't the most useful thing, but he seemed pleased that I treated him like a grownup.


• Right before closing, a young white man came in looking for Philip Pullman's of The Golden Compass. Now I know that above I said we didn't have it, but in the interim, I had made a trip to the "back room" where there are all kinds of stuff on the shelves. Including, I had noticed, a nice new copy of The Golden Compass. So I was able to snag that for him. I don't really get why there is so much on the shelves in the back -- since it's not listed as such in the catalog, there's no way for me to know if something might be back there when it's not on the "public" shelves.


• There was one other interaction, which is worthy of its own post. For the purposes of the MLS vs. GED tally below, it definitely qualifies as an MLS-level issue.

One other little tidbit. As I was cleaning up the room, I found a book sitting out called Osama bin Laden: A War Against the West. This is 130-page book for teens about bin Laden, largely cribbed from Simon Reeve's The New Jackals, Yosef Bodansky's Bin Laden, and various newspaper and magazine stories. I mention this book just by way of illustrating how you can find books about pretty much any topic written for the teen audience. Alas, School Library Journal writes "has little to offer readers who want to know what makes this man tick, beyond generalities about Islamic fundamentalism and a thin framework of facts fleshed out by suppositions." Ouch!

MLS or GED?
Which of the above interactions really need an MLS to sucesfully resolve?
This week was mixed. Pointing out where the DVDs are and tracking down specific books don't rate in my world, but the other stuff does, meaning that this week I handled almost as many in-depth requests as the previous 12 weeks combined!
Week: 5 for 10
Year: 11 for 78