I also bumped into the Library Director on his way back from a meeting today, and he told me that it will probably not be until mid-March that he starts advertising positions that I can apply for. Last week, the word was that the early/family literacy job that I thought this internship would help me groom myself for probably won’t be funded this year. Sigh. I guess on the bright side, I have that much more time to prepare a portfolio, something that was suggested to me by a guest speaker in my public libraries class. I understand it’s a bad economy and that I may have a better lead on a job than many of the other graduating students do, but it’s still very stressful not knowing how I am going to support myself come May.

I also had a casual conversation with a librarian who works on the adult reference desk on the second floor that is lingering in my mind. I got to know her when I was working a two-hour per week shift on the reference desk. She asked me how I like children’s, and I told her that I like it more than I ever expected to. I thought it was going to be all play-doh and finger puppets, but it’s actually not that much different than adult reference. There is more emphasis on showing an awareness of your patron’s reading skills in children’s, and programming is a much bigger deal. But other than that, there isn’t a lot of difference. She said she thought it was a shame that the training given to children’s librarians doesn’t emphasize the reference part of the job more. I never thought much about it, but she is right. Except for the emergent literacy class through the education school that I am enrolled in now, I have never taken any children’s librarian classes at SILS. But all of the professional development things I have gone to, especially those run by the state library, do tend to focus on how to make bulletin boards or how to use recycled plastic drink bottles for a story time craft or stuff like that. It’s not much about getting kids to tell you their goals and then matching your resources to their goals. Even Anna, the children’s room manager, told me she thinks that learning story time presentation skills is more important than learning reference skills for a children’s librarian. Of course, I hope to do both reference and story time well, but it does give me food for thought about crafting a resume and selling myself to employers.

Apparently, the leadership at my library does not share this opinion, probably because the relationship between good reference /readers’ advisory and high usage statistics or high funding is not straightforward. Before, my boss was very clear about not wanting me on the desk at all. When I finagled a way to work two hours a week – two measly hours –on the reference desk, she threatened to not pay me for those hours. And in the process of getting that situation straightened out, I found that others with more  ”back-room” type jobs had also had a time persuading their supervisors that working on the desk directly with patrons was of value and not just a distraction from the real job of writing reports or putting together programs and partnerships.

Even my new supervisor, who was very happy to have me out on the floor instead of in the program room during the crazy week of snow days, said that in general, she thinks learning to do story times is a more productive use of my limited intern hours. Desk work, she feels, is something that anyone with halfway decent people skills will pick up easily. But presenting story times is a skill that all children’s librarians need, few rookies have and sometimes opportunities to get on-the-job mentoring in this are limited. So often you are on your own to sink or swim.

I guess I can buy that argument. In my previous role, I was tasked with facilitating high school students to do something – develop story times – that I had no clue how to do myself. So now it’s nice to have some mentoring in this area. And even though I am learning in school about all the theory behind why we do story times and other programming to develop  children’s brains and teach literacy, I’m still a little fuzzy sometimes on how library programming actually makes a difference in the lives of the people sitting before me. It’s much easier to see how you are making a difference when a patron comes in asking , to use an example from today, for books she can read with her 11-year-old son and you send them home with a stack of books that the 11-year-old says he can’t wait to share with his mother.  

Another interesting thing happened today. My boss asked me if I was comfortable enough working the desk that she can quit hiring a sub to cover Wednesday afternoons and just use me instead. I am very conflicted about this. On the one hand, for the sake of my career, I want to prove that I can do it. But on the other hand, I am about to be job hunting in a very tough market. I will be doing myself no favors if I do anything to contribute to the impression that using volunteer or student labor to do a professional’s job is ever appropriate. Sigh. I was able to give a non-committal answer today. I’ll talk more about it next week.

For the first time, I planned two different programs for my two groups of kids. The first home I visit has preschoolers who have obviously already gotten a lot of academic instruction. I thought they could handle more challenging material than the baby books I have been bringing, so this time, I brought Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock. The book has about 30 pages with a paragraph’s worth of text on every page.   It takes maybe 15 minutes to get through the whole book and understanding the plot requires some reading between the lines. But I thought this group might be able to handle it. They are usually eager to guess what comes next, and I generally feel like I run out of time before their attention spans run out.

Wouldn’t you know it? The more advanced preschoolers were out sick, so I was working with two 2-year-olds, who clearly were not ready for a long story. I didn’t even finish the reading. And the kids had absolutely no interest in the craft I had prepared. Instead, we played with a puppet book I had brought for the younger kids I was going to visit next, and I listened to them recite the pledge of allegiance, which their teacher had been working on with them. I felt a little sheepish having such a miserable failure in front of the teacher who rightly expects better from the library. She was very nice about it. And she knows I’m an intern trying desperately to continue a program that that has taken some funding and personnel hits. So she appreciates the effort. But still. It’s embarrassing.

Next, I went to the other home with one autistic preschooler, three one-year-olds and an infant. They did enjoy the puppet and one of the kids really enjoyed stomping his feet and dancing along to “if you’re happy and you know it.” Music and dancing isn’t something that comes natural to me, but the kids really enjoy it, so I will have to incorporate it more. I also read a book that the preschooler just happened to already own at home. He had memorized the book and seemed to really enjoy reading it to me and correcting me when I got a word wrong. Also, every page was labeled according to the species of dinosaur featured in the illustration, and he really seemed to enjoy hearing me struggle to sound out and pronounce those names. They are a fun group.

I also made arrangements to do an entire storytime by myself for the preschoolers on March 9. I’m excited about that. Anna said that the best way to arrange it is to pick a book that you know you like and then choose a theme to go along with it. I think I am going to do a book that I used to use with the older children, Who Invited You? It’s a rhyming counting book about a little girl who keeps having swamp animals jump into her boat without her permission. The older children liked the surprise ending. But I think the younger children will still like the animals and the action. To go with it, I am thinking about some finger plays having to do with Row, Row Row your boat and maybe Curious George Gets a Paper Route, which is all about floating paper boats in the water. I have a few weeks to practice and prepare. Maybe I will try it out first on some of the other children I work with during Get Set, Get Ready Let’s Read!

Since I had such limited time to prepare, I decided to check out a premade story kit that the library circulates to day care homes. It was a windy day, so I chose the wind themed one. It contained a felt board kit with a book, some rhymes and finger play activities, some cassette tapes (which I was unable to use — we need to update that part of our collection I guess) and a professional development book that contained craft ideas. Those kits worked very well. I will go back for another visit in two weeks. I hope this new assignment continues to go well.

I have enjoyed how fast-paced my experience has been. And I have a new appreciation for how territorial my previous boss, Karlene, was during my previous assignment. She and I often butted heads because I wanted to be part of everything that was going on in the library, and she wanted me to focus only on the job I was hired for. Now that I don’t have those kind of constraints, it does seem like everybody wants some of my very limited time, and I need to be very deliberate about what projects I choose so that I can get the most out of this internship. Karlene asked me to take on another Get Set, Get Ready Let’s Read! site becasue the previous person handling that home was having some conflicts with the child care operator. I am happy to do it, but it’s going to cut into my time on the desk during the busy after school hours. She also asked me about mp progress with Motheread. I had to deliver the unhappy news that I have been too busy to make much progress on it, and even if I am able to forge and agreement, I don’t know when I will have time to actually administer the program.

After talking with Karlene, I spoke to a representative of Genesis Home, the shelter for homeless families next door to the library where we had wanted to begin the Motheread program. We had been playing phone tag for a week. The woman I spoke to was enthusiastic about starting up a program, but she said that her residents were already in class four days a week, and five would be asking a bit much. She suggested I call her back in March, when things would ease up a little. I’m not sure if she was earnest about wanting me to call her back or if she was just trying to decline my offer without making an enemy out of her next door neighbor. I will keep on trying elsewhere, I guess.

This week is also the week that the permanent staff will start the job application process. I am not part of that, but I will have a chance to apply for vacancies created by the other staff moving up. Karlene, who I never felt was especially supportive of my career goals, called me to clue me in to this process. Maybe she is more supportive than I thought after all.

The other thing that was interesting today was that Amanda, who is now doing the job I used to do, came down to get some advice on recruiting more participants from the high schools she is working with. I told her a story about distributing 150 applications, getting eight of them back, getting four of the eight to attend a meeting, and getting two of the four to come back for a second meeting. And I called that a success. It wasn’t easy for me, and I told her not to expect it to be easy for her, either. Anna had overheard the conversation, and she mentioned after Amanda left that she had had the same difficulty partnering with the schools, and that she thought most librarians new to the profession are in for a rude awakening the first time they plan a program only to hear crickets in the auditorium. Theoretically, everybody loves the library, but packing the programs is never easy. Partnering with another agency, such as the schools, that already has a bug in the ear of your intended audience can make it easier, but then you have to put up with the vagaries of that agency which isn’t always fun. It’s the second day in a row now that I’ve dealt with programming stumbling blocks. Maybe there’s an idea for my final reflective paper?

When I arrived, there were even more carts full of books that had been checked in but not shelved than when I left on Tuesday. But to my surprise, my supervisor Laurel did not ask me to start shelving, but to start preparing yet another cart. It seems that the children’s room feels as though it is getting short shrift with a new system for roaming pages that the library has put in place in the last few months, and Laurel and the other librarians there feared that allowing me or other sorts of volunteers to shelve books might weaken the case they wanted to make for why they should have their own pages, separate from the roaming pages that serve the rest of the library. I had read about something similar with libraries who are reluctant to chase grant money for fear that being awarded grants will weaken the case for why state money is necessary. I even heard of one case, in Fairfax, Va., of a library shaming its Board of County Supervisors into providing more money by applying for grants to pay for a boring rebarcoding project instead of grants for more exciting programming or collection development projects. It was eye-opening to see the same tactics used on a smaller scale, right before my eyes.

The crowd at the desk was pretty steady, but there were two patrons that really stood out to me. First, I watched my boss, Anna, do some readers advisory on a girl who looked be maybe 8 or 9 and who was a voracious reader, but uncertain about her ability to navigate the library. She was sure that, at the tender age of 9, she had already read everything in our library that she cared to read. Just like we are taught, Anna asked her to name some of the things she had read recently that she liked. With some prodding, she mentioned something, and Anna was able to recommend some fairy series similar to the fairy books she had already read. I was really surprised that she knew these books off the top of her head, but Anna said that I will too after a short time getting to know my way around the library.

Not 10 minutes after that conversation, another little girl around the same age came in, also sure that she had already read everything in our library that she cared to read, but for a different reason. She didn’t care to read anything, or so she told me. But her mother was insisting. I tried to ask her about her interests, but got frustrated because her mother kept answering for her, and she didn’t seem to like her mother’s answers. I gave her a list of books that were at her grade level and told her to browse it and I would be back to check on her. When I came back, I had another librarian, Tom with me. I told Tom her grade and the fact that she was a reluctant reader and asked him what to do. He tried to give her some Arthur books and some other short series books, but she wasn’t biting. They might have matched her reading level, but not her age level. After probably 15 minutes, we finally got out of her that there was a Hannah Montana book that she had read and enjoyed, so I was able to find her another one that she had not read that she seemed happy to take. It was non-fiction and probably a little over her reading level, but there were a lot of photos and sidebars, so even if she has trouble with the main text, she might be able to practice her reading with the pictures and sidebars. We also gave her some other Disney kids books, which she seemed happy to take. I told her that she doesn’t have to read all the books, but to just try them and show us when she returns which ones she enjoyed and which she didn’t. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but by the time she left she did seem happy that she came, unlike when she came in, so I think we did our job. I hope she comes back.

Was there ever something for me to do! I didn’t even get to the phone calls or email, I was so busy. My supervisor and a page and I spent the entire morning pulling holds. It’s usually a task that is done twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, but the library had been closed over the weekend due to snow, and Monday the library was open only five hours. So there were probably five times the normal amount of holds, plus the parents who normally come for the 10:30 storytime were all crowded in there trying to entertain their kids on their own for a half-hour so that our storytime leader, Laurel, could at least have a little time to prep the room for them.

Many of the holds were not easy to find because while most of the backlog had been checked in, not much of it had not been shelved yet, so we had to dig through stacks of unorganized books more than usual to get the holds filled.

Placing a hold on a book is something I have done many, many times in my life, but until today I had never really considered the people on the back end of that transaction, the ones searching the stacks for the book I requested It was a good learning experience that showed me why some libraries might be reluctant to adopt new technological tools . I would have thought that allowing patrons to place holds for themselves would be good because it would save librarians the trouble. But I see now how even a minor emergency can lead to patrons placing holds faster than we can fill them. Ours happened to be a weather emergency, but I can imagine a similar situation at a small library when the person who does this task calls in sick. Or when a computer glitch prevents a librarian from generating a holds list but does not prevent patrons from placing holds.