Do you work here? (Part 2)

...no, this is what happens to you if you return your books late.

...no, but the librarians are all too afraid of conflict to ask me to come out from behind this desk.

...if my shift ended 15 minutes ago but I haven't been able to escape, is that a yes?

...technically, most of my work is actually accomplished over by the print release station.

...until the director figures out that I'm the author of our latest Google review, yes.

Why the library's electric bills are so high

1. Back corners of the stacks must be brightly-lit for safety

2. As long as the elevator exists, no one uses the stairs

3. Scanners. SO many scanners.

4. No matter how many times I ask them to, staff never turn off the front desk computers at night

5. The patron who comes in with his own power strip and charges two phones, a tablet, a laptop, and a mysterious device I have yet to identify.

Librarian low points (part 2)

• Seeing one of your problem patrons push his way in just as the library is closing (contributed by an anonymous commenter)
• Keeping an ugly, outdated book in your collection area because it's the only one you have.
• Using painstaking, by-hand labor to do something that should be done by printing technology that your library system is too cheap to pay for (coloring in a black-and-white printout, taping together multiple sheets of paper to make a poster, etc.)
• The first time someone says "You're a librarian? It must be so nice to get paid just to read books!" and you don't even bother to explain, you just say "Uh huh."
•  Labeling an office supply with your own name. You're one of Them now.

Librarian low points (part 1)

• Checking out a book just so you don't have to figure out how to reshelve it in a very full set of shelves.
• Bringing in your own bathroom soap from home
• Receiving your third pair of literary-themed socks
• Walking by that patron that is always taking their shoes off/sitting in the aisle/talking too loudly on the phone and, for once, just pretending to yourself that you didn't see them
• Having the dream where it's your evening shift and you can't go home until you get all the patrons to leave for the night, but more and more of them just keep coming in

Never send a librarian to do a page's job

(EDIT: Sorry the pictures are so tiny! I tried keeping the original size but they really mess up the site formatting!)

I can't remember if I mentioned that Mystery Library has a New Manager. New Manager is pretty cool but also lets me/wants me to do more things, so I've been just as busy as I was under Old Manager, who wasn't as good at managing but also shot my (work-making) ideas down on a regular basis.

New manager wants everybody to be doing things so that we all become empowered employees who love our jobs, or something like that. Accordingly, she came up with a bunch of smallish workflow changes and improvements and asked each staff person to work on one. Since the staff at Mystery Library isn't used to being allowed to do things and New Manager knows that, she started with baby steps. The task she gave me was this: She'd like us to do more pre-sorting of returned items before we take them out to shelve, and wants me to find a way to label our shelving carts to facilitate that.

Simple, right? Here's what she got...

I started by making a list of every single collection in our library and which shelving cart (out of the 6 we have) we currently sort them onto. My listed looked like this (sorry for the not great formatting--I've found that Blogger doesn't handle spreadsheets well):

Noticing that some of the carts had way more collections on them than others, I tinkered around with other possible distributions over the 6 carts that would be easier, and found an arrangement where no individual shelf would have to contain more than 2 distinct collections (this took a little while since I also had to account for the fact that some collections are much larger than others and thus need proportionally larger space). Then it occurred to me that since we shifted the collection around last year, some of the shelving cart groupings no longer match up well with how things are laid out on the floor, so if you take out one cart you might have to go to three or four different areas to shelve the materials on it. That seemed sub-optimal as well, so then I rearranged the groupings again to take into account the physical proximity, or lack thereof, of each collection. Of course, I couldn't completely go by that, since I still had to keep the size and number of each collection in mind as well.

I finally settled on the following distribution:

I emailed my proposed solution to New Manager, but New Manager worked the weekend and is off today, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what she says. It kind of reminds me, though, about how people joke that if you don't want to do a chore, you should do a really bad job, such a bad job that you will never be asked to do it again.

Self help

I finally got access to some decent analytical tools for the collection, so I can belatedly present:The most popular Dewey numbers at Mystery Library!

You'll notice they have more of a theme than at other libraries where I have worked.

1. 248 How to get your sh*t together, from an explicitly Christian perspective
2. 158 How to get your sh*t together, from an implicitly Christian perspective
3. 650 How to get your sh*t together by getting a job
4. 332 How to get your sh*t together by managing your money
5. 305 How to get your sh*t together as a black person 
6. 921 How other people got their sh*t together and you can too
7. 364 True crime--what will obviously happen to you if you don't get your sh*t together


Welcome to the (cowboy)bootstrap society, y'all.

Talking trash

Today it was again my turn to pick up trash around the library grounds. I did not find any cereal, but I did find:

• 32 cigarette butts
• An empty bottle of motor oil, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the auto repair shops on either side of us
• The label for a can of fat-free refried beans
• (Presumably) a can of refried beans, about 5 yards away from the above label
• Two of my nemesis' daily cigarillo packets, since no one picked up the trash yesterday
• A long lock from someone's extension, or so I like to think.
• The largest bottle of Smirnoff I've ever seen outside a liquor store (empty)

News sources

 How I get my news as a librarian:
1.  Patron gossip
2.  Reading newspaper headlines in the time between ordering my Saturday Librarian coffee at the coffee shop on my way to work and receiving said coffee
3.  Sharing the customer service desk with baby boomer coworkers who still have Yahoo! as their personal email provider
4.   Lastly, since I’m a public servant i.e. a parasite on god-fearing taxpayers, I am also obligated to get my news from the liberal media (i.e., NPR)

(Least) Favorite

Most favorite things about working at the central branch of a big public library system:
1. We have all the most obscure books
2. Not having to answer boring local history questions because we have a whole department for that
3. The two patrons waiting in line to print could be a person who is homeless, followed by the mayor of the city
4. Hearing patrons say variations of "Wow, this is a huge library!"
5. We have all the assistive technology, even if I struggle to advertise it well

Least favorite things about working at the central branch of a big public library system:
1. Having to decide whether something is pornography or not
2-5. Actually, all of these are about having to tolerate various weird smells.

Strip malls

What I wish West Side Library shared its strip mall with:
1. An office supply store (for regular envelopes, manila envelopes, resume paper, etc.)
2. A post office (for stamps, and for posting tax returns at 4:50 p.m. on April 14th)
3. A childcare center (of course, convincing patrons to use it instead of us would be another matter)

4. A cheap cafe (drink your coffee and brightly-colored energy drinks there, please, not at our computers!)

What West Side Library actually has in its strip mall:
1. A hair salon
2. A tax preparer
3. A taco place
4.A liquor store

To do list

Today I found a list with the heading "Library" in the recycling bin next to the printer. Here's what was on it:

• Budget
• Golden Corral locations
• Touchless car wash
• First pass on photos
• Backup to HD

Grr

Things patrons have told me lately that have made me (at least briefly) angry:

• That I don't understand what Microsoft Silverlight is
• That I was "just making excuses" for the local history librarian's failure to immediately return a phone call
• That I'm racist
• That they don't understand how many copies of pornographic trash (i.e., the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy) the library has to buy with taxpayer money
• That the library should be open until 9 p.m. on Fridays because "some people have to work"
• That I let other patrons be too loud in the library
• That a picture book about gender identity isn't appropriate for children
• That, no matter what I may claim to the contrary, they were just speaking to me on the phone

Titles

Different ways I have been addressed while on the reference desk:
"Ma'am"
"Miss"
"Sir"
"Lil' mama"
"Shawty"
"Girl"


For the record, any of these are preferable to "Do you work here?" and also to patrons who just raise their hands or wordlessly gesture me over as though I am a waiter.

Most valuable skills

I present, in rough order of importance, the five characteristics that contribute most to my effectiveness as a public library reference assistant:

1. Grew up after the average person stopped thinking a computer might blow up if you pressed the wrong key
2. Always sorry for everything
3. Spent a lot of time playing with Microsoft Paint as a child
4. Big, genuine smile
5. Ivy-league caliber undergraduate degree and 2/3 of the way through a master's of library science program

Things our patrons call the catalog computers

- The card catalog
- A library computer
-A non-internet computer
- "A little place where I can look up books"

Wish list

If I could choose five things all of our library patrons could magically know, they would be:
1. How to attach a document to an email
2. What their PIN to log on to the computers is
3. That the public library doesn't carry current textbooks
4. That our branch is NOT the other, bigger branch that starts with the same letter
5. Where to go to release a print job

But then, I guess, what would I do all day?

Top tens

Following Love the Liberry's Dewey's Top 10 Call #'s I've Memorized, and other great Top Tens:

Dewey's Top 10 (Non-Fiction) Call #'s I've Memorized

1. 373 GED
2. 346 Do-it-yourself legal guides
3. 332 Crackpot get rich quick books
4. 741 Drawing and comics
5. 220 Bible and Biblical interpretation
6. 796 WWE/wrestling
7. 422 English dictionaries
9. 567 Dinosaurs
8. 746 Knitting
10. 597 Sharks


Top 10 reasons why people hate the library staff:

1. The computer logged me out and I hadn't saved my work
2. You have to be 8 years old to play the Wii
3. No eating in the library
4. The library internet is slow
5. We won't look up your library card number for you
6. No open-topped pop containers in the library
7. We will have to get that title sent over from another branch
8. The copier only copies one page at a time
9. We will not give you an infinite number and variety of free office supplies
10. An interlibrary loan costs $2.50


The top 10 types of items most likely to be "missing":
1. Antowne Fisher
2. Anything to do with the WWE
3. Junior DVDs of all kinds
4. Horror movies
5. Country CDs
6. SAT/ACT prep books
7. Any TV series popular with educated 20-somethings
8. Manga graphic novels
9. Paperback 'historical' romance novels
10. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Ask not what your library can do for you...

Just kidding. Totally ask that.

But also, this blog presents: Things that you can do for your local public library for almost no effort or money:

-Donate the recent bestseller you bought to the library collection as soon as you finish it. I guarantee you the waiting list for the library’s copies are is at least a month long.

-If your library has a place to provide feedback, take five minutes to actually tell them what they need to improve. Actively collecting user input costs staff time and is a difficult process. You are saving the staff a lot of effort.

-If they gave you a cheap pair of ear buds on your last flight or you picked up a free flash drive at a trade show, bring it to the library. A single pair of headphones or a flash drive for someone who doesn’t have one can prevent a huge patron meltdown, but most libraries can’t afford to give them out unless the supplies are donated.

-Write a book or movie review for your library’s review blog, if it has one (if it’s a big library it probably does). It’s a struggle for the diversity of the staff’s reading taste to match the diversity of the community’s reading tastes, so new contributors are almost always welcomed.

-Take that pile of books you are planning to resell to a bookstore for 5% of their original price to the library instead. Their Friends of the Library will sell them at a book sale (probably for 5% of their original value) to raise money for the library.

-If you read and write a language other than English, ask a library staff member if it’d be useful to them for you to spend an hour translating some of their signs into that language.

-Bring the pile of superfluous pens and pencils cluttering up your drawers to the library. The information desk probably gives out writing implements, and if no one donates them either the library has to stop making them available or money to buy them comes out of budgets for actually interesting things like books, movies, and library programs.

-Go to the library and get a library card, even if you have a home internet connection and a book-buying budget so you’re not sure how often you’ll use it. Statistics about membership and visits are the most powerful weapons libraries have in the battle to get funding from the city or county governments that oversee them.