Congrats and Notes

Happy Birthday to my sister, D! (Aug 8)

Congratulations to Stephanie and family on the arrival of Alex! (born Aug 7)

A huge CONGRATULATIONS to my parents on their 35th anniversary! (Aug 5)

Congratulations to Megan & Kc! (Married Aug 4)

Happy Birthday to my cousin, Christy! (Aug 3)

MG started working at the library on Monday.

Monday was taking care of paperwork, IDs, basic computer access, and a lot of general training (circulation policies, etc). Having worked in libraries previously, she is actually familiar with the major pieces of software we are using. So we could skip stuff like "How to check out a book"--she knows the buttons to push, we just talked about what we require in the way of ID, who has privileges, our fines and fees policies, etc. We did give her a brief overview of some of the home-grown databases we use. We put her on scanning book barcodes at the end of the day--partly so we could get some work done, partly so she could have a break from just having information thrown at her, and partly so she could get familiar with the collection. Assuming we get all the barcodes scanned, we'll use the data for an inventory check.

Tuesday she spent most of the day with SS and AC. With SS, she walked through placing an order (with pulling book requests from our database of requests, deciding where to buy them, updating the request records to show they were ordered, etc). With AC, she helped with receiving periodicals.

Today, I'd given SS the day off to pack and go to get some dental work done. AC ended up not coming in today, as her sister had her baby last night and she (AC) was needed at home. I'd told her before hand that would be fine. That left MG and I to tend to the library by ourselves. I was a few minutes late to work, but MG had the library open. Her biggest problem was that we hadn't given her the passwords yet for the circulation computer, so she couldn't log in. I HAD to get the User Guide finished today for the new student packets admissions puts together. After I had finished making the corrections that SS had marked last night and while I finished working on the formatting, I had MG proofread it one last time. Hopefully it'll be good! I gave the originals to the mailroom to make the copies (they have a high-speed copier for these larger jobs). MG spent some of the morning reading through the Circulation Desk Manual to get familiar with library procedures and some policies, but most of her morning was spent in a technology training session being done by I.T. for all the recent hires. After lunch, the mailroom had finished the copies, so we stapled and folded the User Guides and got them up to admissions. We also pulled out the plans for the library expansion and talked about them. Then I put her on the project of checking the E-Resources links. After she'd gone through the list, I showed her how to make the edits in the database that updates the website, so she can do that part as well. It's the first time that anyone other than myself has updated links for the website!! (Aside from one emergency exception--while I was on vacation, it was discovered that a Russian history site I'd link to had been turned into an adult website.)

In between all the training this week, I've been trying to get other documents updated and prepare for the orientation sessions next week--faculty and new students. SS expects to be back tomorrow and Friday is her last day. I haven't heard from AC whether she expects to be gone more than one day.

Harry Potter update: BOOK: Today, the number of requests for the book fell below 100 (313 was the high the morning the book was released)--it is now down to 89. And at least 60 of those have or will have by Friday, a copy of the book waiting for them at the library. CASSETTE: Have patience if you want to listen to the book on cassette! Only 4 people (since it was released) have checked out a copy of the cassette from LCPL. CD: There are more copies and they are circulating faster than the cassette--but you'll still need a lot of patience, as the list for the CD has more than twice the number of people as the list for the cassette!