Another Day At The Desk...

School started back this week in our area, so it was a pretty quiet day, though we did have a few people trickle in and out with younger kids before school let out, then some with older kids came in afterward.  I was a little disappointed Batman didn't pay us a visit today :)

So today was a good day to get some housekeeping done.  After I cleaned up the few puzzles and blocks that were in the floor, I straightened the shelves and filled displays.  Next I withdrew a cartful of picture books the children's librarian had weeded.  I always feel bad for some of them; there are *SO* many picture books published every year and there are always some good ones that just get overlooked and end up getting weeded eventually because they just don't circulate.  I came across one in this batch called Zoom! by Diane Adams, who is apparently a not so well-known author that writes primarily Christian romance.  Zoom! is a cute picture book about a little boy and his father going to ride a roller coaster.  The story is cute, as in the beginning the little boy is scared, but by the end it's the father who decides to sit it out while the boy gets back in line for another ride.  The text is short and has lots of action and expressive, descriptive words and I could immediately see it being a fun read-aloud.  So I decided to rescue it and give it a second life in the outreach collection for the storytime bus :)

My next bit of housekeeping was the missing list, which is as the name implies, a list of all the books in our collection that have been marked missing.  My job was to make one more effort to physically locate these items on the shelf, as sometimes they have turned up in the meantime.  This happens because sometimes patrons accidentally take books without getting them checked out, they've been miss-shelved, someone just didn't look hard enough, or the item may have been a little slow at getting back to us after being returned at another branch.  But the majority have been lost or stolen, so checking the missing list can sometimes be a little depressing, especially the DVD's.  We check-in the ones that turn up, and withdraw the ones that still remain missing after several attempts to locate.  But, I like a challenge, and pride myself in finding things others couldn't.  I think I look a little harder, and I'm pretty good at guessing where something might have been miss-shelved.  I found about a dozen items in the Easy and Juvenile collections, and then was pleasantly surprised to find several items in the Teen section as well, even some graphic novels and manga! 

I still had a few patrons who had questions or needed assistance with check-out as well, and I was also able to run the "send list" - the report listing items patrons have requested from our collection that need to be sent to other branches - and located all those items and checked them all in and had them tagged, sorted and ready to go to their respective destinations, plus issued myself a program card. So even though it was quiet, it was a very productive afternoon after all.