My Second Library Placement

If you do not already know, since September 2017, I have been a college student in a library and information technician program online through distance education. The end of the program involves two library placements. I previously blogged about my first library placement that I did at an academic library. I just finished my second library placement on Tuesday, which I did at a public library, and I am now finished my entire library and information technician program! I am so excited to be done my program and have realized that I definitely made the right decision of choosing this program. Library work is well suited to me. I have seen this through my enthusiasm in both my courses and my placements. I love it so much!

At my second library placement, I had both similar and different experiences than my first library placement but even the experiences that were similar were still a bit different. Here is what I did:

Health and Safety: I went through health and safety training that employees and volunteers must complete. This involved a tour of the library, a staff member explaining health and safety procedures, and online courses (videos, text, and quizzes) with certificates.

Cataloguing and Physical Processing: I catalogued CDs, DVDs, fiction books, puzzles, and board games. I did physical processing for books, CDs, DVDs, audiobooks, puzzles, and board games. I also had to check the catalogue for DVDs that were donated to see if any of the library branches had them, which ones had them, and how many had them.

Archive Digital Folders: I organized newspapers that were digitized from microfilm into folders by week since they had already been organized by month.

Interlibrary Loan: I learned about how the interlibrary loan system usually works since, at the time of my placement, interlibrary loans were suspended, and I got to experience how it was working at the time. I still got to work with returns, reserves, check ins, shipping, shelf checks, patron requests, processing, and stats despite the suspension which is a lot more than I thought I would get to do.

Children's Collection: I learned about ordering/purchasing books and DVDs for the children's collection through various companies and even got to actually order some, with help from the staff member in charge of the children's collection, of course.

Weeding: I weeded the teen fiction section and the adult graphic novel section using lists that were given to me by staff. The books were either on the list because they had been checked out a lot and may not be in great condition or they had not been checked out in a while. I removed the books from the shelves and then went through them with staff members to see if any were worth keeping and withdrew the rest that the library wanted to get rid of and learned the different fates of withdrawn books. They may be just thrown away or they could be donated to a school that wants them or sold through library book sales or a specific organization that helps libraries sell books.

Technology: I helped update children's apps on iPads by restoring the purchases for all of them.

Makerspace: I learned about the different tools and aspects of the makerspace and how the makerspace functions when it comes to using tools and setting up workshops.

This library placement was so much fun and the staff were amazing. I got to have experiences in so many different departments and see just how much work goes into running a public library. There are so many details and it is fascinating how the work is distributed among staff in a large library. I am so glad that I had this experience and now feel even more confident with library work.

Cheers,

Kaylie

My First Library Placement

Since September 2017, I have been a college student in a library and information technician program online through distance education. It is a two year program that I will be finished with at the end of May. Part of the program involves two library placement and I finished my first placement earlier this month. It was at an academic library that I had previously visited for an assignment so I already knew some of the staff. It was amazing and so much better than I could have ever hoped for. I went in with so much anxiety but left with so much confidence. The staff there were so nice and helpful. I had so many different experiences and tried so many different things. I got to see which parts of library work I like best and which parts I need to improve on. This placement made me see just how right library work is for me and made me want to pursue it even more.

Here's what I did during my placement:

Displays: I created posters with inspirational quotes for a positivity board, put up and took down event posters, set up a board for a smoke-free day at the college, and created two book displays including a Summer Romance fiction book display and a job-hunting non-fiction book display.

Cataloguing:I catalogued fiction books, non-fiction books, periodicals, and even supplies/tools (rulers, phone chargers), doing physical processing for them as well, and learned how DVDs and CDs are catalogued.

Weeding: I gathered books from a list that a staff member created, let the staff review them for books that might want to be kept, and then removed the rest from the catalogue.

Book selection: I looked through publications like Library Journal and BookList to understand some of the ways that libraries select items for their collections and I also added selections made by another staff member to the library's main selection list.

Front desk circulation/reference: I sat at the front desk and checked out items, returned items, booked study rooms, and helped students with computer/printer issues.

Book repair: I learned how to and helped replace the plastic protective book jacket for a book that needed a new one.

Archival: I digitized documents for the college's archive by scanning them and saving them to a USB memory drive and then named each one with information that would make it easy for searching.

Computers and printers/photocopiers: I helped students with issues on the computer as well as with printing and photocopying.

Library policies and practices: I read documents about the library's collection development policy and weeding practices as well as a list of reference definitions. I also read some library technician job descriptions.

Along with controlling my anxiety, the most difficult part of the placement was dealing with computer and printing issues. However, it was a bit out of my control because there were some computer/printing issues that were not the norm and were specific to the computers in that library. The highlights of my placement were helping a staff member that I was with help some students who spoke French since she did not speak enough French to be able to help them, cataloguing one of my favourite fiction books to add to the library's collection, and getting to practice my readers' advisory skills to suggest a specific book for a birthday present for a staff member's wife.

As I said before, this was such an amazing experience and I look forward to my next library placement!

Cheers,

Kaylie