Staff Association

Brenda is the staff association person at my branch.

And this is the last orientation blog post I'll be making!

IT Room

The troubleshooters at my branch are Brenda and Cindy.

The IT tech is Sherry.

And a CCPL wiki is the Summer Reading Team.

Operations

The most fascinating thing I learned about operations was that Scott has the best job in the entire system and that 77,000 items were processed by technical services in the last year!

Facilities Manager-Tom Sheets
IT Manager-Bob Kuntz,
Technical Services Manager-Elaine Adkins

Outreach Room

I saw the PowerPoint on the programing philosophy. Since I serve on the Summer Reading team and have done numerous story times I mostly already knew about the aims of programming, what's considered a program and so forth. However I thought the PowerPoint was very complete and helpful to somebody new who didn't know a lot about programming.

Booking a Meeting Room

I've booked the meeting room for all of the children's programs since I started. Its simple to book and quick. I really like the feature to book multiple dates for the same time, very helpful for booking it for storytimes. I already know how to delete the booking (or I think I do anyways). I called ILL and left a message. I believe you have the patron email or call ILL in order to delete it.

One thing I learned...

One thing I learned in the External relations room is that its all right to ask to call a reporter back so you can gather together what you plan to say.

Meeting Someone New

Somebody new I've met recently is Sam Eddington the new Adult Services Supervisor here at Mt. Airy. A couple of things I've learned about him are that he's in a band and used to work at a very small town.

Shelfari

Just wanted to blog about how wonderful Shelfari is. I LOVE it! I am using it to keep track of books to do reader's advisory, to plan what I'm going to read next and to plan for book talking with the others who'll be also book talking. Its a great resource since it gives you a way to organize books into three catagories: reading, plan to read and read. Library Thing doesn't offer this wonderful option, which I find very helpful to keep track of what I want to read in the future and books that I've already read. In addition you can give your books tags including mass tagging books. I tagged my books according to the age group that they were most appropriate and then further broke them down into tags for things like sports, non-fiction, family or orphans. I love Shelfari!

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

Winding Down

My LATI experience has been winding down. I've finished all the assignments except for the things for the final project and things are coming along nicely for it. I've received feedback on a lot of the assignments and it was all positive. I am shocked at how close to the end of my LATI journey I am. It's gone by very quickly although I do feel like I've learned a lot about library resources.

Wii Meeting

On Tuesday I got to attend a meeting of the Woodbine Rec Council who funded the purchase of our Wii. The branch manager and I talked about what we were doing with the Wii and then let the members try it out. Although most were reluctant a couple brave ones did get to play a few games with the Wii. I think they enjoyed this presentation and they seemed pretty happy with the Wii.
Everything for LATI is coming along in a timely manner although it does feel a little bit much right now with so many deadlines not very far away. I am surprised how far along I am in the LATI journey the time has flown.

Time to Relax....a bit

I finished all my basic reference resource reviews! All 22 of them have been reviewed. It was a really good experience since it showed me new resources that I hadn't used before and have already used since I first started exploring those resources. Now that I've done that and there is a bit of a break for LATI I have time to relax and throw together a couple story time boxes and hopefully shift everything in the J non-fiction section so I can interfile the rest of the J reference books. But the holiday break is nice. I am very excited about Christmas and some of the gifts I got for certain people.

A Whole New Mind

If a patron asked me about the book this is the summary I would give them:

It's a look at the direction of the career market of the future and what skills will be most rewarded. The book also explains which type of person, left brain or right brain, would most likely possess those skills.

My questions for Daniel H. Pink from each chapter are:

Chapter 1-Do you think there will one day be a computer with right brain abilities?
Chapter 2-What about left-brain jobs that need to be done in person like the computer repair done by geek squad?
Chapter 3-Don’t we always need some left brain and right brain people such as painters during the industrial age or politicians in the more left brain directed past?

Community Directory

A few months ago there was a quiz on the Carroll County Community directory. So I got acquainted with the directory then however the community directory module for LATI was a nice refresher and had me check out some additional directories although the Carroll County Community Directory is my favorite. The Maryland directory was pretty easy to use but it just seemed like the Carroll County one brought up more pertinent results more of the time. I do like the multiple county search function though. Being located on the border of four different counties a lot of times people don't want to go to to somewhere in Carroll county for a service. This would be a great way of showing them options available in the area but not limiting oneself to county borders. I did not like the Memphis, TN directory. It was confusing and you had to sift through a lot of information to get the desired results.

LATI Days

On Wednesday I had the programming day of LATI. Although I thought the information that was presented was good being from the same county as the presenters meant that I'd heard most of it previously. But I think it was important to include. I would have liked more on teen programing since I'm always trying to get ideas to do for that.
I enjoyed going to the central branch of Enoch Pratt Free Library. For starters the library is fun to look at especially the ceilings and lobby. Its a very impressive building. However I also learned a lot about things I can take back to my branch. I grabbed a ton of their reading lists for YAs to help with reader's advisory questions. They were very nicely broken up into genres, interests and a special short books list for the reluctant reader. I also am excited to learn they get public viewing rights for a lot of their movies (with the exception of the big Hollywood ones) so it might be possible to do a movie night or something for teens without having to pay for the public viewing rights. I found how they filed everything very interesting although I think it would be confusing with all those departments overlapping in certain areas. And it could be even more confusing if you have a patron that isn't exactly sure what they want. In the afternoon I went to the workshop Mother Goose on the Loose. It was very fun and gave me some new ideas to do at story time although I mostly do story times with older kids.

Wii Staff Play

Today I introduced some of my fellow staff members to the Wii. Everybody loved it naturally and had a lot of fun playing Wii Sports. I am really impressed by this game system and can't wait till I get to run a program for it for teens. I had the staff sign up just like the teens will and it went pretty smoothly. And there was a scramble in one of the groups to pick the game. Here are some pictures of the staff playing on the Wii.

Basic Reference Module

Well I completed my first reference resource review. I was really happy that this module had lots of step by step help and the example of a reference resource to walk me through it. I also really appreciated Honore's feedback on my resource. While I understand there isn't a single right way to do it I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track. I'm beginning to think about other resources that I would want to include in my top ten and review in general. A children's reference book on Native Americans keeps popping into my mind since its VERY helpful for school reports because it has a paragraph on a whole bunch of tribes.

Right Brain/Left Brain

I finished reading the first three chapters of the book A Whole New Mind and it was very interesting although most of the general left brain/right brain stuff I'd heard before. Having majored in Early Childhood Education at TU I really got a lot of learning theories and all of that. So left brain/right brain isn't new nor is multiple intelligence, which I actually did a research paper on at one point. The book A Whole New Mind though with its focus on how right brain might come to play a better indicator in job security was very interesting.
The whole left brain/right brain makes me think of my future in-laws. My fiance is in the computer field working at a help desk and majoring in Computer Information Systems at TU. He also has decent people skills and so his right brain isn't left unused. His older brother however is very, very intelligent but his people skills are very much lacking. He has the right skills to work in the computer field but he doesn't interview or deal with people very well. So he's been working in a bagel shop. He's definitely using primarily his left brain. Their other two biological siblings use more of their right brains. His younger brother is and English major and always has had lots of friends. His youngest sister wants to be a music major and plays a variety of instruments. In his family it seems to go from very much left brained to much more right brained as they go down the line. Its very interesting. His father is in the computer field and his mother is a seamstress and very artistic. My fiance's nephew is only five months old but showing signs of being left handed so I'm guessing he's going to be one of the more creative ones.
I think some left brain jobs will be kept around in the United States because help desks and such can only do so much from across the ocean. We need people who can go out and fix the computers in person and those people can't be in India. Although I do see the demand for more right brain people then before as our society progresses. But I don't think it'll ever be a "well your left brained so I don't think you have much hope for ever having a decent job" or anything. Which it sounded like the author was projecting in the distant future.

LATI

I already posted about my project mostly because I was so excited about that but I thought I should have a post about my first few weeks doing LATI. I've been super busy not just with LATI but with other stuff too. So I hadn't gotten a chance to reflect yet on any of the first weeks assignments. For starters I'm already done 23 things and I'm really glad because its nice to already have something finished. The confidentiality and wild card modules (which are pretty much the same thing) were a nice intro to some procedures and ideas. I disagreed with the Crossman article about VIVO technology. The written language will always be sticking around. As we create new technologies written word is very important.
However the article about the Bookless Libraries did have some good ideas. I graduated from Towson University in 2006 and I rarely used the library for its books while I was a student there. And if I did use the library for books it was for a major research paper that required 2 book sources. Mostly I used the journals, which I accessed from databases while in the comfort of my dorm room in most situations. I did use it for a video I had to watch for class that I couldn't find anywhere else and some teachers would have extra study materials only available at the library. I didn't even use the computers that much because Cook Library was a decent walk up a lot of steps from the Union and most of my classes and since most of the buildings had computer labs or rental laptops if I needed to use a computer I would just use one of those instead of making the hike.
All the information about confidentiality was good to know but a lot of it I had already learned when I started or during the past year since then. But it was still good to read about it since its such an important subject. I keep my county's What to do if Law Enforcement arrives asking for records on my desk so its easy to grab in case that were to happen.

LATI Project

I talked to my Branch Manager and she helped me come up with a project for LATI. I'm going to do the Wii programs that I was already planning to do but really try to promote them and make them a sucess and come up with some creative ideas to keep all the kids busy during the programs. I'm really excited about this project because its going to be lots of FUN!

Putting 23 Things to Use

I created a wiki for my team to discuss options for some money we've generously been given. I used pbwiki and was impressed with the ease of setting everything up. I really felt like I was putting the things I learned in 23 things to use and I'm sure this is just the first of many times that I will use the information I learned while doing those things.