Library Day in the Life, round 4
I can’t resist participating in Library Day in the Life! I’m also tweeting about it: http://twitter.com/webchicken So, here is a peek into my life as a reference librarian in an fairly large downtown public library.
Worked with our nonprofit librarian to update Web pages in HTML (see pic below). I live for that stuff! :)
Most of the day I worked on the reference desk. It was insanely busy most of the day, so I didn’t record as much as I wanted to. Here is just a small sample of the questions/issues I dealt with today:
- Interlibrary loan a book that we don’t own.
- Help a patron find books on Web design for business.
- Track down audio CDs of motivational speakers.
- Help a patron navigate the part of our book stacks that are broken up into weird segments by the building’s architecture.
- Page books from our HUGE basement storage area.
- Give out plastic grocery bags that staff bring in for patrons to reuse.
- “Where is this call number?”
- Biographies on a 19th century abolitionist
- Free skin cancer screenings
- “Somebody called me from this number. Do you know who and why?” [We have a couple hundred phone extensions which all show up on caller ID as the same number, so, no, I don't know.]
- Computer Classes. We get several people a day asking about this. We do offer monthly classes. We get lots of people signing up and few actually showing.
