Library Time

My first day of work at the library went great! When I came in I talked with my supervisor for about half an hour about the kinds of things that I will be doing over the course of the semester. Then she took me around to all the different departments and introduced me to most of the staff. I was already familiar with the layout since this is my local public library and I have been there many times. My supervisor and all of the other people that I met were all very nice. One person that I met in the circulation department remembered me from my interview with him for a library assistant position in May 2006 (A job I didn't get, by the way).

Most of my work will be done in the cataloging department. I bonded with one of the people that I will be working most closely with over baking, coffee, and, of all things, dolmas. I jumped right into my first project, which is creating records for a large number of DVDs that have been purchased for the new library branch that will be opening sometime this year. The cataloger is so busy with new books that I think she was thrilled to have someone start work on all these DVDs. It was pretty slow-going for me since I hadn't used that computer program before, but by the end of my shift I was getting better.

I am not an organized person when it comes to my personal space. I love having things be orderly, I'm just usually not all that willing to put forth the effort required to get them that way. However, I'm totally the opposite when it comes to organizing things on computers. I spend lots of time making folders for all of my files and photos so I know exactly where they are. I love organizing the bookmarks on my Internet browsers too. I hate having huge single column lists of bookmarks that go on for pages. It drives me nuts when I see the bookmark list on my parents' computer because their bookmark list has almost no folders and goes on forever. How are you supposed to find anything if you do it that way? So the work I did yesterday was right up my alley. It's all about documenting things so that people can find them from a variety of access points. And I think I've told you all how freaky I am with documenting my own DVD collection, this was like a whole new collection to play with! The 4 hours flew by, which is a good sign. If day one is any indication, maybe I'm onto something here. Day 2 is tomorrow night, hopefully I won't get stranded by the winter precipitation that they are saying may hit. Although there are a lot of worse places to be stuck than in a library.