Saturday in the Life: The Day of Good Intentions or The day where e-mail happened.

9:00: I get to work expecting a delicious day off-desk during which I will surely achieve all of the prep-work for the end of the month reports, etc.

10:00: Summer Reading Club reporting hours begin. I say hello to the volunteers and go back to e-mail.

10:00: A lovely young woman shows up for a proctoring appointment. Good news: I totally know what she’s talking about! Bad news: Between her virtual educators and the library, someone has managed to think a “9″ is a “4″ (or vice-versa) so, here she is, ready to take and exam on the 24th instead of the 29th. The study room we usually use for proctoring has been booked all day, so I put her in my manager’s office since she’s not here and it’s a really nice office. I type in the password for her online exam and she’s off!

10:20: Volunteers are bored. So, I give them project to do, then of course, that’s when people show up to report. Volunteers are un-bored.

10:30: Sit down at my email again, remember that the chess instructor needs yet another white board because the dry-erase surface on the big white board on the wall has somehow lost its capacity to … er… dry erase. Basically, it’s borked. Carry another white board upstairs. Bump into a lot of things.

10:40: E-mail.

11:15: Proctoring person says her exam crashed. I log her back in.

11:30: Prepare registration materials for all classes running in the next week…

The afternoon was really a blur. I don’t even remember what I ate for lunch. Basically, I got through my e-mail and that was my major triumph of the day. Buh. “Oh well,” I thought (foolishly), “there’s always Sunday!”

What did happen on Sunday? I should give you a little background. Shortly before I was hired, Markham Public Library created a new kind of classification system. It’s called Customer Centered Classification, or C3™ for short. It basically limits the call numbers to four fields, and arranges the books by subject headings which are, we hope, more intuitive for customers to find. The arrangement facilitates browsing and the shorter call numbers is supposed to make it easier to find, shelve, and shelf-read the books. It even won an award this year. Before anyone asks me questions, I should mention that I don’t work with C3™ since my branch hasn’t been converted yet. We’re still living in the days of Dewey, which is fine by me since I don’t know Dewey very well, yet, and it’d be nice to learn before we switch to the new system.

I mention all this because my main activity on Sunday was to conduct some testing with Dewey using some volunteers from the Teen Advisory Group. I can’t really get into the nature of the tests, but at 9:59 am, I realized that I needed to select about 90 more random titles for volunteers to work with. This involved pulling all of the books, writing down their titles and call numbers and re-shelving them. And the volunteers were due at 11:00. I’m happy to say that I can re-shelve 90 books in 20 minutes never having worked as a page, but by the time we were ready to begin, it was 11:20. I did bring them Timbits, so I was mostly forgiven. As I’ve mentioned – I can’t describe the tests, but I will say that after I told the volunteers what they would be doing, they looked a little bleak. “This, uh, sounded much more fun in the e-mail.” one of them said.

Flash forward to 2:30 p.m. The volunteers have left, shakily agreeing to take part in the second part of this test. I sit down to type up their response sheets and I realize – I’ve forgotten to have them do the last part of the test. Ah, well. They didn’t have it in them to get up on the Dewey Decimal System for 4 hours straight, anyway and really neither did I.

2:30 pm: Oh right, lunch. I should mention that Sunday was the Deli Duel, where several awesome local delis faced off to win the title of best smoked meat sandwich. Several of my friends attended to eat various sammiches. I was… not there. I had cold pizza.

3:00 p.m.: I now find I’ve lost the will to do any actual, thinking work. So, I turn to my crafts for storytime, which I had originally been saving for the volunteers on Monday. I am making snake puppets. After tracing about 35 of them, I realized they look distinctly sperm-like. Hopefully the parents won’t be offended…

5:00 p.m.: Stumble out of the building, into my car and make it home in time for the 6:20 show of Inception. Which was spectacular.

Old Spice Guy Talks about Libraries

The following day, my twitter feed yielded this library promotion gem:

New Spice

The Harold B. Lee Library has harnessed the Old Spice Guy’s single-shot internet fame and used it for a hilarious way to promote libraries. Of course it won’t be recognized (the joke, that is) in 15 years or so, but I was really pleased that this library was savvy enough to jump on this popular ad campaign and work it in our favour. Monocle smile.

3 years ago this March, I started working as an intern at Bloomfield Township Public Library in the Children’s Department. She had recently retired from this particular library, but still worked occasionally as a substitute. We joked about now actually working at the same library… I was given the nickname Garza 2.0 the day I began that job. Inevitably, we worked a shift together and it was … well, it just seemed natural. “Meg! What are you doing here?!” “Oh… I just work here.”

Thank you, mom, or being amazing and supportive and for everything. Love, Megan

I had the good fortune of being off-desk all day (I know, I know, practically unheard of in public libraries!) so I tried to take advantage of that and try to finish things that need doing so I could try to relax the rest of the week. So this was my to-do list for the day:

• Call about preschool about class visit (52 kids!) on Friday. Incidentally, I got an email saying that they aren’t coming due to “rescheduling.” Considering that they said they were coming last, oh Thursday and could we have a room and program for them, I’m considering it a good thing. Even though I like the preschool set… jeesh. Short notice and a whoooole lot of munchkins. I wonder what the collective noun for that would be?
• Call doctoral student about workshop re: infant speech development and infant/caregiver communication. If you’re in the GTA and interested, I can pass on some information.
• Write report for Family Literacy Day events and Month-End report.
• Tabulate programming and display statistics
• Make a list of partnership opportunities for programming in my catchment of Markham.
• Storytime rhymes/songs for Week 3: Phonological Awareness
• Make subject headings for Kid’s Databases
• March break publicity
• Outreach materials for this week: Info on Tumblebooks for parents and teachers. I have 2 outreach visits for Family Literacy Day, which is January 27, 2010.

So I’m not going to lie – some things came up. I got through… well, I got through everything that was truly going-to-come-down-on-my-head-tomorrow kind of urgent, but otherwise… FTF, to do list. I’m disappointed because my kick-off for round 4 is totally a “Let me tell you about how I didn’t do anything!” entry, but this week’ll be exciting! I promise. I have 3 storytimes, 2 outreach visits, and I’m planning to retro-blog (is that even a word? Well now it is…) about Saturday and Sunday because – hey – that’s when my week began. And as a result, I’m a bit fried. Oh! But there was a fire alarm today. And we had to evacuate alllllll of the students out of the library. They were… not so pleased to go outside. Because it’s finals week. Fortunately, (or unfortunately as the case may be), the alarm stopped just as we had told about 1/3 of the lower level to leave. Then we had to go around and tell them “Just kiddin’ guys!” Which I always love, because you look like an alarmist and next time chances are they won’t leave…

Me to Disgruntled Student (avec sheepish grin): “Err, sorry. It’s all clear. Carry on, guys.”
Disgruntled Student: “Man. Seriously?! I don’t even WANNA carry on, now!”

Me neither, buddy, me neither…

More tomorrow! With added and further energy!

9:00 a.m.: Mercifully short atrium meeting followed by the realization that there the only two people scheduled this morning, (as far as info staff goes), are Catherine and myself.

9:30 a.m.: Library opens   x . x <- the emoticon for f#@$ed.

10:06 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

10: 13 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

That was not a typo.

10:17 a.m.: A brief walk around the children’s department reveals that unbeknownst to me yet another group of older campers from the community centre has also snuck in, bored teen counselors in tow. They are hunkered down in the story nook playing with texture toys meant for babies. I see that the baskets that I bought to contain said toys yesterday are already broken. Note to self: Never go to the dollar store for things that need to stand up to a department full of kids.

10:30 a.m.: Thankfully our Musical Theatre camp instructor, Crystal, says that the teeny-tiny people can use the meeting room for their lunch 11:30. Otherwise they were going to eat in the children’s department, which would most likely have resulted in a good solid talking-to from maintenance.

11:30 a.m.: Crystal seems to have forgotten our agreement.

(It’s okay – she’s directing a cast of 20 children in a production of Mamma Mia! by herself. She’s allowed. )

11:32 a.m.: I reconcile the room situation and stall for time so the room can be cleaned up. To do this means a story time for 54 children. We read Wiggle, by Doreen Cronin (one of my all-time favourite large-group-zomg story time books)  and Let’s Go Visiting by Sue Williams (sequel to I Went Walking). The former is extensible from age 2 until 6 years at the outside. The latter two books are for younger children (I’d say 5 and under, depending on how you read them). I opened, as I usually do, with “Shake Your Sillies Out” and closed with “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” The sound of 54 small children shouting “HOORAY” is really quite something… In addition, because it was raining, I sang “Mr. Sun” and another song about rain. It’s a good one because it allows kids to make noise, even if they don’t want to sing along. Goes like this:

A Little Drop of Rain
(To the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”)
A little drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ one hand)
Then another drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ other hand)
Then another and another and another and another
(Slap ground w/ alternating hands as fast as you can in time with “anothers”)
And another drop of rain hits the ground!
SPLASH! (Slap ground with both hands)

11:40 a.m.: Kidlets into lunch. Whew.

11:50 a.m.: Realize that I’ve been scheduled for lunch at 1:00 and have story time at 1:30. Catherine will be alone for an hour if I go for lunch at 12:00. She says it’s okay. I don’t think she is serious.

11:53 p.m.: Go in the borrower’s services (that’s Markham-ese for “circ”) department’s workspace and see the veritable Fort Knox of courier boxes that have come in. I briefly wish for an iPhone and a twitpic account.

12:00 p.m.: Standard reference (haha) lunch.

1:00 p.m.: Start cleaning up for Baby Goose.

1:30 p.m.: My last Wednesday afternoon Baby Goose of the summer – and possibly ever. In the fall we’ll be doing Baby Goose in the mornings only, which is not the most convenient thing in the world. My little guys Ryan, Alex, and Vincent showed up to the story time! They’ve also been coming to the story time since they were about 3 months old. Now they’re all starting to crawl and sit up and babble. Awww  …

2:00 p.m.: I admit our discontinuation of afternoon Baby Goose to parents and get complaints, albeit understanding complaints. More evals this time – continuous comments about the space – I’ve been consistently getting numbers of over 60 for Wednesday afternoons. It’s a squeeze.

4:10 p.m.: More cute kids from Stonebridge P.S. recognize me from Summer Reading Club promotions. Vincent and Raymond (grade 3 and 4, respectively) kind of act like I’m a rockstar… and subsequently feed my ego and re-affirm my belief in the importance of what I do. Now if they could just stop in every day 50 min. before I leave and 5 seconds before I go off the deep end, I’ll be set! Maybe I could pay them in stickers…

5:20 p.m.: Run screaming from the building.

Make record time home (I <3 the 407.), begin blogging, and pick up husbandito from the train.

Here We Go Up, Up, Up!
To the tune of “Skip to my Lou-bee-lou”
Here we go up, up, up!
Here we go down, down, down
Here we go up, up, up!
And here we go down, down, down!

The Grand Old Duke of York
The grand old Duke of York
He had 10,000 men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
And when they were up they were up!
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up,
They were neither up nor down

Very easy to memorize and the babies really dig it. This is also a good visual example of how we present our “story time out in the open.” You can see both the pros and cons of such a practice. Pro: Everyone feels welcome to participate and numbers are great! Con: Everyone feels welcome to participate and numbers are great. These issues (popularity, inclusiveness, overcrowding and quality of story time) will warrant further discussion, but until then – enjoy the video! Many thanks to Renée’s cousin.

Baby Goose Story Time Video

We’re Going on a Bearhunt

One of my original misgivings about blogging in general is that it seems sort of narcissistic to assume that I have anything more to say about a single topic than anyone else and who really cares? Does anyone really see my posts anyway? Like Henry Rollins says (about message boards, not about blogging) “putting more content on the Internet, like we need more of THAT.” Am I just putting more content on the Internet that our children need to slog through finding their little nuggets of information in this monstrous amorphous heaving mass of electro-data?

Not to say that I think all blogging is a waste, some people are doing it well – the academic bloggers and library gurus… “Joe the Blogger,” too. After reading a blog about the “canon of academic blogging” somewhere I became horribly insecure about self-publishing – what if it doesn’t sound intelligent enough? I guess it’s time to restate my purpose, which is to provide support to those who, like me, have found themselves in a position for which they’re not quite prepared; to reassure them that it’s okay… and to share resources, thoughts, etc. with people, librarians, parents, what-have you, on the way. Canon be damned!

And it looks like…people are looking, so maybe I’m doing some good?

I’m finding a lot of picturebooks on factual content, that are being catalogued as non-fiction, then are forgotten. I’m thinking of having a display of “Non-Fiction Picture Books”… maybe? That’s the best I can do to increase their visibility, but I think it’s a shame that they’re being cataloged that way. Judging a book by its content, if you will.

The program itself was bit harder because I was exhausted and I got really hot jumping around with the kids. Usually their enthusiasm has proven to give little attention seeking me the fuel to finish the 20 minutes or so of story times. But I think the kids were as restless as I was tired so it was a struggle. Not to say they didn’t have fun… they shook their sillies out, but they spent more time kicking each other than actually listening, haha.

Here’s the outline of the program:

Song: Shake My Sillies Out

Book: What Did You Put in Your Pocket?

Song/fingerplay: Five Green and Speckled Frogs

Five green and speckled frogs,
Sat upon a speckled log,
Eating the most delicious bugs!
Yum! Yum!
One jumped into the pool,
Where it was nice and cool.
Then there were four green and speckled frogs!

Glub! Glub!
Repeat for 4,3,2,1

Action rhyme: Bouncing Ball

Book: The Mud Puddle

Song: Mr. Sun

Oh Mr Sun, Sun Mr. golden Sun
Please shine down on me.
Oh Mr. Sun, Sun Mr. golden Sun
Hiding behind those trees.
These little children are asking you
To please come out so we can play with you.
Oh Mr. Sun, Sun Mr. Golden Sun
Please shine down on me.

Song: The More We Get Together

Book: Jamberry

Song: Head Shoulders Knees and Toes

Book: Peanut Butter and Jelly

Song: Do Your Ears Hang Low?

Book: Slop Goes the Soup

Song: If You’re Happy and You Know It

Actually, I didn’t get to Slop Goes the Soup, cuz the kids pretty much were just bugging each other by the time I got around to “Mr. Sun” but… I had planned it. Overall, I think The Mud Puddle (by the wonderful Robert Munsch) was a bit too old for the majority of the kids, although it’s a great book for story telling and they listened politely. What Did You Put in Your Pocket (Beatrice De Regniers) was possibly a bit too trippy for the kids. It’s a strange book – great visuals , putting pudding in your pocket, but it doesn’t really flow as well as I’d like. I feel like there should be a rhythm (“What did you put in your pocket? What did you put in your pocket? In your pockety-pockety pocket? Early Monday morning…) but somehow I’m not getting it very well. It lent itself well to a great tie-in craft, though: I had the kids make their own “pockets” by cutting out a pocket shape in construction paper, and then stapling a plastic baggie to card stock under the pocket shape. It made a transparent pocket which they could decorate then stuff it full of strange things, just like the book. I gave them glitter, feathers, foam shapes, crepe paper and cotton balls. Hm. Might have to post a picture of that one, haha. So, I think they had fun… Wellll, that’s my report for this “Family Fun Day Monday”… tune in next time for “Hilarious Hats and Headwear” (ohhhhh I am such a children’s programming cheeseball).