Reported to the public library at 1:30 PM. Started working on a new powerpoint on social media. This is the class that I will be teaching on July 3rd. Took lots of screen shots and got several slides made. When I got tired of the powerpoint, I decided to look over my proposed list of new books for the reference section. I had a list about 6 pages long, that I had compiled through using recommendations from Guide to Reference and ABC-CLIO. I found some recommendations from Library Journal, so I added those to my list. My plan is to talk with Mr. Cole tomorrow about my reference proposals. The current fiscal year for the library ends June 30th and the administrative assistant mentioned she needed to make one more book order before that date. I left the library about three hours later feeling very accomplished because I was ready to submit my proposals. Oh, I did speak with Mr. Cole about leaving early Friday so that I could run up to Tennessee and check on my mother who has a chronic condition that flairs up occasionally. He said that would be ok, so Friday I will teach my computer class on email and leave at noon to drive to Tennessee.
Today I will present my reference book proposals to Mr. Cole. But this morning I am going to work with the ladies at the circulation desk for a while. The first thing is to empty the book drop. After emptying the book drop, Rosa shows me how to go into the circulation program and check the books back in. What draws my attention is one patron dropped in about ten books and each book had a $2.20 overdue fine, so that adds up to a $22.00 fine in total. WOW! So Rosa explains that there will be a hold placed on the patrons account and they will not be able to checkout any more materials until the fine is reduced to below $10.00. I am having a hard time being able to fathom library fines. With a book drop and the ability to renew books online and over the phone, how could you rack up such a big fine? I do not understand, because my family gets paid only once a month, I live to get the bills paid so I know how much money I have left to spend. I just do not rest well unless my bills are paid. This really bothers me. Rosa explains that many times patrons will come in and try to get out of paying the fines using many excuses. But of course, the library has heard many of these excuses before and that circulation desk workers know how to handle these types of patrons. I hang with the ladies at the circulation desk until about 11:30, watching and asking questions about the procedures. After lunch I meet with Mr. Cole and we start going over my seven pages of reference recommendations. We discuss many aspects of collection development and making decisions on what to add to the collection. The discussion was enlightening and gave me lots to think about in the future when working on collection development. We decided that at this point, I needed to revise my list and really think about some of my choices, did the library need them or could we find them elsewhere in the system and get more useful materials for the patrons of this city. Mr. Cole said I had many good resources listed, but money and relevance to the patron population would be the deciding factors. So I have now revised my list down to two pages and we are going to look at it together again next week.
June 26, 2015
Got to the library early this morning, because of the children's program this afternoon my computer class will be this morning at 10:00. So I needed to get the conference room set up and the computers charging. I had the room set up and going by 10:15, now to get a snack and get back because I had a man come in and he asked if I could go over the basics with him. I met my student at 10:45 and had a quick (20 mins.) with him just looking at the parts of a computer and turning it on and getting started. My other pupils started arriving, I had four persons come in for the class on email. We had just got started good when I realized that the wifi was still not working. Improvise--so I showed everyone how to set up an email account (they all had accounts already) and we talked about to/from, attachments, replying and forwarding. Then I told everyone that we would go into the library and I would help each of them on their accounts, show them what we had gone over, and answer questions about their particular accounts. I finished with everyone about 11:30. It is rewarding to be able to show these patrons how to use their email accounts, it is just aggravating that we don't have the wifi so that we could stay in our make-shift classroom and get all the instruction. But during this instruction, I did learn that I had not included enough screen shots to adequately explain some of the concepts. I learned that the students would like a handout or something to take with them to refer to when they get back to their own computers. I feel like it was a very productive day for both my students and me.
No comments:
Post a Comment