DAILY - WEEKLY REFLECTION

Well today is my last day!! Yipee!

Linda is off today and tomorrow. I'm unable to chat with her and finalize plans for the upgrade. I decided to write her and email and let her know where things stand. I also took the opportunity to thank her for her help this summer through my entire internship.

After writing her I felt the need to send the other department heads a thank you as well. I drafted emails and will wait to send them till later this evening after I'm off work.

I stopped in Susie's office to chat and find out what the next steps are for long range planning; follow-up from the staff meeting we had a couple weeks ago. She filled me in on the process and what needs to take place next. Interesting to find out the library board consists of 7 members all of which are non-elected officials; appointed. I found that interesting. For a fleeting moment I thought of asking if a position was going to become available. Turns out members can only serve 16 years maximum; guess I better wait till I'm retired :)

I feel as if I could work here full time if I needed employment however I'd want to work somewhere other than children's. I could easily see myself as the webmaster or handling ILL or Reference. There seems to be so many clerk positions and not a lot of administrative workload. I'm not sure if folks hide that aspect well or maybe I've not been involved in those matters. I was hoping to get a feel for those types of things however only one day did Debbie share that aspect of her work. I'm wondering when the people actually have time to do their ordering, selection, weeding, and such. I asked Debbie about this and she commented "when I can". I assume this means piece-meal or during the day when I'm working summer school. I know the department heads report to Susie with stats and such. Just tonight when I was in Susie's office Debbie stopped by to deliver the latest summer reading program info.

The numbers she shared were since the 4th of this month. Not quite 20 days into the program. I think there's some time yet for kids to get involved and into the program. However the July 4th holiday is a week and a half away. I'm wondering if next week is the pinnacle of the signups and activity. The entire summer program concludes the last week of July. With the numbers so far, signups are less than last summer's totals. Conclusions remain if this decrease in numbers is due to the new computerized signup / management. In talking with Susie and Debbie they are both confident the program they purchased to handle the summer reading is a good thing. I concure; having seen their previous system. The fact parents can involve their kids without having to drive to the library (at $3 a gallon) to record provides great feasibility / flexibility!

I was able to gather numbers from 06 and 05 on the auction:
Last year there was a statistical increase in every category. More signups, more pages read, more kids showed for the auction, more books read, and more total pages read. If this trend remains this summer's stats should look just as good!

I put my finishing touches on the website tonight. It's a bonafide deliverable. I showed it to a co-worker tonight who'd yet to see it; she was thoroughly impressed. I value her opinion as she's one of the most tech savvy folks in the building. Her main role is lab supervisor and ILL coordinator.

The shift tonight is dedicated to gathering my paperwork and working on this blog / journal. I've had a difficult time finding time after work of a day to complete the article annotations. When I'm at school each day I'm working on "my" library stuff. The one hour off to travel and eat lunch and then report uptown isn't enough to get anything done. When I finally arrive at home around 9:30 each night I've yet to eat dinner and I'm ready to call it a day!

I've got three more articles to crank out. These will be my next few pieces posted on the blog.