A Day In The Life

Of A Rural Librarian

This Kat wears a lot of hats. Not a cool striped hat like that Seuss Cat. They are more metaphorical hats, without physical substance, and I thought I would give you a look at my "hat" collection on a typical Tuesday.

My official job title is a "circulation specialist." I like that it has the word "special" in the title, that's nice. In reality, I don't get to do just "circ", especially on Tuesdays.

Here we go:

Our town has about 2,000 souls inhabiting it, so unfortunately we don't have the longest opening hours I've ever seen, and are only open from 1-6 p.m. on Tuesdays. However, we have story-time at 10:30 a.m. This interactive story, song, dance, craft, and playtime extravaganza for infants to 5 year old kids is ran by a Youth Services librarian from a neighboring library. She is quite possibly the most amazing person that I have ever met! YS people really get put through the ringer, and if you want to express gratitude to a librarian, send it their direction!

The terrors that the story time rug has seen! Mainly in the form of crushed goldfish and animal crackers...

Anyhow, I'm our branch's representative during this time, and busily help her facilitate the class while simultaneously helping the parents check out books, run through opening procedures and reports, empty the drop box, check in the drop-box, give people the bathroom key a few hundred times, and get the courier bins ready to head north, as we also have two deliveries of holds on Tuesdays. I then get to help set out the toys for "Stay and Play":

This all happens from 10am-12pm.

After helping Miss M clean up the storytime detritus, I move on to actually opening the library. You do not just get to unlock the door. There are databases to back up, holds to pull, random sticky note mysteries to solve, email requests for you to, "Please, please run another gardening program for us!", and so on. By the time I acutally open the door at 1pm I need at least my 15th cup of tea.

One of the "mysteries." I still don't know why this plant was in the sink.

Then courier arrives. Well, there was a snow storm yesterday, so I engaged in some book surgery before his appearance. Anyway, our library network has an excellent courier system that delivers all of the holds our patrons place multiple times a week. People love that they can sit at home, login to the library website, and order the book, dvd, audiobook, or manga graphic novel that they desire. I love the courier delivery because it allows me some time to hide in the back, alphabetize things, harass local people I know with phone calls if they refuse to list their email address for holds notification, and peruse all of the beautiful items that show up in the bins and bags for delivery to our patrons, er members. That's right, we are to call them members now. More inclusive.

There's nothing peculiar about what happened to this "Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children." I spend a lot of my mending time re-gluing bindings.

I usually have to hurry to get batch one of the courier delivery done, as I am also supposed to assist our YS person, Miss M with the after school program. We are located right next door to our town's only elementary school. Every day at 3:05 we prepare ourselves for the onslaught of backpacks, phone usage requests, the bathroom key queue kids, and what I like to call the "Line of Imminent Doom." That line would be the gaggle of young people that I have to wade through to get to the meeting room that Miss M and I have the after-school program in. This week's program: Book Bingo.

Now, it is getting close to Spring Break, and Miss M and I are getting a little bit burnt out, especially of bingo. So we decided to let the kids facilitate it, and you know what? They had an absolute blast! Usually, Miss M calls the numbers out, and I write them on the white board, kind of like a redneck Vanna White. I tend to wear jeans and cowboy boots on Tuesdays, because I run around a lot. Also, you never know, a horse could show up in the parking lot that needs wrangled (This has occurred.). This bingo time we let the kids take turn calling and writing out the numbers as the others played their cards. The cutest thing ever is seeing a whole room of rambunctious kiddos under the complete command of a kindergartner!

After a speedy bingo cleanup, It's time for courier delivery two for the day. He was running late yesterday because nature forgot that it's almost Spring and proceeded to dump a snowstorm on us. That was okay by me, because I had a whole shelve of In Processing to do. That's just librarian speak for readying the new items we get in for patron checkout. A lot of the hard work is now done at the Mother-ship, er, the main library branch of our network. My part of it revolves around some taping, contact-papering soft-covers, and other things unique to our library's collection items. Before I knew it, it was five o'clock and I was out of there for the day!

So yes, I do not get to sit around and read books and shush people all day, and you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way!

And as always, all of the images in this post were taken by the author, on her book glue covered iPhone.