Today I (June 30)
Today my supervisor took me along to work at another branch that needed coverage that night. While it was only a mile or two away from our home branch, it serves a very different population – fewer young families and more elderly people or people with limited access to computers or other resources. We had a woman asking how to get her files off a 3.5” floppy disk—I hadn’t seen one of those in years.
I staffed the reference desk for most of the evening, but it was a really slow night and we didn’t have a lot of questions. We had a summer reading program turn-in, which was tricky because I didn’t know where the prize books were! We did find them eventually.
I also had a tricky reference question that I pretty much muffed. A patron came up asking for a large book, like coffee-table sized, about Hollywood legends—he was pretty sure that was the title, and he was looking for a specific book, not just a retrospective on famous people in Hollywood or anything. I spent a lot of time searching around Hollywood, Hollywood legends, film stars, film icons, etc.; I found the subject heading “motion picture actors and actresses” and tried that out; I took him back to the 790s to see if it was on the shelves there; I checked the oversize shelves….no joy. None of the books we had were what he was looking for, and since he couldn’t be much more specific about the title I wasn’t able to do much else. The worst part was that he was so apologetic for bothering me (even though I assured him every time that it was our job to help people find things and we were very happy to do it), and I couldn’t find what he was looking for. It was sad.