TwentySevenLetters / B

Trick or Treat!

Happy Halloween.

We had maybe 9 or 10 kids trick-or-treating at the library. Who T-or-Ts at the library?? It's not like we had any signs up, or advertised, or anything. We gave no indication that the library would be a fruitful place for panhandling. We had some junk very valuable and cool stuff leftover from the summer reading program--mini-notebooks and pencils and crap like that.

A group of three girls came in, around 8 or 9 years old, I think (sans parents, of course). They came all the way upstairs to the children's room and gave their "Trick or Treat!" cry and held out their bags expectantly. I sized them up and started to move for the bag of crap when one said "come on, good candy!"

"Sorry, no candy," I told them. I pulled out three of the mini-notebooks and some pencils. "You can have these, though."

Good Candy Girl looked at hers and said "Pink? I hate pink! I don't want pink!"

"So give it back and another kid will take it instead," I told her.

"What do I get instead?"

"Nothing. You get what's in your hand, or nothing."

She took the pink notebook and stuffed it in her pillowcase. But really--what the hell? When I see her again, I likely will give her a much stiffer lecture on manners (as a librarian, I think I'm professionally obligated to do those sorts of stodgy things).

But just as a matter of further boggle: who trick-or-treats at the library??

A hundred small fires

I’m alone in the Children’s room today. Well, alone in staffing terms—my co-worker has taken today off. For a while, I wasn’t bothered. It was unusually slow this afternoon, so I was getting through some minor projects that had piled up: typing new spine labels to replace ones that had faded or were just wrong, replacing the plastic jacket covers on books whose covers had torn, repairing loose book hinges, that sort of thing. Keeping busy in a low-profile way.

At 4:30, the tranquility ended. At 4:30, the room went nuts.

In the space of only a few minutes, I went from having a small handful of very quiet kids amusing themselves to a couple of our needier young patrons, parents and children with questions, reports, reader advisory, circulation… I managed to hand the primary Needy Child off to a volunteer worker, but I still had to deal with the rest.

It reminds me a bit of the Christmas rush, from my days of working retail at the mall. When suddenly there are five or six people who all want your attention and all think their request is the most important, and you’re left to prioritize. On some level, I always enjoyed the craziness—better to be busy than bored, and the juggling just makes it more of a challenge. It’s hard to come off that rush; when the room suddenly dies down, it’s hard to stop moving so quickly. It’s hard not to feel frantic anymore.

Today? Today was A Day. It started with a patron on the phone going through a list of titles: “Do you have this? Or this? Or this? Don’t you have anything?” I had the same thing a little later from another patron, though this one was in front of me. I think they were both working from the same list (the Rhode Island Children’s Book Awards), but since the list came out, what copies we had have been checked out. The rest of the list is on order, but I can’t magically make them appear, or rush them through cataloging in the next eight seconds. It does seem, though, like I was expected to.

This evening brought another Needy Child, another one who’s just a pain. I hate to say it, but she’s very demanding and knows exactly what she wants—except that she doesn’t. There’s a book I read, and I want to check it out again, and the cover was blue. That’s all I remember. I’ll be sitting over there when you find it. Uh… no. Do you have books on costumes? Yes, they’re right here. Do you have other books on costumes? No, just what I gave you. But I want something else! I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I want stories about cats and mice. And they have to come from over here. And you can bring them to me when you find them.

Someone from the Y came by to say that she’d like to bring a group of 12 or so kids in every week on Friday afternoons. I explained that we only have one staff member here in the Children’s room on Fridays, and is there any other day that would work for their schedule? I might have bumped her to Tuesdays, but I’m not really sure.

And the elevator repairman came by to fish the master set of keys out of the elevator shaft, where they’d been accidentally dropped last night. While he was here, he took a ride up to the second floor, then cheerfully informed us that, yes, it does need a new part, but it’s perfectly safe—even though it shudders and makes that grinding noise at the top.

I have a three-day weekend starting in half an hour. I don’t think I’ve ever been so ready for it.

Updates galore

The weeding project is finished, with about a third of the collection purged. I learned several things from the experience: first, that weeding fiction is far easier than non-fiction; second, it’s a lot more work than you’d expect; and third, even the shelf-sitters circulate better than they’re not jammed in with other books.

The YA Non-fiction collection is a strange mix of useful and not useful, things we can’t throw away and things we wouldn’t want to. I did move a couple of poetry novels (like Keesha’s House) into the fiction collection, where nearly everyone else in the state has them. (Actually, I left one copy in the non-fiction, moved one to fiction, and one to storage.) I tossed a teen etiquette guide that contained a long section on how to behave at formal dinners—not wedding-formal, mind you, but things like dining with high-ranking politicians and royals. This library is in an upper-class neighborhood, but it’s not that upper class.

Where I really ran into problems, though, was weeding the collection of mental health and sexuality books. Sure, most of the books about depression, STDs, pregnancy, and the like haven’t been checked out in years. But they’re mixed into celebrity biographies, psychology, writing, college guides… I’m guessing that the books are getting a lot of in-house use, but the teens who are using them don’t want to bring them home. Which is understandable. I still threw away the more dated books—the ones talking about Sue and John necking and petting, puberty books that still mention belts, those sorts of things—and kept anything that looked like it would still be useful. I’ve ordered some new books on teen depression, manners, and sexuality, and when those come in, I’ll ditch some of the older books that still sit there.

As for the shelf-sitters: there were some books that only just barely squeaked into the “saved” category and returned to the shelf. And since then, those titles (some of them, anyway) have gone out a few more times, a definite uptick in their popularity. My only thought is that suddenly people can see them, and therefore want them. Also, people take a bunch of shelf-sitters every time I do some shifting, so there’s that at work, too. I guess they just look newer than they really are.

In other news, my circulation numbers sank for September, as compared with their growth over the past eight months or so. This doesn’t really surprise me, as school started, summer reading ended, and everyone has a little less time to spend on pleasure-reading. Children’s non-fiction circulation rose as school has gotten underway, so it’s not like all the patrons have just vanished.

The thousand dollars in Friends’ money has been spent (or at least mostly): in addition to the $330 I spent at SPX, the other $670 worth of orders was submitted downtown last week. I have another $400 in orders just sitting in the back, and that’s where I have some new non-fiction (Yoga! Puberty! Mental health! Memoir!), new hardcover fiction, paperback series, and the like. I’ll send that along in the next couple of weeks (can’t submit too much at once, or they get a little freaky on me, even if it is from different funds), and that will be officially submitted a few weeks after that.

At least three of the books I sent downtown for processing after SPX—Owly, Bone Sharps, and King—are now in the system from other libraries. Our cataloging department hasn’t returned them yet, but at least those titles should go a little faster now. I sort of with I’d held onto them to do them myself… but how was I to know? (And Bone Sharps already has a hold on it, though not through my library. Who knows when we’ll get our copy back.)

I think that’s everything. If I missed something and you’re dying to know how it turned out, drop an email and remind me! I'll put it in my next update.

Young young adult audiences

I have no teen audience.

This means that my teen programs—speakers, workshops, active programs involving computer games and food, passive programs that give prizes if someone turns things in!—have a pretty reliable attendance rate of zero. This is disheartening, because how can I build my audience if nobody comes to my programs? And with Teen Read Week upon us, how can I not do anything? I spend most of my time upstairs in the children’s room, so I don’t really see the teens much.

But I realized something at the end of last week: I have no teen audience and I almost never see the kids once they’ve “aged out” of the children’s room, but I do have a core group up here. I feel like a bit of a jerk that I’ve never noticed them before, because they’re a little younger than I’ve been looking for. Instead of high-schoolers, they’re almost all middle-schoolers. I’ve been actively seeking 14-year-olds, and never noticed that I have five or six eleven- and twelve-year-olds who hang around here all the time.

Next year, these will be the kids I can solicit to join my programs. I can poll them to see what they want to do, and then do it. When I started here, librarians from some other branches told me that it would take some time to grow my loyal teen following, but I didn’t realize that I was waiting for said teens to grow up.

There are a couple of girls I think I could get, if I approach them the right way. There’s one girl I am absolutely certain I could convince to join in, as she likes to help with whatever I’m doing. (Last week she attached “Biography” stickers to a stack of books for me.) She'll probably drag a couple of her friends along. And there are two brothers that I think I could convince, as long as I make sure to tell one that Helper Girl will be in attendance, because he has a massive crush on her. (He won’t talk to her, though, and his mom “threatened” to do so on his behalf. He was mortified at the very idea, but still wouldn’t say anything besides “hi” to Helper Girl.) I’ll have to see how long I can keep the seventh-grade gossip mill working for me.

Now Showing

The display case in the basement is my responsibility starting October 15, which means I have almost 2 weeks to pick a theme and gather materials for it. For obvious reasons I’d like it to be a children’s/YA theme, and I’d like it to take up a lot of space, so that I have to find fewer books. Honestly, I don’t like the idea of tying up a bunch of books in a display case for a month, where people can’t check them out, but I guess that’s how it’s going to be. Right now I’m leaning toward a movie theme—books that have been adapted to film. Possible titles range from Charlotte’s Web and Winnie-the-Pooh to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Ghost World. Except that I don’t want to keep Ghost World out of circulation for a month, since it generally goes out about once a month already.

Anyway, the question is really what else to put in the case besides books. It’s a pretty big case, and I’d like something else to dress it up, like posters or toys or something. I have a couple of Winnie-the-Pooh dolls, but no movie posters or anything like that. No lunchboxes, T-shirts, or other assorted paraphernalia. So… suggestions are welcome, and even solicited. I’m also all ears for other themes—my other thought was a gaming theme, where I can acquire random bits of outdated or expendable role-playing equipment (dice, boards) and video-game parts (broken controllers, empty computer game packages) to dress it up. The case doesn’t lock, so I can’t put anything I care too deeply about in there.

Maybe I’ll just keep thinking about it. Maybe the theme of my display will be “Shelf-Sitters,” so I don't have to keep things people want out of circulation. Or maybe I can jump on the Teen Read Week “Get Real” theme, and see what I can do with that. For props, I suppose I could include anything that isn't imaginary.

Busy days

Saturday was a very busy day for me here. I spent some time processing about 2/3 of the new graphic novels I bought at SPX, so they’re all set to go into the collection. There are 7 or 8 that have to go downtown for cataloging, and I do hope that they’re speedy down there, because it’s good stuff I’m waiting on—the second Owly book, King, and Bone Sharps are in that batch, and I want them in the collection soon. (Ideally, tomorrow, but I think I’ll have to wait at least a month or so. Cataloging is perpetually backed up.)

I think I’ve mentioned the generosity of our Friends group, providing $1,000 for new teen materials. I spent about a third of that at SPX, so I have about $670 left, and I have my spreadsheet of what I’m buying with that. I’ll be handing in the slips soon, and I’m hoping that by Thanksgiving I’ll have another 80 or so books to add to the collection. Hooray!

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price. In this case, in order to fit another 80 books on the shelf, I have to relocate some of the books that are already there. This means weeding, in a big way. I’ve started the project, but I think it’s going to take me all week to get through it. So far, I’ve weeded the paperbacks and A-D of the hardbacks. So far, my decisions are being made almost entirely by the due dates stamped in each book: if it hasn’t gone out in a year, we shouldn’t keep it. There are a couple of other factors: if we have multiple copies and some are in poor condition and they don’t circulate heavily, we don’t need all those copies. If we have two copies and they each go out once every few months, we could easily do with just one. If it’s Sixteen, with a cover blurb of “a collection of sixteen short stories for the eighties,” I don’t feel guilty about pitching it. (It hasn’t gone out since 2001, anyway, and before that, ’98.)

Actually, my weeding has had another step from there. Once I filled my many buckets of candidates, I lugged them back upstairs to actually check them over. I looked to see how many copies of each book we had at this branch, in Providence, and in the Rhode Island system overall. In some cases, I looked to see how well they circulate at other libraries. Then I sorted into three piles: Paroled (back on the shelf), Stay of execution (move to storage, to be revived for Summer Reading or disposed of when it hasn’t been requested in a year), and Dump. The “dump” pile ended up being about half of what I’d nominated in the first place, plus another 2/3 of a bucket that will go into storage. There wasn’t all that much that went back down to the teen shelves, but a small number of books (10?) were moved up to the children’s room instead. E-Z and the non-fiction collection will be weeded this week, I hope, but it might take a little longer than that before I can really plow through it.

It's all been done before

I almost blogged last week about the Pre-school Story Time, which someone other than I covered. One of our Friends has volunteered to come in once a month as a storyteller, and last Wednesday was her first go at it. Aside from the group being a little younger than she’d expected, it seemed to go reasonably well. She’ll be coming back for another session in a few weeks to do another story and some new songs. In the meantime, the kids are stuck with me and my usual routine of Song and Book × 5. They seem to like it, so I guess it’s okay.

Speaking of the story time and what the kids like, I normally go for books that are a little goofy—Don’t Let Pigeon Drive the Bus, I Lost My Bear, things like that. Books that have some personality to them and are fun to read aloud. In my last round of books, I thought I’d try something a little different and throw in a classic: Where the Wild Things Are. A couple of kids liked it; most were uninterested; one kid cried when I turned the page to show some monsters. And the funniest thing, to me, is that I felt like a complete faker reading this book to these kids. I like the book, but it’s too straightforward for my tastes. It just wasn’t me. That might be why the kids were mostly uninterested—because it wasn’t really my type of book, so it was probably a flatter reading than my usual performances. But still, it made me a little sad, because there just aren’t that many good, goofy stories with attractive pictures being written for three-year-olds, and I feel like I’ve used most of the ones that have been written. Luckily, the kids have a short enough memory that I can recycle some of my first titles!

Lastly, I had another teen program flop. This one was a college admissions program, where a former Brown University Admissions officer talks about what colleges look for in an application—how to write a good essay, what elements are stressed over others, things like that. He’s come in before, back in April or so, and we had about 20 people show up. This time: three, and they were adults who were asking questions specific to their situations (international transfers, green-card-but-non-citizen financial aid, etc.). I thought the whole thing was rather strange, until someone downstairs said, “well, it is a holiday.” A what? “A holiday. Rosh Hashanah started tonight.” We planned this session so painstakingly: a night when the library would be open, far enough ahead of the Early Decision application deadlines to be useful, and we completely forgot about the Jewish holidays impacting attendance in our heavily-Orthodox area. Yikes. At least I had three, so it wasn’t a total loss. I guess.