DAILY

Today was my first Sunday at PPL. I enjoy the fact that my hours today count as time and a half. So for 4 hours of work I get to count 6 hours of internship time! I was able to schedule only 2 more Sunday opportunities, one more in May, and one in June; before PPL switches to summer hours. Their switch takes place Memorial Day weekend. The June session is a special all staff meeting to discuss their vision plan. It sounds like a planning session much like an in-service.

I worked with Debbie today who was in charge of the YA department. She's the one person I feel I know best prior to starting at PPL. She and I've collaborated via email and in person a couple times over the Reading Counts quizzes. This made heading into work today a bit easier due to a familiar face.

Debbie had a computer job for me. Essentially I'm creating a web page presence for her YA / Children's summer reading Auction. The kids read and read, as they do the librarians keep a running total of their books. For every 100 books a kid earns a $1 “buck” toward the end of the summer auction. Debbie has shopped for and had donations of toys, gifts, games, and lots of fun stuff. My project involves expanding the consciousness of kids who are reading. Debbie wants an interactive means for kids to see and research the prizes in the auction. Debbie’s asked me to create a page where kids can click on items that are in the auction and see detailed descriptions and cost for each. Essentially she’s hoping kids will check out the prizes online and become motivated to read to earn “bucks” towards them.

I spent my entire four hours today fighting with a computer that had minimum memory installed. To make matters worse I had to work at someone else’s desk. The ergonomics of the desk was not to my liking and I quickly got a stiff neck due to the computer setup. The lack of memory made me wish I was using my own laptop. That way I would be more at ease and could set up show wherever I needed and have plenty of space.

The prizes were located in a different room and every 20 minutes or so I had to walk from the office to the room to shuffle stuff back and forth. I wish I could have worked in the room where the prizes were located; hence my laptop would have been perfect.

Debbie’s organized list was also cumbersome as she used Word to do something Excel could best be utilized for. She had multiple tables combined on a multiple page Word document. I spent a huge amount of time trying to manipulate her beginning document on a limited means PC. Today was a test of my patience; both software and hardware wise.

A co-worker in the department is a PHS graduate. While I didn’t have her in class as a student I had her brother. She was as friendly as she had to be. I was disappointed in how cold she was towards me, I’m not sure why.

There are two main areas where summer prizes are located in the building. The newly purchased goods were all in one room. I was able to get all of those items linked with photos. Of the group there were only 3 items that will need digital camera pictures as I was unable to locate an online vendor that actually sold the item.

The remaining items will be difficult to link to online pictures and vendors as many things were donations and were from non-profit entities.

Debbie demo-ed a new computer software system the library purchased to handle the scheduling of programming and tracking of data. Much like a circulation system this system maintains their programs and allows patrons to sign-up, register, etc. As I understand it this program is also the entity that will track kids’ reading progress throughout the summer.

I’m wondering if Word isn’t the vehicle I should be using for this project. Having just finished L571 I’m wondering if a true HTML editor is something I should be using for the item list. I mentioned to Debbie we could possibly organize the items into categories much like they do at Wal-Mart; which is where several of her prizes I worked on today came from. For example Sporting Goods, Electronics, Games, etc… If we were to do this I can easily see how my organizational design plans would out grow Word’s capability.

I’m only “Debbie’s” person for a couple times. She’s wishing she had me more to herself time-wise so I could devote my time to her projects. I’m hoping to count some off-site hours working on her project towards my total. However from the looks of my summer schedule I’m not sure when those hours will be? There’s only 24 in a day and I gotta sleep sometime!