Shadowing on Thursday

          Today I got to shadow Marianne. It was very interesting. I finally got to see, in detail, what she does. I always had a vague idea - a mysterious thing called "cataloguing" - but finally I got to learn firsthand. There's a whole system in SIRSI that she uses & basically she denotes how to find the book in our library. She used to have a scanner for barcodes but now she puts them in manually (except she's very adept at it from practice so it doesn't actually take long and she doesn't need to look at the keys). A lot of the time, other libraries already have a book in the system. So if their information matches ours we can just use that, and if not, we usually just need to make minor changes. Sometimes, our library is the first to put a book in the catalogue. Marianne marks down every time this happens for reference. Finally, I saw actually creating information for a book. I don't think I understood it all - you had to search online and import things and make sure there was enough information - but it was still cool to learn about.

          PS- Oh! I also sat in on a program the library was offering for children. It was Shakespeare for kids and was quite cool actually. A lady came in a explained the plot of "Much Ado About Nothing" using paper plate puppets. After it, I really wanted to read the play. She engaged the children as well at times, making them act out scenes. It was a fun and enjoyable program.

Thursday - Global Edit

          Today was pretty good. I helped out in the children's section again. It's amazing how messy it can get. Not surprising though - they're kids. There was more reorganizing today with labels. I had to change old summer reading list books to regular books. This entailed taking off some stickers, doing a global edit (more about that in a second), and reshelving them in their regular places. Now, the global edit was something new. It wasn't very complicated, but it was quite helpful. Basically, I used the computer to change all the old summer reading books to regular books located in the children's section. I used the library's system (SIRSI, I think it's called), went to cataloguing, and found "global edit". I simply commanded the computer to modify the item type - "schoollistp" (summer reading books) to "book" - and the location to "Children's". Then I just had to scan the barcodes and they all changed.