Today was the second to last day of my internship. My days have more or less fallen into a pattern. I arrive and process some ILL requests online, emailing those whose requests cannot be filled due to it being a recent publication or the fact that they have exceeded five outstanding requests. After that I went on the phones and answered a few questions; nothing terribly exciting.
I periodically worked on my display for the coming month, which is going to highlight the science collection. I spent a long time trying to find a ready-made sign that detailed the parts of the earth, but I wasn't able to find one suitable. Perhaps I didn't look in the right places. I *was* able to find a nice and colorful periodic table as well a diagram of the solar system. I'm trying to throw in some physics and earth science, since I know I'm going to be biased towards biology and chemistry.
Went to lunch, came back, and I did some weeding in the sports section. It's not as long as the cookbooks area, but not nearly as many have gone missing. It's always interesting to me to see which areas of the collection are heavily used. In the sports area what would be called the general information area, I suppose, was very heavily weeded, while titles on specific sports didn't get weeded as much. I suppose people only care about their particular sport and less about the sporting world in general?
After that I went online and did some virtual reference for the Ask a Librarian service. I had a few good questions, but I was again frustrated by my lack of access to other system's databases since they had failed to update their information on the Ask a Librarian website. After that the night was quiet, and I spent a long time reading old minutes of staff meetings, which are always fascinating to me. I did manage to have a really nice reference interaction with a woman who needed materials for a literature project. At the time all of the reference computers were busy, so went over to the reference stacks and actually used an index for Contemporary Authors. I actually used it wrong, failing to notice the difference between the new and old contemporary authors series, but thankfully a computer opened up and I was able to show her our Literature Resource Center and the Biography Resource Center. I also showed her how she could access them from home. She was so thankful! It left me with a big smile on my face.
And that was my day!
I arrived at 8am and left at 9pm, totalling 12 hours.
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I thought I had read your coments from last week, but now I see that I had not. Glad you had the "real" reference question about authors and literature criticism. BTW, the patrons can also access the databases from the OPACs, and there are I think 2 more dedicated database computers in the Serials Dept. (however, I'm psyched to hear that all the database computers were in use!)
And you learned something about the print volumes, as well, and got an appreciation as to why we might still consider keeping print resources (when all the computers are in use, for example)
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