Building A Collection

Date: October 13th 

Time: 9am-1pm

Mondays are my designated reference desk days, which I do enjoy the most. The first hour of my shift I went through all of the books in my section, which is JUV 700-900s. It has taken me about 4 shifts and about 10 hours total to get through it, and honestly by the end I was starting to see patterns in what gets checked out versus what just sits there gathering dust. The 700s (arts and recreation) tend to circulate pretty well—drawing books, crafts, sports—but some of the 900s (history and geography) can be hit or miss depending on how visually engaging they are or whether they tie into what kids are learning in school. I found myself making judgment calls on books that technically met the weeding criteria but felt like they still had value, which is where the job gets less mechanical and more about understanding what the community actually uses.

The second part of my day was helping patrons and going through the new magazines that the library gets each month, such as Bookpage, to see which books we should order for the library. Flipping through these review magazines is interesting because you're essentially predicting what will be popular months before the books even hit shelves—you're looking at starred reviews, considering what gaps exist in the collection, and weighing whether a hyped title will actually circulate or just sit on the new arrivals shelf. I have noticed most of the time with these demographics of people, they tend to want more help with tech services such as computer usage and printing. It's rarely about complicated issues either, usually it's navigating a website, attaching a document to an email, or figuring out why the printer isn't responding. Most of the patrons are regulars and they know how to find and check out books themselves, which makes the reference work more about being a troubleshooting resource than a traditional librarian helping with research questions. There's a comfort level that develops with regulars where they'll just wave you over when something's not working rather than formally approaching the desk.