High-Maintenance Needy Child was back in tonight. The easy questions came while I was at dinner, apparently: the book with the blue cover, books on costumes, and Can I Go On The Computer. Then I came back and our other Children’s Librarian went to dinner. And I’m left—alone—with this child.
“How much does it cost to print?” Ten cents a page. “But I want to print three pages!” Then it’ll be thirty cents. “How much to print SIX pages?” Well, ten cents a page times six pages… “um… sixty cents?” Yep. “How many pages can I print for this quarter?” Two, and you’ll get a nickel back. “Is that good?” And on, and on.
Sounds annoying yet? But wait! There’s more!
She didn’t have much money on her, and she kept running downstairs, presumably to shake down Mom for more change. Eventually, though, the Bank of Mom closed. And the girl came back upstairs.
But I want to priiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnt! I want to print twelve pages! Can’t I print more pages? But I want to! Can’t you let me print? I have two quarters; how much can I print for that? (Those are actually two nickels, so only one page.) Can’t you pretend they’re quarters? Why won’t you let meeeeee? You’re going to make me cry! Do you want to make me cry? I want to print more pages! Can't we make a deal? (Deal is, ten cents for each page. Take it or leave it.) It’s all sooooooo cruel! (Yes, she actually said this last. The only response I could think of was, “Oh, the humanity!” She didn’t get it, of course, but another patron in the room found it quite amusing.)
A librarian at her usual branch had mentioned her to us once before, as we were comparing notes on Dealing With Difficult Patrons. (And yes, we actually did cover this topic at a regional meeting.) I hadn’t connected her until now, but she’s the one he specifically talked about. I do think that branch wins the prize, though. I’d happily take two of our neediest before willingly taking this one on again.
In other news: my washing, repairing, relabeling, recovering, and discard piles have all been eliminated. Well, the repair pile is as eliminated as it can be; I'm waiting for a new roll of tape to come in. I'm caught up, at least until tomorrow when we find more dirty/unlabeled/torn/broken books.
In other other news: Happy New Year, folks. Drink responsibly, drive safely, and somehow try to have fun anyway. (Thus ends my Public Service Announcement.)
A woman just called to ask us to pull a bunch of books. One of them was "The warlock, the witch, and the … something." The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe? “Yes, that's it. And other books like that, that the children will like.” Well, what do they like? How old are they? Boys, girls? “13-year-old girls.” (Ultimately, I pulled the first books from my usual trifecta of Fantasy Literature For Adolescent Girls: Earthsea, Wrinkle in Time, and The Dark is Rising.) (Come to think of it, this is my trifecta for boys, too…)
But then... she's also looking for "Factor for Children." I'm sorry, I don't see any listing for it. Are you sure of the title? "Oh, yes. It's written by Bill Reilly." Okay. Bill O'Reilly's Factor for Kids? We don't own it, but we can order it from another library. "You don't OWN it?" Nope. "You should! You MUST know Bill Reilly." I've heard of him, but I don't watch his show. "But he's on Fox News! Don't you watch Fox News?" Nope. "It's on every night at 8 o'clock!" Would you like to order this book? "well... I don’t know..."
Turns out she's doing some Christmas shopping, and wants to come to the library to see the books and decide if she likes them, so she can go to the bookstore to look at them and pick which ones to buy. And she’s completely aghast that I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly or Fox News.
(Just pretend this was posted last Wednesday, okay?)
Today was the last of the Pre-school storytimes for a bit—we’re taking a break for the holidays, and resuming in the second week of January. We were supposed to have our storyteller come in again today, but she had to cancel at the last minute for a dental emergency.
We had about 16 kids this time, about half of whom were in the 3-5 age range they’re supposed to be, so this is an improvement, I think. Also, I made it through without any wardrobe malfunctions, so that’s also an improvement over last week. (Though it has been suggested that this week’s crowd was due in part to a rumor that I’d give a show, as well as some stories.)
Since half the group is Jewish, I tried to avoid any Christmas-specific stories. What I’d been looking for was maybe something short about friends celebrating different holidays, but alas, my options are Christmas or Hanukkah. Except for one book: Toby’s Holiday Hugs and Kisses. This is a lame little cop-out: it’s snowing outside the tree where Toby lives, there are good cooking smells and the table is set for the holiday meal, and Toby wonders what to give people. Which holiday it is, is never specified. For all I know, Toby’s family celebrates Groundhog Day with presents and a feast. So, it was cheating, but I read it anyway, and now several kids are planning on giving their relatives hugs and kisses for whatever they’re celebrating next week. I’ll call this a win, even though it’s completely lame.
In other gift-giving materialism, I’ve submitted order cards for $1100 in books and movies in the past week. Some will be additions to the non-fiction section (Um, like, om: a girl goddess’s guide to yoga; How rude!: a teenager’s guide to good manners, proper behavior, and not grossing people out). Some are new series that have been requested (god help me: That’s So Raven). Sequels, serials, new books, I’m buying it. The movies are another variety batch: everything from action-adventure (Fantastic Four) to blockbusters (Lord of the Rings) to chick flicks (Princess Diaries) to anime (Kino’s Journey, Neon Genesis Evangelion). For budget reasons, I had to cut Chobits, but frankly, it was only on the list for the hilarious scene of the girl bot marching through the town chanting “underpants! Underpants! Underpants!” (only in Japanese, which I can’t spell but sounded like “pansu!”) (Um, if any readers want to correct my spelling, drop me an email and I’ll edit accordingly.)
Okay, so my vacation started Thursday and I’ll be back again on Tuesday.I did write almost a whole post before I left on Wednesday, but then I got distracted by work and forgot to post it.It’s saved on the computer there; I’ll post on my return.
Not much has been going on—I’ve been doing a bunch of year-end wrap-up that hardly seemed worth blogging.Basically just eliminating Piles of Crap we had strewn about—fixing the books in the repair pile, half-processing discards (we can’t fully eliminate them yet because the whole database is changing in March, so we have to hold onto all barcodes and actually delete them post-migration.For now, we just change the status to off-site storage, so people aren’t looking for them.), processing donations and adding them to the collection (these will stay post-migration; it’s something with updating the status of everything later, but not deleting any records), re-labeling books, re-covering books with torn jackets, and washing books with dirty jackets.See?Hardly seemed worth blogging.
So what am I doing on my vacation?Nothing having to do with libraries or comics, so I guess this entry is just way off topic.I’ve been working steadily to finish all the Christmas baking/cooking.I have only 2 days left (and I’m losing today to the Laundromat), and I still need to chocolate-dip four kinds of cream fillings (vanilla, chocolate, run-almond, and cinnamon-clove), plus make the marshmallows, candied nuts, and a cheesecake. And cookies. So far, I’ve made three batches of lollipops (honey, root beer, and clove), cherry cordials (yum!—and the leftover stuff has become the rum-almond cream mentioned above), caramels (half chocolate-covered and half plain), raspberry jelly logs, and the afore-mentioned creams.
So, who wants to be my friend this Christmas?(Line forms to the right.)
According to Erica (according to Siva), there are more public libraries in this country than there are McDonald's. 16,220 libraries to 13,000 McDonald's. And if memory serves, Trivial Pursuit (Genus 4) claimed that there's a McDonald's, on average, every 4 miles across the country.
And we don't even have a catchy ad campaign with slogans and jingles. Maybe we should look into that. We can't do much worse than McDonald's current "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, right?
Pre-school Storytime begins. We sing a little song. We read a book. We sing another song. I glance down and notice that not one but TWO buttons in the middle of my shirt have popped open at some point.
There’s no way to recover from this, really, except to admit that I’ve lost the ability to dress myself, and issue an apology (“whoops, sorry ‘bout that”) for flashing my audience.
Circulation is down across the board—fiction and non-fiction; adult, teen, and children’s. Even the videos and DVDs are down. My only excuse theory is that November had Thanksgiving, for which many, many people were traveling, and October had all the Jewish holidays, for which the local Hebrew Day School was closed for most of the month. (Seriously, the kids had something like six days of school in October—the rest of the time, they were at the library, on the computers and/or checking out books or videos.)
On the whole, the YA section isn’t doing too badly. Circulation had a little uptick a couple of months ago, after the major weeding. Also, some of the books that had just narrowly avoided being tossed started circulating again; it’s amazing to see what sorts of titles get noticed once the detritus is removed. Overall, we’re down about 80 volumes across all the YA categories, including CDs and magazines. Part of the drop in certain categories (like YA Mystery, YA Sci Fic, etc) might be that we’ve reclassified some titles, thanks to outdated collection codes or just an effort to streamline the stats.
No surprises, but the graphic novel circulation is up another 20 items. I honestly don’t remember if we’ve gotten anything new in the past month, but I’m still waiting, with growing impatience, for the few titles I sent downtown for cataloging. Plus a bunch more books that I ordered a couple of months back. Once we get those, we should see the circulation swing up even higher—and that will make me happy.
In other statistical news, we’ve just discovered that, in addition to the 500 or so reference questions the two of us answer each month, we’re also circulating about 5,000 volumes from our counter. The adult department—with its two reference librarians and four clerks—circulates about 9,400, or just shy of double. I don’t know if this means that we in the children’s department are insane, or SuperLibrarians. Maybe both.
December 05, 2005-- The Best Webcomics of 2005 are featured in the special end-of-year issue of The Webcomics Examiner. The editorial advisory board surveyed the field and debated to come up with a list of the most noteworthy series and completed works. Says editor Joe Zabel, "Everyone has their own opinion about which comics are best; but we hope our listing efforts will stimulate discussion and attract new readers to a very fine group of cartoonists."
The Webcomics Examiner is a monthly forum of reviews, interviews, and critical articles evaluating webcomics as a fine art. The free-access website is at http://webcomicsreview.com.
This issue also features Part 2 of an editorial roundtable on The Artistic History of Webcomics, withT Campbell, Shaenon Garrity, William G., Phil Kahn, Bob Stevenson, Eric Burns, Wednesday White, A. G. Hopkins, Rob Balder, Tim Godek, Zabel, Alexander and Brandy Danner. Chronicling the webcomics medium's creative evolution, the discussion includes profiles of Cat Garza, Tristan Farnon, Demian5, Patrick Farley, Broken Saints, Justine Shaw, James Kochalka, Roger Langridge, Jim Zubkavich, and many more.
Make sure you pay particular attention to my astute comments on both James Kochalka and Jim Zubkavich in the roundtable! And read the rest of the Examiner, too; it's really good.
