Athena’s Banquet

August 26, 2009 Wednesday

Today was a day of many firsts.  After sampling some Dutch soy sausage stuff (a distinctly odd first, although not untasty) at breakfast, we had class.  Post-academia, I led a group of about four people to the nearby park where I pretended to be a yoga teacher for about an hour.  Despite doing yoga nearly every day for seven months, plus taking a year of yoga in high school as my P.E. (Yes, my high school was basically awesome.  Don’t hate me.), this was the first time I’d ever led a class and it was terribly fun if a bit nerve-wracking.  It definitely tested me on my ability to tell left from right, which has never in my life been a strong point.  Everyone seemed really positive and enthusiastic though, so that was awesome.

Afterward, a few of us had yet to rent our bikes from the local bike rental place, so we went back to the hotel, showered, and then headed over to Rotterdam Central.  After handing over a deposit of 80 euros (I really need to get more cash), we walked out with gigantic Dutch bicycles, each weighing approximately two tons, with no gear shifts and pedal brakes.  And then we rode them home.  It was lovely – I’ve been scared off of riding bikes since I was about eight years old (there was one devastating attempt in Boston when I managed to run into a pedestrian and two other stationary objects, as well as get yelled at by a substantial number of drivers, which to be fair may have been entirely deserved).  And no, I didn’t wear a helmet.  Nobody does here.  The Dutch either have a very enlightened approach to bicycle safety (rules of the road seem to consist entirely of “Bikes do whatever they want; other stuff gets out of their way.”) or a very foolhardy one; I’ve already seen a young mother toting no less than three children in a front-loaded babybucket and helmets are entirely unheard of.  Bikes do get their own lanes, which is pretty sweet and solves the yelling-drivers problem handily.  Tomorrow most of us are heading over to Delft to do…stuff.  I don’t think anyone’s sorted that part out yet.  It’ll be fun though.

We made it back to the hotel with barely time to spare to make it to the Pancake Boat.  This is exactly what it sounds like – a boat, filled with pancakes.  To be honest, I found it a little mediocre; some of the dentistry was terrifying and the pancakes were acceptable.  The lack of whipped cream (“slagroom”) was inexplicable.  The shredded cheese was a bit on the stale side, and the large chunks of candied ginger (and I do mean large, half an inch to a side) were…again, inexplicable.  Still, it was a fairly charming way to view the harbor and see some more of Rotterdam.

While most of the group proceeded on to a nearby watering hole, I headed up to my room; my voice is basically shot between the asthma/allergies/bronchial flare-up and the talking/leading yoga.  I booked my flight to Copenhagen (wheeee!) but I still need to get my hotel room sorted out.  Time enough for that tomorrow, I expect.

Yes, tomorrow!  To Delft!

...It’s the only way to be sure.

Thanks to, apparently, a hurricane and a few other weather systems churning their way up the East Coast, my flight from Boston to Newark and thence to Amsterdam was delayed for three hours, leading to my inevitable rebooking on a later (direct, thankfully) flight that will get me in on Monday.  This is either the best or the worst excuse I’ve ever used for being late for class.

And Newark, man.  Newark needs to die.  It’s responsible for two of my three worst travel days.  France was responsible for the other one.  The combination of Newark and Europe is goes out the other side of awful into uncharted regions of awfulness, a wormhole into the Gamma quadrant of awful, full of strange and awful new life forms, some of which must rest in goo-buckets for one hour in every sixteen.

Yes, I’m really very tired.

Today I skipped toddler storytime to work an evening shift with the adult librarian.  He was putting on a showing of Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? aimed at adults.  My job was to scurry around getting everything together beforehand and making sure things ran smoothly.

• I set up the computer, speakers, and projector.  It’s a really good idea to make sure that you fix the power settings on the computer so that it won’t decide to shut down fifteen minutes into the movie (we had trouble getting the computer settings to change, but it was a good thing we did it ahead of time).  It’s also smart to tape down any cords to make sure that 1) no one trips and 2) no one pulls them out of the electrical socket at a crucial moment in the film.


• I got all the refreshments ready – I thought of it a smidge too late, but you can make your own giant cup-sized ice cubes, which will stay frozen longer (and also are free); it’s also good to chill the drinks ahead of time.  We used book bins to hold the icewater for the drinks, and had some big bowls available for the popcorn.  Also put out a tablecloth on the refreshment table, plus napkins, cups, etc.


• I arranged the meeting room in a setup conducive to movie-watching.  These non-stacking chairs are the bane of my existence.


• That was pretty much it.  Central had sent along a bunch of recommended titles in a box with the film, and the adults were pretty self contained.  I did have one guy ask if it was okay to leave the room to use the restroom.  For the record, in general librarians greatly prefer this to the alternative.  You don’t really need to ask.  We’re not evil schoolmarms.


• We also had a giveaway after the film ended; the adult librarian had a set of books on CD to give away.  As it turned out, we had enough discs for everyone to get one, so the drawing was just to establish what order you got to choose in.  Still, it was very popular.

People were generally really positive about the experience and strongly urged us to have more movie showings, especially since there weren’t any kids there (which isn’t something we can guarantee in the future, but whatever).  There were several strong requests for more movie nights at other times in  the year, so that’s definitely something to think about.

Today I:

• Observed Storytime for pre-schoolers.  We did a bug theme since the Bee-Boppin’ Bugs program is happening on Monday (although apparently that is so popular it needs no additional advertising.  We shall see.).  Ten Little Ladybugs (which is a very cute book with little plastic ladybugs through cut-out windows), acting out being a hungry caterpillar, and reading (of course!) The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Such a very cute book (and, not related to library-stuff at all, is giving me wicked awesome ideas about baby quilts.)  It was amazing the energy that zoomed through the room when my supervisor pulled up that book; kids were absolutely shouting that they had read it at home and were thrilled to get to read it again.

  We also acted out the Itsy Bitsy Spider – my supervisor intended to do it as a feltboard, but realized halfway through that the kids only did the hand motions when she was doing them herself, and weren’t doing them while she did the feltboard.  Not to mention that the song wasn’t very well-adapted to a feltboard; it’s too short and quick to really allow you to place the felt pieces appropriately.



• I spent a good chunk of time working on my weeding project and am nearly done with it.  I was mostly working on the animals region of the 500s (round the 590s) and started to get really ruthless – we do NOT need a full shelf of books on dolphins!  I was pretty much pulling anything more than 10 years old, and then evaluating to see if it circulated (although honestly even that wouldn’t necessarily save a book – I think ALL the dolphin books circulated, and we STILL don’t need a full shelf of them) or if there was something special about it (and that would save a book, because special books are special).


• I also had an interesting reference question from a boy looking for some books on video game design.  It took a little bit to figure out whether he wanted books on writing video games (the coding and calculus stuff) or designing video games (writing the plots and characters and world-building).  It turns out he wanted the latter, which stumped me pretty badly; my supervisor leaned over and suggested doing a subject browse for video games and then seeing what sub-headings there were.  Once I found the right subject heading, it was pretty easy to find some books to put on hold and on the shelves.  Still, I should have thought of that myself.  Oh well.

Today I helped our teen librarian out with the Duct Tape Mania program.  She had gotten a crate full of duct tape in different colors, rulers (some handmade from cardboard and laminated), folders with various instructions, a few examples already made, all that sort of thing.  The room was already set up, but we hit a space crisis only a few minutes into the program – we didn’t have nearly enough tables and we had way too many kids (okay, not really “way too many”, but we needed more space for them!)  We wound up with about 30 teens making appearances, and the first part of the program was spent (for me, at least) running around finding more pencils, rulers, scissors, all that sort of thing.  Not really a bad problem to have, but it was definitely a bit unexpected – other branches only had five or six kids show up, and we were worried about running out of tape!

The teens seemed to have a lot of fun making different things.  There were a fair number of problems with understanding instructions – lots of things were written kind of “hiply” which hindered rather than enhanced understanding.  It would have been nice to be able to run through some of the projects more thoroughly before turning the teens loose, and we had to do a bit of translating at several points, but it all worked out.  We had one girl come up and show us the very cute blue-and-white purse she made.  She said she tried following the instructions but they didn’t make sense, so she just gave up and improvised – awesome!

We also made up little quarter-page handouts with some links to other duct tape craft sites.  Only a few of these were taken, but I think it mght have been better to put them out on the tables where kids were actually crafting; as it was they were on the registration table which most kids kind of scanned and ignored.

We did a raffle giveaway for the summer reading prizebooks which is always popular.  There were kids hanging around even after they’d finished their craft just to make sure they’d be there when the drawing happened.  Teens love books!

All in  all, this was a totally successful event.  Everyone seemed to have a great time with the craft and really enjoy themselves and there were a lot of really ambitious and well-executed projects going on.  More duct tape!

Today was our African drumming workshop and it was great!  We had 130 people (not counting performers and librarians) move in and out of the room or hover around the door and glassed-in entryway.  Two performers from Benin and Senegal kept the room absolutely mesmerized, with kids banging on drums and rattling the shakers brought by the drummers.

We moved most of the chairs out to the side of the room to leave a big open space in the middle and set up fans to try to keep the air  moving.  This branch doesn’t have air conditioning and it was about 85 today, so it was pretty brutal in the room – we had a bunch of people hang out in the anteroom and then leave after the first song was over; I can only assume it was because of the heat.  My supervisor handed me a clicker to keep track of door counts and it made things MUCH easier than my usual “count three times and average them” method for storytime, although it also helped that the kids were all seated and pretty static – storytimes can get kind of wiggly.

The performance itself was pretty self-contained.  The guys had clearly been doing this for a while.  They played a few songs, then guided the kids (and adults) through some basic rhythms, split the room up into a few groups and led the groups through banging out different rhythms together to see how they interact, practiced getting everyone to stop when the drummer made a hand motion (Crucial!), and made sure that the kids rotated to let everyone get a chance with a drum or a shaker.  It was completely adorable watching the toddlers who were old enough to hear and “get” the rhythm, but lacked the fine motor control to actually follow it.

This was one of the highest-interest programs I’ve seen this summer.  People entering and leaving the library were stopping constantly to look in through the glass-fronted meeting room, ducking in and out for a few moments, hanging around the entryway, etc.  A couple of kids who clearly hadn’t come for the program all but dragged their parents inside.

Before the program started, my supervisor sent me out into the stacks to grab some books on African instruments and Africa itself.  Africa itself wasn’t hard – we had several books on the continent as a whole, plus smaller ones on individual countries (I made sure to ask the performers where they were from and put books about those countries on display), but then I found the one book we had on African instruments.  “Musical instruments of Africa…”, yup, sounding okay so far…”Their nature, use, and place in the life of a deeply musical people.”...Um.  Ooookay.  Published in 1965, a year noted for, oh, say, the Watts Riots and the second (failed) attempt at a Selma-Montgomery march.  An era known for its clear-eyed open-mindedness on the subject of racial equality and human rights.  Not.  So.  Much.

People, this is why we weed.

(I brought the book to my supervisor and she said, “Oh great!” up until she read the part about deeply musical people.  At which point we nodded and took it in back to go to the great library in the sky.  I believe I prefaced presenting it to her with the phrase “I think we need to burn this” which okay, was probably not the best way to put it but um.  Yeah.  That book had no business circulating any more.)

My Storytime project was the one I looked forward to most and least. On the one hand, it was something I’d done as a teen working with the “Readings is Fundamental” program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (my first paying library job!). I was responsible for working with the youngest children (babies to seven, approximately) of underprivileged families who were learning how to read to their children both for fun and to teach life skills. While the adults and older children participated in a read-aloud Storytime taught by the children’s librarians, I would read to the younger kids, complete a craft with them, and generally keep them quiet and entertained.

On the other hand, I hadn’t read to kids (and certainly had never sung to them, because I strenuously avoided singing in public until I was at least twenty-four, believing that embarrasment could be lethal) since I was fifteen or so. Solitary nieces and nephews don’t count.
So this was certainly the project that was going to stretch me the most. As an adult, I regretted not doing more with my RIF kids; I would make rattles or masks out of paper plates and Mardi Gras beads, read them a few stories, color with them on butcher paper…and that was about it. I didn’t have themes, I didn’t have a wide variety of crafts, I didn’t sing. Now was my chance to try doing something more involved.

I watched my supervisor’s Storytimes for most of the summer (aside from a few weeks when she was on vacation or doing school visits) and took note of what she did that worked. She always had a consistent opening song and stretch, a mid-Storytime stretch, and a closing song. I would need to incorporate these into my Storytime, since it was what all of her kids were used to doing. She would also do a lot of singing with them (she always looked for a new song for them from a variety of children’s websites), and did a simple craft at the end of Storytime with the pre-schoolers. I observed that the kids often wouldn’t sing or act along as she did the song and associated hand motions, but she said that parents were always coming up to her and telling her that the kids would sing them all week at home – they were just shy in public.

I decided fairly early in the summer that I would do a muffin themed Storytime, mostly because I was making a lot of muffins for myself (I had a ton of frozen blueberries that needed to get used up). If You Give A Moose A Muffin would definitely be one of my readings, and “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” would be one of my songs, and there I stuck. For a long time. I spent a good chunk of time closer to my due date looking through the shelves for muffin- or baking-themed Storytimes and came up with a few books, but nothing that really grabbed me.

Then, suddenly (my supervisor assures me that this happens to her all the time the night before Storytime), a scant two weeks before my due date, I had a change of plans. Muffins are out. FARMS, now, farms and gardens…I love farms and gardens. I had spent a lot of time this summer at the farmer’s market and even tried my hand at making jams and canning fruit (mostly successful, tons of fun except for the burns and the cleanup, and so incredibly tasty), and this, this was a theme I could really get excited about. And was, in fact. I tossed around some other farm and garden-themed books, but nothing really grabbed me until my supervisor suggested Farmer Duck and Muncha Muncha Muncha for the pre-schoolers and Growing Vegetable Soup and The Little Red Hen for the toddlers. I had considered (was planning on, in fact) doing Potato Joe for both sets up until my run-through the day before, when I decided that it really wasn’t an excellent book for reading aloud and also had no narrative structure whatsoever, and would probably bore the willies out of the pre-schoolers. My song would be “This is the way we grow the food” to the tune of “Here we go round the mulberry bush”, and my craft would be making little garden labels out of cut-up paper grocery bags and popsicle sticks. I had a felt board for The Very Big Carrot. I had a flower stamp for the kids at the end. If I needed more to fiill the time, I’d teach everyone to sing “Inch by Inch.” I was set.

My supervisor met with me the day before to do a complete run-through of the Storytime, and it was very helpful. It was a good chance for me to practice reading the stories out loud and to practice dealing with an occasionally tough crowd of four-year-olds (she can do killer impressions of kids being excited/bored/random as the mood strikes her. It was both funny and very, very useful.) She gave me some great tips on projecting my voice (I am not a naturally loud person) and dealing with the kidlets.

I was really nervous on the morning of my preschool Storytime, but I’m lucky in that once I get on stage and reading I tend to forget to be nervous and just focus on what I’m doing. It went great! There were 120 people in the room, which my supervisor said is something she’s only had to deal with twice. I didn’t have time to do “Inch by Inch” (which I both expected and was disappointed by), my “Very Big Carrot” feltboard (told as if it happened to me as a kid) went over like hotcakes, the kids and adults helped me read Farmer Duck (especially the Moos and the Quacks and the Oinks and the Clucks), and it seemed like everyone had a really good time. Especially me. Which was a relief.

I made a few changes from my supervisor’s usual routine, mostly in that she starts each Storytime with shaking the wiggles out of your right hand, left hand, both hands, and then your face. I really can’t handle shaking wiggles out of my face; it feels like my brain is sloshing around in my head. Instead I had all the kids make a big silly faces (and I made one too, of course), and it seemed like that went over just fine as a substitute.

After playing to a crowd of 120, the 80 and 60 I got for my toddler Storytimes the next day were small potatoes. I did mostly the same routine, but swapped out the books for two shorter ones, since the toddlers only have twenty minutes to the pre-schoolers’ thirty.

The adults were hugely helpful in keeping the kids relatively still and quiet; I mentioned that these were one of my first Storytimes and they really stepped up in getting the kids to participate without getting too crazy. Everyone sang along, which was another thing that I’d been worried about.

I kept a notebook next to me with my Storytime plan written out in it as a reminder to me of what was supposed to come next, and that was a great crutch as well. My supervisor has been doing this for years and doesn’t need them any more, but it was great for me to have a cheat-sheet/security blanket. I will definitely keep doing this until I’m more comfortable with the routine of a Storytime.

Once again, a good knowledge of your collection is essential. I’m a good twenty years away from my prime picture-book years, and my supervisor was a huge help in choosing books. When she was away on vacation I processed the new children’s books that came in, and it feels like between that, weeding, shelving, and the general browsing required of a children’s librarian, a good knowledge of your collection develops by osmosis. Sadly, since I was only there for three months, I didn’t have much of that so it was extremely helpful to have her advice to support my book selections.

In general, I had a really fabulous time working on this project. The Storytimes were much more fun (and much less stressful) than I anticipated them being, giving kids their end-of-Storytime stamps is both cute and gratifying, and hearing a roomful of toddlers gasp when you get to the climax of “The Very Big Carrot” is just plain awesome. After my pre-school Storytime a woman from Page Ahead told me about their program and asked if I would be interested in volunteering, and this definitely sounds like a great way to both build my own Storytime skills and engage children in their library and what it can do for them.

This was one of the most technically challenging projects I worked on this summer.  My supervisor wanted to have a booklist of historical fiction works created, since there were several schools in our service area that did projects related to historical fiction, especially global historical fiction, and it was a constant challenge to keep track of appropriate books.

In essence, she wanted a database (or database-like system) created that would allow her to search for historical fiction* by continent and country.  Time period searches would also be handy, but were less crucial than the geographic component.  She didn’t want to need to spend a lot of time maintaining it or learning how to use it, didn’t want it to be “socially” public (ie, she didn’t want to deal with “friend requests” or chatting with other users), and wanted to be able to print out exported lists of books for her patrons.  It also needed to be free.

My first thoughts were GoodReads and LibraryThing, but both of these proved to be unworkable.  GoodReads does not support tags, and their bookshelf system was too cumbersome to really work for this project.  While LibraryThing was more hospitable to her needs, only the first 200 books could be imported for free – a serious limitation when you’re dealing with a collection the size of Seattle Public Library’s (or even North East’s, for that matter).  Upon a friend’s suggestion, I started playing with Google Books and soon decided that this would be a good platform to support this project.  Google Book is free, allows the creation of a person library, allows the unlimited creation of tags, is not substantially a social platform (although it is possible to see other people’s booklists, it is not generally intended or used as a social networking site the way GoodReads is), is very easy to use, and (as a bonus) allows the user to see reviews and ratings from a variety of editorial sites as well  as reader reviews.  The downside is that the export function is pretty cumbersome at present, allowing creation of an XML file but no other formats.  Despite this limitation, it seemed like the best off-the-shelf solution for her needs.

I created an instruction file to guide future DFW students and other volunteers in the creation and use of tags (see attached).  The basic idea is to tag for three main concepts: place, time, and logistics.  For place, users should tag for continent, country (including both the name at the time of the story’s setting and the present-day name), city (if applicable), and any other applicable geographic features (for example, if the fact that the story is set on an island or a mountain is relevant, include that information; if it’s set on or along a particular river, include that as a tag).  For time, the user should tag for century (using BCE if applicable) and decade, as well as including the generally-used name for any world or local events (eg, apartheid, WWII, glastnost, Holocaust, etc.)  Including general terms for events is also encouraged (for example, a book set in WWII focusing on the Holocaust would be tagged 20th century, 1940s, WWII, Holocaust, war, genocide).  Logistical tags are those that will aid the end user and the patron in locating a book, so these include the call number or shelving area (E, JE, J, YA, FIC) and whether the book is held by North East or just by SPL.
During the time of my DFW, I was able to complete (in so much as such a project can ever be “complete”) a historical fiction booklist for Africa from a booklist provided by Wedgewood Elementary for their students’ use, as well as other online booklists provided by other library systems and individuals.  I also volunteered to complete the upload of the remainder of the Wedgewood booklist after the end of my DFW term, as this is one of my supervisor’s top priorities for the next school year.

*While the focus of this project was historical fiction, or fiction with a strong sense of time and place, generally set in a specific historical period or during a recognizable historical event, she also wanted to include books simply set in another country.  Wedgewood does a project every year that encourages their students to “Read Around the World” and so books set abroad, even if not “historical” per se, were good candidates for inclusion in this list.

You can examine the guidelines I created for this project here.

You can explore our booklist here.

I was able to spend a substantial amount of time this summer working on the reference desk.  Since North East is a branch library, all of the librarians take it in turns to staff the desk and help patrons of all ages.  While we spent a lot of time dealing with the summer reading program signups and completions (we had well over 1700 signups by the time I finished my DFW, and had already exceeded our reading goal by early August), we also fielded a large number of reference questions.

There were three instances in particular that I feel exemplified my reference experiences, one excellent, one okay, and one poor.

• My instance of poor reference services came during my shift at Lake City Branch Library.  My supervisor had been assigned there for the evening and asked me to accompany her to get a sense of what a different branch is like and how the community served can be radically different from a shift of only a few blocks.  Indeed, the population served by Lake City is substantially different from that at North East; North East serves large number of families with young children and generally comes from a more affluent social class, while Lake City (from what I saw) has a larger minority population and more patrons from a less privileged socioeconomic class.  A patron came up with a book that he had retrieved from his hold shelf, but he no longer wanted it and wanted to make sure it was shelved properly.  He kept apologizing for bothering us, although both my supervisor and I tried to reassure him that this was our job, we were happy to help, and it wasn’t a bother at all.

  He then asked if we had a particular book on Hollywood stars or Hollywood legends.  He described it as a big coffee-table book, was pretty sure that the title was “Hollywood Legends”, and said that he had seen it here.  Searching by that title didn’t turn anything up; trying a variety of subject headings and searches around “Hollywood,” “Hollywood legends,” “film stars,” “film icons,” etc. didn’t turn anything up.  My supervisor was helping me search the catalog but she came up against the same limitations I did – plenty of books about that subject, but no way to tell if any particular one was the one he wanted.  Googling turned up way too many things, none of which were useful.  He mentioned that he had also seen it at Barnes and Nobles “and should have just bought it while he was there”, so I tried searching the Barnes and Nobles website to see if I could find it, but again struck out.  I also tried the Borders website, as it’s my experience that people often don’t differentiate between the two, but found nothing.  I took him back to the 790s to see if we could find it by browsing, but none of the books on  the shelf were what he wanted; we also checked the Oversize collection.  One of the oversize books was a Vogue book of film stars, but he said that it wasn’t the one he was looking for.  Since he was looking for a very specific book, it wasn’t appropriate to put any of the other books that shared the “motion picture actors and actresses” subject headings on hold for him, and so in the end I apologized for not being able to find it and suggested that it might be checked out and he could try back later.

  I felt like this was a very frustrating experience for both of us.  Since he was looking for a specific book without knowing the exact title or author, it was difficult for me to locate it; he wasn’t interested in any other book that covered the same topic, so putting books on hold or finding an appropriate substitute wasn’t a great option.  It was also a difficult interaction for me since he was very apologetic about bothering me, and I wanted very much for him to feel welcome at the library, but simply wasn’t able to find what he was looking for; I didn’t want him to feel like the library didn’t want him there or we weren’t happy to see him or help him, but I just wasn’t able to deliver.  I believe that I maintained a welcoming and professional demeanor throughout the interaction, but I would have felt much better if I’d been able to find his book for him.

• I had a more successful, but still not spectacular, reference experience with another patron at North East.  A woman in upper middle age came up and asked if “this was where she got her questions answered.”  I assured her that it was certainly where we tried to answer questions, and she sat down and explained that she was looking for unbiased, government (state or federal) funded information on planning for retirement and old age.  She said that she’d checked out the AARP’s website and they had several resources, but that most of them referred you to banks or brokerage houses or the like and she didn’t want to get information from organizations that had an obvious vested interest in your ultimate financial planning decisions.  I asked if she was planning for herself or for a parent or relative, to get a sense  of whether this was an urgent need for funding sources or a more long-term goal, and she answered that it was for her own needs in the (relatively distant) future.  I also asked if she was interested in, for example, a website, a phone hotline, an in-person workshop or consultation, or some other method.  She mentioned specifically that she’d prefer a face-to-face workshop or consultation, but was more interested in the non-commercial aspect than the format.

  I briefly checked the AARP website but she was quite correct that most of the links were to commerical entities, since AARP tends to partner with other businesses to provide services.  I knew from my job in eldercare prior to entering library school that most communities have local Area Agencies on Aging, which are nonprofit resources for seniors and adults caring for them, and so this might be a good place for her to contact to see what types of workshops or other information might be available.  I was able to locate the website for the Seattle Agency on Aging and provided her with the site address and contact phone number.  I also checked the Medicare website to see if it provided any additional information on financial planning, but was unable to locate any.

  She mentioned that she had checked the UW extension course catalog to see if they offered any classes, but that they didn’t.  When I asked if she had checked the community colleges around Seattle, she said that she hadn’t but that it sounded like those might be great resources.  I wrote down a pointer for her to check community college catalogs, but I feel now like I would have provided better service to have given her a list of them and possibly checked their catalogs (time permitting) for appropriate courses—I’m not really sure why I stopped my services there, but especially given the lack of a line I could have done more.

  I also asked my supervisor if she had any thoughts and she brought the patron back to our large-print section, which is where we keep our resources on aging, including the AARP magazine.  However, these were geared more towards people making immediate decisions about health care and aging care, and were also heavily commercially sponsored.  These were not good resources for this patron.

  I finished with a recommendation that she contact the agency on aging to see what resources they could offer, and that she check the community college catalogs for classes or seminars.  Again, I feel like it would have been more appropriate to provide her with at least a list of colleges to try, but this was at least a starting point for her.

  After she left, I also realized that I could have checked Consumer Reports for other resources and information – while they wouldn’t sponsor face-to-face classes, they frequently publish articles on smart money management and retirement strategies.  They do indeed have several articles linked from their website on retirement planning, pension planning, and other financial considerations.  This would have been a great resource for this patron, and I wish that I had thought of it earlier.  As it is, I will have to keep Consumer Reports in mind for other patrons with similar information needs.

• The last reference encounter I wish to discuss came from an elderly woman who said that she was writing her memoirs and wanted to learn about “holographic” writing.  She said that The Atlantic Monthly always had one section in each issue devoted to holographic writing and that she wanted to learn how to write in this style.  Despite having some experience with creative  writing  (I was nearly an English minor in college), I had never heard of this term for a writing style.  When I asked her to explain what this term meant, she said that it was a way of writing in which you provide the full picture of everything that a character is experiencing at that point in time, from their thoughts to the types of food that they’re eating, to the weather, to their personal relationships, to the politial and economic events that are affecting them – basically giving a fish-eye view of everything that’s affecting this individual at this point in time.  She was specifically interested in this in the context of memoirs, and even more specifically about writing for an audio book.

  When I took a creative non-fiction writing class in college, our two textbooks were Writing Down the Bones and Bird By Bird.  I’ve since heard these two books referenced as the virtual bibles of writing memoir or creative nonfiction, and so I thought I would get them for her…with the slight  complication that I couldn’t remember the title of Writing Down the Bones.  Amazon came to my rescue; I looked up Bird by Bird and the first or second link of “related products” was Writing Down the Bones, so I was able to put them both on hold for her.  However, she really wanted something to take home that day, so I wrote down their call numbers and went to see what else we had on the shelves in that range.  I was able to find a book on writing by Ray Bradbury (who I’ve always considered to be very gifted at creating a strong sense of time and place), another by Norman Mailer (who I admit I have never read anything by, but he’s won Pulitzers so I assume he knows what he’s going on about), and a third, more generic, volume on writing narrative nonfiction.  She flipped through all of these, declared them to be exactly what she was looking for, and went away happy.

  My experience here was a bit lucky, to be honest.  I had enough background in writing to know a good book to start from and be able to work from there to locate other similar works  that might serve her needs.

In general, it’s been the questions where I had some (or a lot) of existing background knowledge where I was most able to easily locate materials and resources for the patron.  It’s when they’re asking about a field that I’m wholly unfamiliar with (Hollywood stars being a good example) that I have trouble figuring out where to start.  I’m sure that a lot of these skills will simply develop with experience and time as I am asked a wider range of questions, but I’m very frequently made aware of the gaping holes in my knowledge.

Additionally, I need to work on improving my basic search strategies; I often forget to try subject-browse searches, which will frequently redirect you to the correct subject heading even if you’re using the wrong term initially, and I need more work on combining terms to find the right resource.  I’ll be taking LIS 521 next quarter, which is the more advanced reference services class, and I’m looking forward to gaining more search strategies as a result of the coursework.  Answering reference questions was one of my favorite parts of this summer—I like the combination of detective work, interpersonal skills, and ingenuity in finding my patrons the best resources I can.

North East Library is preparing for a substantial remodeling project to take place between August 23 and approximately the first week of October.  Despite substantial renovations undertaken during the Libraries for All program, the branch requires additional work to consolidate the nonfiction collection (currently divided between the east and west sides of the library with a split at approximately 945), renovate the back room to improve workflow for the circulation staff, and create additional space for books on hold.  North East is one of the busiest branches in the city in terms of door count and circulation numbers and needs these renovations in order to better provide services to its patrons.

In preparation for this renovation, the librarians have been focusing on weeding their collections, especially non-fiction.  One of my projects this summer was to weed the 500s, a project witth several steps.
My supervisor first submitted a request to Central for a “dusty shelves” list—a list of those books that have not been checked out for a year or more.  Central generates these lists at night, as they take substantial computer processing time.  Once this list was created, we sat down to discuss the criteria for weeding.  In general, the books on the dusty shelves list are the first to undergo serious scrutiny as to their appropriateness for the collection.  Other considerations were the age of the book (books older than ten years were also up for scrutiny), the number of other books in the collection covering the same topics, the need to maintain a book on a particular topic in the collection, and the condition of the book.  All of these considerations had to be balanced in an attempt to balance the needs of our patrons with the need to create new shelf space and make way for new materials; particularly due to the upcoming renovation, I was asked to be fairly aggressive in weeding, which undoubtedly colors my assessment of the process.

Back in the stacks, things changed from theoretical to practical.  My first step was to browse the shelves for books on the dusty shelves list, while also checking for older books or books in poor condition.  This was, by and large, the easy part—even if I pulled a book that wasn’t a good candidate for weeding, no real harm would be done by giving it a once-over back at the desk.  I gathered approximately a full cart (three shelves) worth of books over my several sessions of work on this project.

At the desk the real work started.  The process was to scan the book to pull up its record, then check the frequency with which it circulated, the last date of circulation, the number of times it had circulated from North East by year, the number of other copies in the system, the age of the book, and the condition.  It turned out to nearly be two projects, as one of the other things I wound up doing was determining whether a particular book might be better shelved in our easy nonfiction (ENF) collection.  This collection is shelved in our children’s area (while the non-easy nonfiction is interfiled with YA and adult nonfiction in the back), and could be fairly described as non-fiction picture books.  These books are more appropriate for reading aloud to a child than for working on school projects, generally (but not always) lack an index, and often have picture-book style illustrations or photographs.  A book that isn’t circulating in our regular nonfiction collection may well circulate frequently when shelved in ENF, so I found myself checking books with low circulation numbers to see if they might fit that collection better.

Condition was by far one of the easiest criteria to deal with.  If a book had multiple ripped pages, any writing or scribbling inside, or a damaged spine or cover such that it was beyond hope of reasonable repair by our very talented and dedicated group of volunteers, it was a pretty easy call to decide to pull it from the collection.  Exceptions were made (there are always exceptions!) if it was the absolute only book we had on a topic, but if other libraries in the system held a copy that might not be enough to save it.  Some I would set aside to have their acetate covers replaced or torn pages fixed, but there is a limit to what can be repaired.
Age, when combined with circulation frequency and the number of other books on that topic, was also pretty easy to deal with.  Books more than ten years old are always up for scrutiny – if we have a similar but newer book covering the same topic, I would usually weed the older one.  Books that were published or acquired before I was born were definitely on the chopping block (and there were a few of these…)

Circulation frequency and distribution were more challenging.  If a book had circulated too many times (more than about 100), we would take a good look at its condition to see if it was time for it to go; that said, if it was still in reasonable condition and hadn’t been replaced by a more current book, there is absolutely no reason to remove a popular book from the library.  I also used Horizon to check the circulation distribution – if a book had circulated heavily in 2005 and 2006, but had only circulated once a year in 2007 and 2008, it was a good candidate for weeding.  In general, books that circulated less than twice per year for 2008 and 2009 were good candidates for weeding.

I would also check the catalog for other books covering the same topic (both at our branch and elsewhere) by using the subject headings assigned to a candidate for weeding.  Horizon allows you to see how many other books in the system have the same subject heading, as well as what they are; it also displays the publication date and (a few screens in) the libraries that hold a copy.  If the copy I was considering for weeding was the only copy in the system, it might (depending on the above factors) mean that we should definitely hang on to it, but if it was a fifteen-year-old, deeply battered book with more recent works on the same topic in the system, it might mean that every other branch had already gotten rid of their copy and it was time for us to follow their example.

I also found that I had to consult my supervisor frequently to see if there was a reason to keep a particular book; for example, we had many books on biomes that circulated only occasionally.  However, we kept them because the schools nearby that send students to North East frequently have a unit on biomes that requires students to use these books.  We may not need them often, but we need them.

At the same time, it was a bit easier for me to be ruthless when weeding – I didn’t have a great deal of experience with the collection or warm fuzzy memories associated with the books, and so I was relatively psychologically freer to zap books.  I will confess to keeping a few that were particularly cool, even if they might otherwise be candidates; as long as my pile of weeds stayed larger than my pile of keeps, I felt like keeping a few around that were “special” (unique presentation or voice, great photographs, etc.) was a totally acceptable librarian perogative to pull.   “Circ it til it’s dead” was the phrase we used for these.

I also found that I would occasionally differentiate between two superficially similar books.  One particular instance came as I was evaluating two books on “intelligent life in outer space.”  One was about SETI, how astronomers are searching for extraterresterial intelligences, how such intelligences might have evolved, etc., and was generally a very scientific look at how scientists went about researching extraterrestrial life.  The other was a very credulous look at aliens, complete with illustrations of bug-eyed greys and flying saucers.  The second circulated far more often than the first (because let’s face it, aliens are way cooler than extraterrestrial intelligences).  I ended up keeping both of them, reasoning that they were presenting two unique viewpoints on the matter, but I would have been hard pressed to keep the second without keeping the first – even if the first was a good candidate for weeding.  That said, it was definitely a situation where I found my personal beliefs being challenged by the task of collection maintenance.

In general, I found this to be a fascinating and useful experience at making the kinds of decisions that go into building and maintaining a quality collection that supports your users.  It’s evident to me that a solid working knowledge of not only your collection but also your users and their needs throughout the year is necessary in collection maintenance; there were a few incidents where my supervisor chose to keep a book that I had selected for weeding because she knew that every so often a school would need it for a project.  I enjoyed working on this project very much, and found that it was a great way to learn your collection and get a better feel for your users’ needs and interests.