Tough concept

Man on cell phone: "Hello...I'm in the library." (pause) (raising his voice) "I said I'm in the library!"

Today

A new patron laughs so loudly that it echoes and then says, "Sorry! This is a library."

A high school kid with no library card and absolutely no ID on him wants to get on the computer, and I have to tell him no (he was in yesterday, too, and they let him on without it but told him it'd just be that one time). I suggest a bunch of options--expired ID? Friend with a library card? Can you call someone and get them to read you their card number over the phone?--but nothing works. I am already feeling guilty because he accepted the "no" so politely and graciously, and then I see him playing with a stranger's two-year-old and keeping her entertained while his mom does something important on a computer. Dang.

Someone insists on showing me all the places on her arm she got injections when she was recently in the hospital.

Do you fax here? For free!? Dang!

Do you have tax forms yet?

Does the library offer driver's ed classes?

Over the course of the day, I tell like 5 different patrons about our upcoming English classes in very broken Spanish.

I try to shelve some DVDs but I don't even get one shelf of my cart emptied in an hour, I get interrupted so often by patron questions. We've having lots of computer problems today.

Special visitors

One of my favorite patrons I helped today was a woman who came in to sign her middle-school aged daughter up for a library card. The daughter wasn't with her, but she had her school ID. The patron told me that her daughter was special and came to the library every week as part of a program, and the people in the program had told her (the patron) that it would be good for her (the daughter) to have her own library card. I could tell from the way she said "special" and the fact that the daughter came to the library as part of a program that the daughter had some kind of cognitive impairment, so I wasn't surprised to see a girl with the newly-issued card come in later today as part of a regular group of visitors--several kids who seem to be on the autism spectrum and a few adults. It was fun checking out a book to her on her new card, even though we had a brief scare where it seemed she might have already lost the card (she and one of her adults found it on the floor of the children's area).

I love seeing kids on the spectrum for a few reasons, but one is that patron interactions with neurotypical patrons can get kind of repetitive, but you never know what a kid on the spectrum might like to talk to you about. The highlight today was a kid who spent our whole transaction telling me about his plans to ride to different stations on our local light rail line, and, when prompted to thank me, shouted "Thank you, commuter!"

Other reasons I especially like seeing kids who are on the spectrum in the library:

1. I like getting to participate in teaching interactions. The adults are often using the opportunity to have the kid practice navigating common commercial social situations, and it is fun to play along with them and help out by being a bit more direct and exaggerated than I would be with another kid the same age.

2. The public library is one of the few institutions around to support people on the spectrum that they don't have to worry about aging out of or otherwise being disqualified from. I've heard--from patrons, teachers, and from a speech therapist friend (technically she is a speech and language pathologist but I don't know if people know what that is) who works with a lot of kids on the spectrum--that lots of help for people drops off between ages 16 and 21, and there is a lot less support in place for adults. However, I do see independent adults who obviously have cognitive disabilities of various kinds and use the library on a regular basis, and I really enjoy getting to see the foundation of that being set.

3. Invariably, the adults with those kids, despite how hard they are working, are always super nice and polite.

Truants

Me and the Teen librarian, playing Good Cop, Bad Cop with the high school kids hanging out in the library at 11 a.m. on a weekday:

Teen Librarian: See that woman over there? She is in charge of the library today and she says that we should make you leave since you are not supposed to be in the library instead of at school. But I told her that I was sure you would be really quiet and polite, and she said that as long as I was right you guys could stay.

Disobedience

My boss is on vacation and I am taking joy in departing from a few of her policies that I most dislike, #1 being: You can't leave the desk unattended. This means that patrons have to wait for help until your counterpart returns or you can call someone from the back to interrupt whatever they are doing and stand at your computer. In some libraries I think this would be a reasonable rule (we do have the cash drawer here, after all) but in mine, the desk is standing-height and projects out from the staff area, a doorway from which is the only way to enter the behind-the-desk space. The staff area is separated from the public area with a badge-swipe lock. So a patron who wanted to get behind the desk would have to vault over it.

Not that that would never happen, just that it doesn't seem reasonable to base constant policy on a rare event.

What do you revel in doing at your library when your boss/manger/the director is away?

Overheard at a back table

Female patron: I'm a little more rude to them over there than I am here.
Male patron: Why?
Female patron: Because they're bitches!

Ethics emergency

I'm currently at the desk watching a patron flagrantly copy a whole academic text using the library's document scanner. I went and spoke to him about it once and reminded him that he had pressed "accept" to a screen explaining copyright law and stating that he would follow it, but I was brought up short by the fact that the book he was copying wasn't something from our collection. I had been planning a spiel trying to get him to borrow the book instead, but obviously that isn't going to work.

I suppose I could kick him out of the library for the day because he is violating the library's code of conduct (which says you must obey all laws), but the enforcement culture at Mystery Library is definitely on the relaxed side and my boss isn't here to ask. The only way to stop him short of that is to power off or unplug the machine right in front of him, and that's awfully confrontational.

I know we have some academic librarian readers who probably deal with this kind of stuff all the time. How do you handle it, and, also, how do you wish it would be handled?

UPDATE: The scanner was overwhelmed because it's not designed to capture 200 images at a time, and it froze! Ultimate justice! He wanted "help" with the problem, and when I told him the situation he A) complained that he flagrantly violates copyright all the time at Other Branch and that never happens there and B) said in an aggrieved tone of voice that since I wasn't offering him any other options he guessed he'd let me restart the machine, but he wasn't going to start over all his "work."

Actual professional advice

Continuing this blog's trademark mix of 70% silliness, 20% thoughts about how to be a good librarian, and 10% moral conundrums ("conundra"?), today we'll be talking about something from the middle slice. And by "we" I mean me, unless the commenters are super-active for some reason.


Today I spent a couple of hours doing marketing and unannounced outreach in our library's neighborhood and I can resist taking the opportunity to evangelize about it. As far as I know my library has never done this, but it seemed like a common sense idea and I figured out a way to suggest it to my boss that made it hard for her to say no.


It took 2 hours of my time (basically all the prep I needed to do, I did on desk), which is about 40 dollars of the library's money. I drove my own car, so I guess I donated a bit of gas money, but it was more than repaid by getting to listen to the radio and see the sunshine while I was on the clock. In the course of my 2 hours, I talked to 8 or 10 people, discovered 3 Little Free Libraries that my library didn't know about, and got contact information and warm handshakes from 2 different people at places I really want the library to do more with: the YWCA and a nearby community college. I also made a promise to return to the Habitat for Humanity office near us later in the week to deliver some donated books to beef up the little collection they have in their lobby, which will be another opportunity to talk up the library to them. I can't remember the last time I spent 2 hours more productively.


If you think you might like to do this, here's how it worked for me:


I made a list of community institutions in our neighborhood (rec centers, nonprofits, churches, a local community college, etc.). Then I plotted their addresses on a custom Google map. That part is really easy--you just create a blank one and copy and paste the addresses to drop pins.


Then I printed copies of flyers for our biggest-ticket programs that are coming up: a job fair and some English as a second language and GED classes. I took my stack of flyers, a clipboard with my map stuck to it, a pen, a roll of tape, and some tacks, and started driving around.


At each place I walked in, explained who I was, showed them the flyers, and asked if they had a public information area where I could tack up a couple. The only place that said no where I actually managed to speak to someone (some of the places I visited were closed) was a community clinic that simply didn't have a spot for local information where the flyers could go. If the person I talked to expressed any interest, I'd start talking to them about the library and the other stuff we offer, and offer to take their email address to send them digital copies of the flyers and a copy of our monthly program calendar. I also offered to leave my own contact information in case there was anything the library could do for them (I just had to scribble it down on a post-it note--this being Mystery Library, we don't have business cards, but maybe I'll ask if I can print my own little in-house ones for future use).


After I got back to the car, I made a note of the name of anyone I'd met, anything interesting I learned about the place that I didn't already know (for example, the Y has a clinic in it, so maybe I should invite them to the healthcare resource fair we have coming up in the spring), and any follow-up I needed to do.


I should say that this really took 3 hours of time, because once I got back I spent a whole hour organizing information and sending follow-up emails, but I still think it was a pretty good deal.


Things I might do differently next time:

• Find out when the heck churches are usually open: Most of the ones I visited mid-day on a Wednesday were closed. I thought about devoting a Sunday morning to this, but would all the church workers be too busy to talk to me then? Further research needed for sure.
• Figure out a way to have my contact information ready: As I said, we don't have business cards, so I didn't have a quick and professional-seeming way to leave my name and email address for places that wanted it.
• Bring more flyers: I was expecting that most places that took flyers would take one copy of each to put up on a bulletin board, but most of the places that accepted them wanted a whole pile to hand out.
• Find a smaller box of tacks!: They are a pain to carry around and I didn't ever have to use them, plus I was really afraid I'd drop them in someone's lobby and then have to spend several embarrassing minutes picking them up one by one.

Management update

I now have a suspect for who "Management" is and I was sad to find out he is a regular, the one with the great Christmas sweater. He came to report to me that another regular, who is quite hostile and eccentric, had turned one of the armchairs 90-degrees from its usual position. I appreciate that he cares about the library, but getting that lady to calm down and not move furniture around is a losing battle.


Also in the library today:


An adult who wants Amelia Bedelia books for her own reading pleasure


An adorable little boy with some kind of light-up toy who checks on me every few minutes while I'm shelving in order to show it to me again


A woman who doesn't understand when she is in her Yahoo! email app on her phone versus when she is just on her phone


A teacher from the school down the street who pronounces that every cool library feature I tell her about is "dope"


A guy who waves at me and I come over to see what he needs, and he says "Sorry, just waving hello!"