Day Five

Today seemed to go by incredibly fast!  First thing this morning, Laurie asked me to sit in on a staff meeting.  I found it very interesting.  They talked about everything from a new swipe card system that is being implemented to replace a time sheet as the way to document hours worked, to DPL politics, to security policies in the case of a mass shooting.  I found the last one a bit scary to think about, but especially in today's society, and in a big city like Detroit, it is something that everyone has to be conscious of.

After the meeting, Laurie and I sat down and scheduled out my shifts for the next month or so, just to have an idea of when I am going to be working.  I will be spending Tuesdays and every other Thursday at the Douglass Branch now, and on the Thursdays that I am not at the Douglass Branch I will be working in the HYPE center at the Main Branch.  My Fridays will alternate between the Douglass Branch and the Children's Library at the main branch, so I will definitely be kept busy.  Laurie and I also talked about my project, and she gave me some materials to look over in order to better ascertain potential recipients of the letter/flyer highlighting the services that the Douglass Branch offers, and also what information to put into the letter and flyer.  The Fridays that I spend at the Douglass Branch will mostly be devoted to that.

After that, I headed out to the reference desk.  Aaron, the librarian, was on the phone with a patron, and so while he was busy, I aided a couple of patrons who had questions. It felt good for me to be able to help the public, and I really enjoy doing it, even if it's something as simple as helping a patron log in to the computer.

I finished off the day by working on more subject headings for Dori.  I had to edit some of my previous entries, because I did not know that certain subject headings existed, such as "Teen Angst" which worked best for some of the Young Adult books.  You see, these subject headings aren't based on Dewey or anything, they're just any subject the librarian could think of at the time they were implemented.  "Danielle Steel" is a subject heading.  So I'm finding it increasingly difficult to make sure I exhaust all possible options when it comes to picking subjects for each book.  There are still probably some subjects I don't know exist.  I just found out today there is a subject heading for "South American Fiction" (I was working on the Spanish Language titles).

Tomorrow I will be observing and participating in another storytime at the Children's Library at the Main Branch, and hopefully will be meeting with the librarians at HYPE so that I can start spending some time there, as well.