And so it has begun.

My first day was actually Saturday, the 12th, even though I was only there for about 4 hours.  It was good to be able to look around the library and get used to its ins and outs, though it’s a big place and I’ll certainly need more time to get used to it.  It was also great to meet the weekend staff– I was tremendously impressed by how friendly and knowledgeable everyone was.

Before I had come in, the staff had brainstormed various projects I could work on in addition to learning the ropes; the ones that caught my eye were:

• checking the catalog
• gathering and crunching reference statistics
• collection analysis (mainly in fields like literary classics, visual arts, magazines, business reference, and religious material)
• blogging (I’ve allowed this blog to an exemplar for the staff; like them, I’m curious to see how my perceptions will change as I learn more about the field)

Those were four that stuck out immediately– at least at first.  Again, once I become more secure  in what I’m doing, I plan to take up projects, finish them, and take up new ones (e.g., displays, assigning cataloging numbers, marketing, etc.).

After I looked around and got some photos of the facility– which I’ll be changing in the banner every week– I sat down at the reference desk, where I almost immediately had to wrangle my first reference question.  However, I did manage to find a public notary available on Saturday after 12:15pm.  Other questions involved me finding books around the collection– I suspect many patrons feel uncomfortable with the library catalogs because of their inexperience with computers.

I hope to post later today on using Sirsi/Dynix.  I was able to tinker a bit with it between questions, and I have to say– as someone who is used to Millennium at work, Sirsi/Dynix seems to have put their ILS together in a more intuitive and comprehensive way.  I like being able to switch from general circulation to cataloging to serials without having to back out of programs that only allow so many users on the server.  Let’s see how it performs when most of the staff is there using it at the same time.