I get a lot of questions from family, friends, and strangers as to what I actually do all day. People just don't realize all that goes into our jobs. One of my favorite things to do is to have a job shadow, whether my godchild for Take Your Child to Work Day, a practicum student, an intern, or a teenager thinking about this as a career. I like to tell people that it is a great career for anybody who wants to do a lot of different things!
Just for fun, here is what I did today:
8:15 a.m.
Arrive at work. My workday starts at 8:30 a.m. 3 days a week. I work one night and one weekend day (Friday or Saturday). I drop my lunch in the refrigerator in the break room, check my mailbox, and head upstairs to the children's department.
**For some great morning fun, we play 2 songs every morning over our loudspeaker. It really gets you going and starts the day off right. Requests are taken from staff so you get a great variety.
Once upstairs, the first person in turns on our AWE stations, our reference computers, and the lights in our Activity Room. I head into my office in the staff workroom and check my email on my computer. Being a manager means that I need to stay on top of any situations that may have popped up since I was last in. This could be anything from the ceiling leaking to a problem with a patron.
9 a.m.
I had a Library Olympics program set for 10:30 a.m. Many of our programs require prep work and set-up, but little work during the program. While we have both a Story Time Room and an Activity Room in the children's department, I need to hold any programs with more than 20 people downstairs in our auditorium. This means loading up a cart and transporting my supplies.
Set-up took about an hour. Just as I made it back upstairs to my desk, our teen librarian asked if I wanted to use her Plinko board for a downhill skiing. Of course I did. This meant that I was printing out clip art skiers and taping them to Plinko chips, plus moving the board downstairs.
10:20 a.m.
By 10:20 I had a line outside of the auditorium of kids who were waiting to attend the program. Since I was all set up and the program was mostly self-directed, I let them in early. This began one of my favorite parts of my job-the program! What is nice about stations is that the kids and parents can move at their own pace and do the ones that they want to do. It also leaves me free to help, to play, and to talk with parents about what we do at the library and why we are important in a low key way.
11:30 a.m.
Our programs last an hour so I began to wrap things up. With the awesome car track and Plinko board, the kids would have stayed all day if their parents let them. Now began the task of clean-up. Everything had to be taken down, loaded up, and transported back upstairs.
12 p.m.
Lunchtime! I had an hour to eat, regroup, and recaffeinate before heading upstairs for my desk shift. This is also my chance to touch base with staff members throughout the building to see what is going on.
1 p.m.
At my location, all staff work the reference desk for part of their shift. It is usually a 3-4 hour chunk of time. Where programming is my favorite part of my job, I view the reference desk as my most important part. I see it as if you don't have customers, you don't have a job. Since we are a dedicated children's desk, we tend to do mostly reader's advisory, directions (Where are the chapter books?), program registration, and homework help. That's not to say that is all that we do. With 8 computer stations in our room and 8 in the teen room, we also help with basic computer work and printing. We have an Activity Room with toys so when they aren't cleaned up, the reference desk person goes in for a quick pick up.
Today, it was midwinter break for our local schools, which meant that there were a lot of people in the children's room. There were a lot of requests for Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles. Also, kids were getting a jump start on their genre reading for "March is Reading" month, which meant that I got a lot of questions like "I need a science fiction title with a Lexile between 850 and 1000."
Normally when the reference desk isn't busy, I will work on ordering, writing blog posts, planning future programs, etc. Today I was working on two big tasks. The first was writing newsletter articles for our summer newsletter. Our deadline is March 15 for our May-August newsletter, which means it needs to contain everything summer reading. Being the Head of Youth Services means that it is my job to coordinate and book all outside programs at all three of our locations, then add them to the newsletter. My brain needs to handle writing clever newsletter articles in small doses so I try to only do 1 or 2 a day or they all end up saying the same thing. My second big thing I was working on are details for MiKidLib, which will be at my library on Friday. This included things like alphabetizing the registration list for the registration table, working on a way to coordinate lunch orders from 2 vendors, and signage.
3:30 p.m.
Break time! If we work for 7 1/2 hours, we get an hour lunch and 2 15 minute breaks. I have a hard time sitting still so my break today consisted of me refilling my pop glass and booktaping new board books in the cataloging department.
3:45 p.m.
Back to the reference desk and more work on MiKidLib. I also had a sub cancel a shift in March so I needed to find a replacement.
5 p.m.
The end of the work day. The new reference desk staff came out and I updated them on any issues we had during the shift. I checked and cleared out my voicemail, then headed home.
Back in July a bunch of us showed off how we do story time. Since then my location has changed so I have been doing some trial-and-error methods in the new location. While the planning portion of story time has remained the same, putting it into action has changed quite a bit.
First off, we have a dedicated story time room. This is a great element as our children's room has a lot going on. I tend to explain it as a great adventure for kids, but the story time room has none of the exciting components of the department. By having a separate space without the distractions of the department, kids know that this is the room where they have to listen.
At my last location, I was able to put out a table with kids' nametags on it. A table here would not work as there is no space for it outside the door. Here, I have tried standing at the door and passing them out as kids come in, but this gives me a traffic backup into the department. I have also tried sitting at the front of the room and having kids come up to me to get them as they straggle in, but I miss the shy kids who don't want to talk to anybody. I also miss the latecomers. This is an area where I am still working out some kinks.
This is our Story Time room. It holds 25 kids and their entourage (parents, siblings, etc.) comfortably. What it doesn't have is room for strollers. Those all need to wait outside of the room.
There are benches around the outside of the room where a lot of the parents will sit. I am still undecided on the benches. My big issue is that we run 2 baby times, 3 2 year old story times, and 1 preschool story time. By having benches, you are not encouraging the parent to sit with their child so they are missing out on the parent-child interaction. Then again, when this room was built 10 years ago, story times for babies and 2 year olds were not as prevalent as they are today.
When I perform story time, I sit or kneel at the front of the room. I want to be at the kids' level, but I want them all to be able to see what is going on. I also use a lot of music. What this room is missing is a plug at an adult level. For me to plug in the iPod, the cord has to go to a side wall, which means that I need to block it with both the flannelboard and an extra chair. As we all know, kids find equipment and cords fascinating so I need to remove access to it.
The flannelboard has become a source of big fascination for the kids. When I came in, I was told by staff that they really don't use it other than to hold big books. If you have seen all of my Flannel Friday posts, you will know that I love using the flannelboard and props to make story time fun. What I am missing at the moment, though, is a carpet or mat to go at the base of the flannelboard to create a "no go" zone. Check out Mel's Desk for why this is a good thing.
Books are still faced out on one of the window sills at the front of the room. I am really missing a space that is taller than the kids' hands to put my stuff on, but I make do.
To make it work, I hide my props, stickers, etc. behind the books on the window sill. This way I have half a chance to catch them if the kiddos make a break for my space.
As you can see above, it gets a little more glitchy when I prepare for baby story time. Mine requires a lot of extras, from board book sets to balls to flannelboard parts. The parents are good are helping to keep the stuff on the windowsills, but it still causes a distraction. Most kids, when given the choice between balls or stories will choose balls. Having the balls out in the open is distracting. I am almost thinking of putting them behind the flannelboard and babygating the whole corner.
So that is my set-up at the new place. If you missed out on the first time around, what do you do?
In response to Anne's great post yesterday at So Tomorrow, below is the method to my story time madness.
How We Work It
My colleague (Kara) and I do nine story times a week through most of the year at our branch. I do 2 Music and Movements for 2-4 year olds and 2 2 year old story times. Kara does 3 baby story times (1 0-11 month and 2 12-24 month) and 1 preschool story time (ages 3-6). Then, we both do one school age story time together. On an average week we run 300 people through our story times. Instead of planning 9 separate story times, we grouped them together in ways that make sense. For example, 2 year old and preschool story times have a lot in common. You can use some of the same books, although you would use less for the 2 year olds. You can also use the same flannelboards, rhymes, and poetry. To avoid burnout, 1 of us plans an entire story time session (6 weeks or so) of preschool and 2 year old story times. That person also plans the school age story time. They are responsible for pulling books, making or pulling flannelboards, and finding and prepping crafts for the preschool and school age story times. Since Music and Movement and the baby programs are totally different, I plan all of the Music and Movement programs and Kara plans all of the baby story times. I will admit that this works for us because we complement each other well. I don't know how this would work with a different mix of people.
My Style
I will admit that since I have been doing this for 12 years, I tend to reuse my themes and plans 1x a year. I used to set them up in Microsoft Word and include everything I would need for a theme-books, rhymes, flannelboards (and where they are filed), crafts, poetry, songs, etc. Ever since Melissa at Mel's Desk posted on the ALSC blog about Evernote, I have been posting my plans there. I am loving Evernote because I can access it from any desk with Internet (even from home!). You can also add pictures (of your crafts or flannelboards) and web links of where you found ideas.
After coming up with (or reusing) a theme, I start off by looking for new or different books. I will search our catalog, check my Pinterest account to see what I have pinned on that theme, and check what I have tagged in my Feedly account. If you get stuck, the first place I would recommend checking is Storytime Katie's list of themes. It is an awesome list!
Once I have my list of books for a theme/session, I pull the ones that we have at our location and put the rest of them on hold. I try to start pulling books at least 2 weeks before a story time session begins as we have three locations and often duplicate themes.
After I have pulled my books, I raid my giant file cabinet to look for flannelboards, rhymes, and songs that I have stored. As you can possibly see, I have a large collection. It has gotten to the point where I add in Evernote where I have filed my various flannelboards and rhymes so I can find them again.
Our Story Times
On the morning of story time, we load everything we will need for the morning up on our cart and take it back to our meeting room. Some mornings have three story times. There is also one day where we have only a 15 minute break in between programs so everything needed is taken back to the meeting room first thing.
We use nametags for attendance. These are put out in alphabetical order on tables. As you can see above, we have three separate programs going this morning so there are three separate tables. When we collect nametags back at the end of the program, we add mini stickers to them.
As you can see above, we don't have a separate story time room. We run all of our programs in our meeting room that we share with the public. The room can seat up to 100 chairs or 50 tables and chairs. This gets a little icky when we have a 9:15 story time and the group the previous evening needed 100 chairs. This means we have to add in furniture take-down to our morning duties in addition to setting up for story time. We also have a lot of multi-children families. It is not unreasonable to expect that we need space for 10 strollers in addition to seating for parents, siblings, and story time kids.
With a room this size, we ran into another issue. Having an open room for a bunch of 2 year olds is asking them to run around. There are no boundaries. We solved this by purchasing a carpet from Demco where they sit. Because of the natural rectangle outline, many of the parents will sit along the edge, either with their children or by themselves. This also gives us a boundary for when older siblings attend the program. We can tell them that they can participate, but they have to stay off of the carpet.
For our programs, we register 15 babies or 25 in the other groups. Part of this is due to what we can realistically handle and the other is due to the entourage. It is not unreasonable to expect that in a 25 child 2 year old story time that there will be 60 people plus 10 strollers.
Above is our actual space where we do story time. Personally, I am a big fan of having counters since we have so many young children coming through. It allows me to set up, while being high enough that little hands can't grab things.
While setting up, I will go through our stack of story time books. Since Kara and I work well together, I can trust in the books that she has chosen. What I am looking for are 2-3 books without tons of words on a page for my 2 year olds.
Our big stack gets whittled down to what I am going to use for that particular program. The rest of the books go back on the cart for the next program. I like to prop the books up, because my kiddos are fond of guessing games (plus, they need really obvious clues). We look at the books and guess what our theme will be for the week. You may be able to see our cd player peeking out from behind the books. While I prefer using my work iPod for programs, if we have a lot of programs in a morning, I will use a burned cd with all of our story time songs on it.
The other nice thing about counters is that you can set up your flannelboards ahead of time! As you can see above, I have two flannelboards ready to go. There are also folders of more flannelboards underneath in case I get desperate or we are having a super wiggly day. While we have a story time easel, I don't pull it out all of the time. I use it when I have flannelboards with lots of parts or when the kiddos are going to participate. Otherwise, I will spend the whole 30-minute story time with kids petting the board. I like my handheld boards also because we sit in a rectangle. It allows me to move the board around the room so everyone can see.
I sit at the front of the room, right in front of the counter (kind of on the R square if you can see it above). With the little kids, I do a better job if I am at their height. It allows me to give them a better experience than if I am looming above them. (As a side note, this also puts me right in front of the space under the sink. I am able to catch the kids if they decide to dive under. Yes, that has happened.)
At the end of story time, all of the kids clean up. This means that they put their shakers and nametags back in the box that I put on the floor. Then they all get a stamp. It is the same every week, even though I have a bunch of stamps from when Kidstamps was still in business. The week I thought I would use Spot instead of Clifford, I thought we were going to have mutiny. I use washable blue ink. I have tried other colors, including red, but they just don't show up on kids' hands.
After the program, the shakers and cd player go back in the cupboards under the counter. The stamps and cds go in one of the drawers. At the end of all of the programs for the day, we roll up the carpet and are ready for groups to use the room.
Any questions???
With summer reading approaching for us all, I thought I would share a unique program that I started 6 years ago. It has become extremely popular and now I get asked all year long when we can start our staff summer reading program.
How it all started:
Summer is extremely busy for our library system. To reward/motivate staff in this busy time, I came up with the idea of doing a staff summer reading program. After all, staff can't participate in our regular program for the public.
Funding, Set-Up, and How It Works:
Once I had the idea, I approached our Friends of the Library. I will admit that we have a very generous Friends group. I asked for $100 to fund prizes throughout the summer.
Since we already had dates in place for our kids, teen, and adult summer reading programs, I used those dates for our staff program (which also helps all staff to remember them). We have a 10 week program, so I split up our prize money so $10 a week was passed out. To have the most possible winners, and still have a cool prize, we pass out $5 gift cards to local restaurants. My only requirement for including a restaurant in the program is that you have to be able to reach it from all 3 locations in a 1-hour lunch break and be able to fund most/all of your lunch with a $5 gift card.
While for our kids and teens we count time read for summer reading, for this program we count items read/watched. We wanted our staff to be using our collection, which made them better at readers' advisory. They could read a book or a magazine, listen to a music cd or audiobook, or play a video game. When they finished, they filled out a form and returned it to me. Drawings were run every Monday morning before the library opened.
In addition, we run a Staff Recommends blog on our web site. Personally, I think that it is low on everybody's TBD list. To bring it back to the forefront, we offer an additional entry for every item written up on the Staff Recommends blog.
You may wonder what we do with all of these recommendations. We are able to run booklists off of our web page. I set them up each summer and call them "Staff Recommends for Summer Reading", "Staff Recommends for Summer Listening", etc. As staff members submit their entries, I take any with a 4 or a 5 rating and add them to the lists.
The Prizes:
For the first couple of years, I took suggestions from staff to get the program going. After all, the prizes are for them. You will want to appeal to a wide variety of people-some eat healthy and some eat fast food. Our three most popular choices are Jimmy Johns, Panera, and "choose your own". We have also included Subway, McDonalds, Starbucks, Target, and Dairy Queen.
Issues that have happened:
- We have a lot of volunteers who work at our three locations. We were asked if they could participate. Since volunteers were able to participate in our regular summer reading programs, we did exclude them from the staff one. Now we say that it is for paid staff.
- While it doesn't happen often, there is always one staff member a year who stuffs the entries with a stack of picture books. While on one hand, they are not anywhere near their reading level, they are still using library materials. This makes them better able to recommend items to the public. If you run a program like this, you will want to decide ahead of time what to do in this type of situation.
- Check with the restaurants ahead of time to make sure that they offer gift cards. It also helps if you buy them ahead of time. We have had restaurants stop carrying gift cards right in the middle of the program (Taco Bell and Mr. Pita). In those instances, we offer a "choose your own" gift card.
How it has changed:
Last summer we moved away from a paper program and had everybody log their items online, similar to what the public does (we use Evanced). In addition to being good for the environment, it gave staff a chance to use the program, which made them better able to explain how to work the online portion of our summer reading program to the public. When we moved to an online system, our staff participation increased 300%. This was a big shock to me, but I just love saying it out loud.
We are now in our 6th year and I am very excited to see the results. Personally I am hoping to increase again, but after the 300% last year, it may be a stretch.
If you have ever done a children's story time, you will know that it isn't just about reading books. There are a lot of extras that come into play, from flannelboards to crafts to stick puppets. The problem then is what do you do with this stuff when you are done? Most of us don't have tons of storage and must find the most efficient way to use what we have.
When I started my career 12 years ago, I started by stashing the extras in my desk drawers in alphabetical order by title. This got a very cumbersome very quickly. My colleague and I do 9 story times a week with 5 different themes and 6 different age levels. They all require "extras" for fun and quality programs. I needed to do something different. I pulled out all of our flannelboards from Lakeshore Learning and kept them in the file drawer, like above. The reason that they are separate from the rest of my stuff is that they have bulky stuffed pieces and take up more room.
Somebody on staff was giving away four-drawer file cabinets and we thought this would help with our organization. These hold all of our flannelboards, magnetboards, stick puppets, coloring sheets, patterns for the future, and flat crafts.
Each hanging file folder is labelled with a story time theme, such as colors or babies (see above). Everything that fits that theme goes in that hanging file folder. As you can see above, we mostly use file folders to hold individual flannelboards. There are also baggies or 9x12 envelopes, depending on how small the pieces are.
Each file folder includes the pieces (such as the stick puppets above), the rhyme, and sometimes a pattern if I think I would use it again. The thing that I would recommend if you do something like this is to write down the citation of where you got the rhyme from. It is something that I do now, but wish I started at the beginning (especially for things like Flannel Friday).
Above is an example of parts in a baggie. As you can see, it is clearly labelled as to what it is (the rhyme/book) and what I am going to do with it (flannelboard).
With hanging file folders to hold a subject together, you can see how easy it is to tuck flat crafts and coloring sheets in the back like my ninjas above.
What I like about my filing system is that everything on a subject is together. This is extremely helpful when I go to plan my story times. The first thing that I do after coming up with themes is to check my files to see what I already have. Most of my flannelboard creation time is not done out of necessity, but out of free time. After 12 years all four drawers are completely full (and I still haven't figured out what to do next-maybe some weeding). Now that I use Evernote to keep track of my story time plans and rhymes, I also include a note as to where items are filed. After all, Mouse Paint could be filed under mice or under painting.
If we had more space at our branch, I would definitely ask for more file cabinets-at least 1 more for story time and another for programs. How do you organize your story time stuff?
They happen at least once a year and unfortunately you can't schedule them. Mine tend to come the first week of summer reading or right in the middle of a story time session (you know, those times when you can't take off). What do you do when you get sick? How can you run a program with no voice? Here are a couple of tricks and tips to minimize the damage.
1. Have a back-up plan. Do you have a story time plan written out in case you can't be in the building (the flu does hit all of us and never on convenient days)? Here are two samples of what I have put together for my Music and Movement story time and my 2 Year Old Story Time. My boss and my colleague both know where these are located and can pull them out. They both know where all of my materials are located. While neither of them want to do my story times, they can in a pinch.
2. Have a secondary back-up plan. I know that this sounds funny, but some days, you can't afford the extra staff to run a program if you are already out sick. In this case, I have a staff member pull out a disc of my Lisa's Dance Party songs, put it in the cd player, and just push the play button at the beginning of story time. While this isn't my favorite thing to do, I like it better than cancelling a program. After all, parents put forth a lot of effort to make it to the library. We want to give them the best experience possible on a given day.
3. When you run 28 weeks of story time a year, chances are good that you will lose your voice at some time. This happens to me at least 4 times a year. When this happens to me, here's what helps me to put together a program:
- First, explain to the parents what is going on. Really, it is obvious (after all, if you have no voice, you really can't talk). You will find that they are really supportive in these instances and will take some of the burden of the program off of you. After all, they are happy that the program is still going on. These are the instances where I really feel appreciated. The parents will sing louder and participate more to keep the program going.
- If you have no voice, you really can't read a story. First, I raid our JKIT area which cd and book kits. Are there any that will work for your group? Second, I raid You Tube. With a laptop (or iPad) and a microphone set up, you can let someone else tell the story while you flip the pages. We used this method this week with Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes and Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons. I let Eric Litwin tell the story while I turned the pages. There are also a lot of really good apps out now that will actually tell the story (check out the Sandra Boynton ones for sure). These are great to use in this type of situation.
- This is also a good day to pull out a flannelboard or two. Do you have any that have a lot of pieces (so everybody can take a turn)? How about ones with matching pieces? These are the ones to pull out-many of these will tell themselves with very little words. The kids are still having a great experience and you don't have to talk. Plus, with 30 or so kids each putting a piece up on the flannelboard, this will take up about 10 minutes of your program.
These are just a couple of ideas that help me to put on story times when I am sick. What do you do? The biggest thing that I have found to be helpful is to think outside of the box. This isn't the type of program that I want to do every day. After all, talking is an important early literacy skill. How can you put on a program that is audience-driven?
It's the part of our job most of us dread-weeding time! If you are one of those people who doesn't have much experience with weeding or cringes every time you have to start, here are some helpful hints to get you started (or keep you going).
First of all, weeding is not personal. The world is not going to end because you had to withdraw a Judy Blume book from your collection.
Weeding is a necessity if you want to purchase new items. Eventually you will run out of shelf space.
For us, shelves that aren't totally full tend to circulate better than shelves that are packed full of books. Personally, I think this has to due with the laws of supply and demand-if it looks like somebody is using a section, others will want to also.
There are always some items you will not weed, even if they don't get the stats you want. At our branch we don't weed
award winners (Newbery, Caldecott, etc.), because even if they aren't
checked out, they are frequently used in the building by teachers and
college students.
Decide on your parameters before you look at the section. Otherwise, once you get there it is very easy to want to keep everything and it becomes really easy to rationalize.
You can use different parameters for different sections. After all, every section circulates differently. For example, in our jfic area, a book needs to go out five times in one year. So if it has been on the shelf for five years, it needs to circulate 25 times. In our juvenile book on cd section, it just needs to circ one time. These are numbers that we came up with for our collection through years of trial and error. They may not work for everyone.
Condition of the items is important. If a book is falling apart, if the spine is broken, or if the cover is torn, your customers will not want to take the item home. If it isn't something that you can easily fix through mending, that item should be pulled and either weeded or replaced. A good example of this section is our board book collection. We rarely have to weed due to low circ. It is frequently weeded because of the condition of the books.
You may notice weird things while weeding that you will want to change. For example, we used to have really high numbers of jfic books that needed to be weeded, even though we had space on the shelves for them. We switched the length of time that we keep our new books labeled as such from 6 months to 9 months and this has made a big difference in circulation for both collections.
As a side note, many people suggest displays to keep low circulating titles from being weeded. If this is something that you want to try, you need to be very proactive with it. After all, one circulation of an item will not help most of us. It needs to be more of an ongoing thing. Two ways to make this work are to highlight an entire collection for a length of time, such as poetry in April. Otherwise make your display and keep a list of what you want on that display (we can do this right through our ILS). Then, as the items are returned, put them back on the display. Since most items go out for a couple of weeks, you will want this to be a long-term display of at least a month or two.
For a more comprehensive list, you may want to check out the Sunlink Weed of the Month Archives. They used to highlight nonfiction collections monthly, but now have one big list. A good overview, especially of nonfiction, can be found on the Arizona State Library site. For an interesting take on how much to weed, you may want to check out a presentation from PLA 2010 on relative use statistics.
Last week I attended the Michigan Library Association's Spring Institute. If you live in the Midwest, it is definitely worth checking out! I came out with a lot of notes, new ideas, and networking connections. So what do you do after you get back from a conference?
First, I take the weekend off. While I know that this sounds funny, I just spent the past couple of days attached to my iPad and iPhone, between taking notes, posting Tweets, or connecting with other librarians. I needed two days of tech detox.
When I get back to work, after clearing the mountainous pile of emails and voicemails, I take a look at my notes. Luckily they are already typed up for me (I use the app CloudOn, which connects to my Google Drive account). I start off by adding in program descriptions so I can look at them in the future. I add in anything that I missed, such as web sites. Since I am a big fan of taking pictures of cool displays or ideas with my phone, I add those pictures right into the notes too. Here is what my notes look like. Now they make sense if I pass them on to my coworkers or look at them again in 6 months.
Then it is time to make sense of my random notes and brainstorming. Sometimes programs spark other ideas that I write down. Above is what my notes look like. As you can see, there is no order to them (some are even upside down)-that is the point of brainstorming.
Finally, what are you going to do with the new information? While listening to programs, everything sounds cool and you are excited to try everything. Once you are back in the real world, you can pull out what has stayed with you. What do you have the staff/funds/time to put into place? Can you take part of an idea and implement it? This is the fun part! Most of us don't attend conferences and stay in a vacuum-we want to try new things.
