Athena’s Banquet

Today I:

• Observed the toddler storytime (again, African stories in preparation for the African Drumming Workshop on Friday)


• Staffed the reference desk – I took a phone reference question on whether we carried the “Consumer’s Checkbook”, but I took too long to find it (I have a lot of trouble finding stuff in our periodical collection) and she hung up pretty much the second  I took her off hold.  Not one of my more successful encounters – I really need to sort out periodicals in my head.I also took a phone question from a woman on vacation.  Apparently the rental car ate one of the CDs from the library, and she wanted to know what would happen if she just told us the disc was lost and how much that would cost her – it would have taken her a long time to take the car back to the rental place to get them to extract it, and she’d rather be on vacation (which I thoroughly understand).  My supervisor guided me through the process of figuring out the replacement cost; it’s not as simple as the Amazon price, since we have to then reprocess the item for shelving and circulation.  It would have been $33, not the $18 it is on Amazon, and the patron went huh, okay, I’ll think about that and then I hope she went off to enjoy her vacation.


• Worked on creating a list of authors who write paranormal romances for our teen librarian, since we have a paranormal romance display up right now and the uncatalogued paperbacks we’ve been throwing on there  have bee pretty well piced over.  It’s time to head into the hardbacks.


• Went to the meeting of all the children’s librarians.  This was absolutely fascinating, although I wished I had something to do with my hands for most of the four hours; I’m bad at sitting still for that long.  A woman came from the periodicals department to tell us about some of their offerings and techniques for finding them (jackpot!), there was a lot of talk about summer reading and other programs going on at the library later this year, and Susan Hildreth, the city librarian, came to have a discussion with the children’s librarians.  It was a great chance to see the behind-the-scenes workings at SPL and hear librarians talk about what their limitations are right now and what  they’d like to be able to do for growth and outreach.