Another new job

 I am moving libraries yet again. My new job is not going to be public-facing, so I'm afraid I may be starved of blog material for quite some time! I know I didn't have much time to post to the blog as manager of Walnut Bluff so hopefully people aren't checking this too often/any disappointment has already been experienced. I will certainly keep posting highlights, they are just likely to be infrequent.

Ironically given how I am a mega-grinch, one of my last acts at Walnut Bluff was to put up a big "Season's Readings" display in the library windows. At least I got a pun in.

Still confused

 We now have two large A-frame signs outside our front doors that patrons have to basically squeeze past to reach the doors themselves. The signs say "CLOSED. Curbside pickup only, call 1-800-WALNUT-BLUFF." Of course, people being people, they often squeeze past the signs and pull on the door handle, at which point our front door person (whose job is supposedly delivering curbside pickups as cars arrive) has to shout the information to them. Most people get it at that point. However, today I had a couple who were still confused. They asked me "What kind of appointments do you guys do?" and when I answered "You can come pick up books or movies or printouts!" they replied, "Wait, so you can't come inside and look at books?"

When I relayed this conversation to Children's Librarian, she said, "I think people have been spending too much time in their houses watching TV and they don't know how to interact with real people anymore. They're like 'This one is talking back to me when I talk to it! What am I supposed to do!?'"

Curbside Nos

 Things people want us to take into the building for them while we are closed and only doing curbside service:

-A 'donation' of two boxes of old magazines

-A mysterious envelope addressed to "Walnut Bluff Librarians"

-The book they bought to replace the one they lost ("Sorry, you need to put it in the book drop so it can be quarantined." "But I don't want to wait for it to be quarantined, I want you to take the fine off my account now!")

-Jars of homemade jam to give to the staff (Aw, how nice! But still no.)

-Used plastic bags ("You use bags to put people's books in for delivery. Why can't you use these ones!?")

'Donations'

A common problem at Walnut Bluff is people leaving bags and boxes of unwanted 'donations' in the dead of night. Right now we are having an argument about which is worse: the three boxes of ancient Civil War books left by the back door in which gloried Confederate generals featured prominently, or the two ripped plastic bags left by the front door of cassette tape cases (yes, you read that right, they were empty).

It's sort of a moot point, as both went straight into the trash.

Pig's name

 Patrons have to call or email us to make an appointment to pick their requests up via curbside service. Here's a recent conversation I had with one family, when the adult called to make a pickup appointment.

Me: Looks like we have 3 books ready for you.

Patron: Can you tell me: Are those all chapter books, or are some of them for little kids?

Me: I'm sorry, they're all chapter books; it looks like the early readers are still on their way. But if you have a younger kid at home, if you can tell me a little bit about them and what they like, we could pull some suggestions for you.

Patron: Oh, that would be great! He's four and he's reading level 1 or 2 readers. He likes Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, Blaze and the Monster Machines...

Little boy (in background): Boy books!

Patron: (to kid) Girl books are good, too. (to me) No 'girl books,'  but for some reason, Peppa is fine...

Little boy: Peppa isn't a girl's name!

Patron: It's not?

Little boy: No, Peppa is a pig's name!

Granite

 A patron described the color of their car as "granite" when making a curbside pickup appointment this week and it absolutely broke Chillest Coworker, who collapsed into horrified laughter. I don't know why this was the thing that finally got to him, but it was.

Curbside at Walnut Bluff

Colors patrons have told us their cars are:

-Bronze

-Champagne

-"A purplish blue, but it will look black." 

-"I say it is green but my husband says it is gray."

-"It's a really janky white Monte Cristo. You will know it when you see it."

Walnut Bluff residents' favorite activity: Calling us to make a curbside appointment and telling us they will come in Car A. Showing up for their appointment in Car B and being really mad that we don't telepathically know it's them and bring their stuff out.  Walnut Bluff residents' second favorite activity: Waiting in the parking lot without calling/texting to tell us they came in a different car, then shouting their information at us when we go out to bring out someone else's holds.

We have three signs on our front doors saying that our building is closed. Literally every day, I see multiple people come up, pause, read the signs, and THEN pull on the door handle to try to come in.

Reasons people park in the curbside pickup parking spots:

1. It's the shadiest spot in the parking lot

2. They are visiting the apartment complex across the street

3. They are cleaning their car/changing a flat tire/eating their lunch/making a phone call

4. They plan to get out and come inside the library

5. They are here for a curbside pickup

I definitely do NOT hit my head on the bike rack of a patron's car when I am closing their trunk. Nope, not even a little bit.

I find a 'curbside bingo' on the internet. The space that hits home the most is 'you and patron disagree on color of patron's car.'

Closure questions part 2

Things patrons want to know right now:

• I have a ton of zucchini from my garden and I thought the library staff might like them. Can I put them in the book drop for you?
• How late are you open today?...What do you MEAN I can't come into the building?
• But I've been holding on to these old magazines for you for MONTHS--are you SURE I can't just donate them? Don't worry, my house is very clean, I'm sure they are safe. They are great magazines, in perfect condition.
• Is there still storytime this Friday?
• Did you know that people were parking in the library parking lot while y'all were closed? I thought you should know that people were violating the law.
• I came by the library back in April to return my books, but the book return thingy was closed, so I just put my books on the top. Did you get them?
• Is the library going to never open again?

Curbside callousness

Like many public libraries, my library is not letting people into the building, but will let people come pick up their requested materials via curbside service. Our administration had the brilliant idea that we should get a service that allows patrons to text us when they are here for their pickup instead of calling. It's supposed to save us time because it forces the patron to go through a little back-and-forth to collect information before we even see their message. The phone number isn't on the website or anything, it's ONLY posted in the parking spots where patrons who are picking up their held materials are supposed to park for curbside service.

How the new text service is supposed to go:
Patron: Hi I'm here to get my books.
Chatbot: Welcome to [library system]'s curbside service! Text "book" to get started.
Patron: Book
Chatbot: What is your first and last name?
Patron: Ramona Quimby
Chatbot: What parking spot are you in?
Patron: Spot 1
At this point, on the staff side, we get a message saying:
Name: Ramona Quimby
Parking spot: Spot 1 

Them we trot cheerfully out to Ms Quimby, who is indeed actually parked in spot #1 and is even wearing a face mask and keeping her window rolled up, and has her trunk popped, and we drop her stuff in the trunk and close it and she drives away. Brilliant, right? Here's how the chatbot actually works. It turns out you can type in absolutely f-ing anything in response to the chatbot's questions, so lots of 'conversations' go like this:

Patron: why can't I come into the library to print?
Chatbot: Welcome to [library system]'s curbside service! Text "book" to get started.
Patron: i don't want a book, I want to get n the computer!
Chatbot: What is your first and last name?
Patron: cruella deville
Chatbot: What parking spot are you in?
Patron: why does tha mattter??? i just want to come in the library!
Staff member (who can only see: "Name: Cruella Deville. Parking spot:
why does tha mattter??? i just want to come in the library!"): Hi Ms. Deville. I'm sorry, but no one can come into the library right now. Did you need to pick up your requests?
Patron: no I need to get on a f-ing computer!!!!!!!!
Staff member: I'm sorry, but you can't do that right now. If you'd like to call us at [redacted], we might be able to help you find somewhere else than can help you with what you need.
Staff member: *bangs head on desk in frustration*

Open for your phone calls

This is a delayed post. We've all been sent home, but there was about a week where the library was closed to the public but staff were coming to work. We mostly worked on collection projects, cleaning, training, etc., but we were answering phones during open hours. Here's what people wanted to know:

Are you open? When are you going to be open again?

Is tax help still happening this week? What about next week?

I'm not going to come pick up my holds. Can you guys hold on to them a little bit longer or will I lose my place in line? 

I've been self-isolating at home and I cleaned out my house. I have a lot of books to donate. Can I bring them in? What if I just put them in the book return slot?

If I come sit by the front door and use your wifi, will you call the police?

Can I email you something to print, and you print it, and then I come to the door and you just hand it to me really quick?

From the last staff meeting

“But the bad things are so funny.”

And, a suggestion that we get a fake police uniform, since people who don’t listen to us listen to our security guard right away: “Spell ‘police’ with a ‘u’ and we’re not legally liable!”

More bad signs

Signs I have found in my library lately:

• "Children's Books on Tape"
• "NO bicycles or shopping carts in lobby"
• An emergency evacuation chart showing that our official safe meeting point is across the street next to a building that no longer exists.
• "Videos"
•  "DO NOT place anything in this area!!!"

And, most ominously, one by the front doors that just says "Pacemaker warning."

Every time you think you've seen it all

One of my least favorite parts of my job is checking the public bathrooms. I try really hard to visit and tidy both the men's and women's at least once every day. I've found toilet paper messes, graffiti, drug paraphernalia, and small floods, but until earlier this week, never had I found the top of the soap dispenser pried open and something barely visible submerged in the cheap pearly pink soap.

I got the tweezers out of our first aid kit to try to pry it out, just in case it was something awful, but the tweezers weren't quite big enough to grab it. A male colleague who is more blase than I am about touching things in the public bathrooms ("It's submerged in soap, I'm sure it's fine") stuck his fingers in there and, as soon as they brushed the object, confidently proclaimed: "This is a crummy disposable shaving razor. I know them well from my teenage years."

He was correct, although he and I couldn't agree on whether the razor was dropped into the soap by accident while someone was shaving, or if it was deliberately hidden/stored there for future use.

Helping the pros

I had a great phone call on the desk this week:
Patron: "Hi. I have kind of a weird question for you."
Me: "I'm happy to help, I am pretty sure it won't be the weirdest thing of my day."
Patron: "Are you familiar with the author Jonathan Safran Foer?...In your system, are his books under S for Safran or F for Foer?"
Me: "That's a great question. I think under F for Foer, let me check...yep. F for Foer."
The patron thanked me for that, and then asked me to check another author with two last names, this one a black woman. Unfortunately it wasn't someone I'd previously heard of and I can't remember it now, but she was also listed under the second of the two names. I told him that and he said: "Ha, excellent! I'm the co-owner of a new bookstore that is about to open, and my partner and I are arguing about this. I thought we could consult an expert!"

I laughed, felt pleased with the relevance of libraries, made a mental note to visit the bookstore, and said goodbye. About 5 minutes later, the phone rang again:
"Hello, was I just speaking to you? Can you check one more author for me? Carlos Ruiz Zafón?"
He was under R for Ruiz. And Gabriel García Márquez was under G. Huh.
The patron on the phone said, "My business partner is Hispanic, and he was the one saying it was the first of the names. He made me call back with different examples."

After a bit of research, we concluded that this seeming discrepancy is a deliberate standard: English-name authors are classified under the last of their surnames, while Spanish-name authors are classified under the first. Presumably, this is due to different cultural traditions, with multiple last names being the norm in Spanish but rare in English. The Chicago Manual of Style has a succinct but not particularly informative FAQ on it, but I also came across a bilingual picture book called Rene Has Two Last Names, which has hideous art but still warmed my politically-correct heart.

That caller and his bookstore co-owner are for sure patrons of the week. I look forward to visiting their store and reporting back on how it's organized!

Storytime (again)

We have a new children's librarian so I'm not longer doing storytime every week (hooray!) but I'm still her backup so I've been acting as her assistant the last few weeks so I can learn the routine if I need to fill in. Her storytimes are super-fun and I think she's doing a great job, but here are some of the concerns she brings to me:

"I introduced a frog puppet this week and I thought the kids weren't really into him, but when I put him away, a little girl started bawling and going 'but I wanted to touch him!!!' What should I have done?!"

"We were doing 'Herman the Worm.' In the original song he eats fruits but I thought the toddlers wouldn't know what lots of the fruits were so I did animals instead, and I guess I didn't think it through because I did a dog and a cat and a parent got mad at me for singing about pets being eaten."

"We were doing a song with animals and colors and we got to blue and I couldn't think of any blue animals, so I said 'blue cow' and then this week I asked the kids what color a cow is and one of them shouted 'blue!' I think I am a bad influence."

Real reference

I entered librarianship in the Google era, and I know I don't have the search chops of librarians who were doing this job when search engines weren't around to make things easier for the end user and the lazy/ignorant librarian. If I were to take a job in, say, the library of a graduate school, or a genealogy/local history collection, I know it would be a steep learning curve for me on the reference desk. I would not be very good at it when I started.

However, because of the availability of search engines and because of the kinds of libraries where I've mostly worked, I rarely get a reference question that challenges my limited skills. When someone comes in with real challenge, I experience 50% excitement, 50% fear that I'll need to slink into the back and get my Baby Boomer colleague, who started her career in The Good Old Days When Librarians Knew Things and There Wasn't All This Technology (seriously, she can find materials on any search topic, but somehow can't handle making edits to our shared Google Doc of collection development ideas?).

Anyway, one of our regular patrons is doing some kind of online college or advanced degree. He had to do what was basically a book report, and the book he did his report on was A Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel. It's a semi-popular history book about a free black woman who was abducted, sold into slavery, got free after the Civil War, and successfully sued her abductor for damages. It looks super-fascinating and like a great choice for a homework assignment. The problem was that he had an opportunity for extra credit, which apparently he needed, and the extra credit assignment seemed to assume that people had chosen books by older, more famous authors, because the first question was: What is the date of birth and place of birth of the author of your book?

W. Caleb McDaniel is a professor in the Rice University History Department, and is actually kind of famous as associate history professors go, which is...not all that famous. He's famous enough that a Google search brings up information about him for most of the first page results, but not like, famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page (not even a stub). History Guy (I'm calling this regular History Guy now since I don't know his real name) got a pretty good start on his own--he read Professor McDaniel's CV, found out where he went to college and what year he graduated, and was looking through digitized college yearbooks, trying to find the guy and see if his birthday was mentioned. Unfortunately, he wasn't having any luck, so he came up to the desk to ask for help.

I thought I'd post how I found it for other 'new' librarians like me, who might be impressed (I'm definitely not telling Baby Boomer colleague, though--it wasn't THAT good). It's also a nice little lesson on how horrifyingly easy it is to find out people's personal information.

Birthday:
I recognized the book and knew that my library owned it. I know that the records in our catalog include the author's year of birth, which I figured was a good starting point. I pulled it up in our catalog and looked at the MARC record, which looked kind of like this:
 
 Do I know what any of those field codes mean? No. Can I extract any meaning at all from 90% of the lines? No. BUT, like 100 does include the author's full first name and his birth year, as I recalled. I also noticed that it was followed by a link that included "loc.gov": http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2012048275.html. I didn't know exactly what that link was, but I recognized it as a Library of Congress link and figured that it was some kind of further information on the author. It is in fact the Library of Congress Name Authority File for McDaniel, which a) made me want to go back to school and take like 10 database classes, and b) contained McDaniel's full date of birth:




 Ta da!

Place of birth:
I was now armed with McDaniel's full first name, birthdate, and also the fact that he was described as a "Native Texan" in a couple of book talk/book signing blurbs about him on different bookstore websites. My library subscribes to Ancestry.com's Library Edition, which is supposed to be for genealogy but which has a lot of records about living people. I went into Ancestry and found that it had something called 'Texas, Birth Index, 1903-1997). A William C. McDaniel was born on August 2, 1979 in San Patricio County. How many can there be? I hope History Guy's professor was happy with the county and didn't demand the city instead.