Date: September 15th
Time: 10am-6pm
My day was split into 2 parts working under the supervision of Kelly. The first part was working reference and handling all of the questions on my own with Kelly watching me, of course. Most of the questions we get primarily have to do with tech, such as helping patrons print or log onto the computers. The second thing is helping people find books, and for the most part they've been very nice and patient if there's something we don't have in stock. What surprised me was how much troubleshooting becomes second nature after a while, you start recognizing the same printer errors or login issues before patrons even finish explaining the problem.
The second part of the day, which was shown in the image, was picking out more books for the Juvenile section. I had to do a lot of discarding with older books that were either torn up or hadn't been checked out in years. My requirements were to find a series of books from age 6-12, at least 4 books in the series, and no more than 3 years old. This was harder than I thought because most of the popular series we already have in stock. I found myself going down rabbit holes on publisher websites and Goodreads, trying to figure out which newer series had actually gained traction with kids versus which ones just had good marketing. It's interesting how much strategy goes into collection development, you're essentially trying to predict what will resonate with young readers while also filling gaps in representation and genres. I ended up discovering a few series I'd never heard of that had surprisingly enthusiastic reviews, which made me realize how much great children's literature flies under the radar if you're not actively looking for it.
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