My Staff Round #2
This bookworm is a continuation of last week, so if you have not read that one, make sure you do. I am sharing the tasks of my staff and basically what a day in the life of a librarian looks like. I have 7 staff members and discussed 4 of them last week: Shirley, Jessica, Sheree and Eric. This week I will share about Kelly, Kate and Brittany.
Kelly is one of my 3 part-time employees, she works 2 days a week, plus a Saturday rotation. Kelly is our Children’s Collection Librarian. She is tasked with ordering all materials for our easy, juvenile and young adult collections. This task is done every month except for December. She has a budget and is not only tasked with the development of the collections, but also the management. This means research and reports. Purchasing items is not like shopping at home, you must create a balanced collection to meet the needs of all of our community. Old books sometimes must be deleted or replaced and as I have mentioned before, this task is ongoing and difficult. Not only does Kelly purchase these materials, but she catalogs the easy and juvenile titles. She is currently the only staff member with a library science degree and we daily make sure she gets her money’s worth on that degree. She is our Dewey reference and bibliography queen and is currently, with Jessica, strengthening our collection. She also is partners with Brittany for our Summer Reading Program. She is in charge of SRP for our older participants. This means during story time in June and July, she is out with the kiddos, and yes she still keeps up with her all her collection and cataloging duties.
Kate is my media and design girl. She manages our Facebook page and our website. She is tasked with sharing all of our events on our Facebook page and she updates our website weekly. Her media tasks extend beyond the internet, she creates our monthly PowerPoint for our circulation TV and also is in charge of our printed monthly calendar. Beyond me sharing our upcoming events at the end of the bookworm, she is responsible for all off our event sharing and promotion. This includes sharing our upcoming events with the area newspapers, radio station and lakefun website. She even makes flyers to post! If you don’t have any idea what is going on at the library, you are not even trying, because she doing everything but calling each of you personally. She is also tasked with rotating the kids’ posters in the easy room and maintaining our laptops, both tasks that require organization and methodic, boring recording. Recently I passed on our ILL management to her, again organization and recording. What I love about her doing all these tasks is that she keeps track and on schedule and I never have to worry about it getting done, she does it better than I could and that is exactly what all bosses want. She also does our displays, good grief, I keep her hopping!
Brittany is our Children’s Service Librarian. She does all of our story times, LEGO Play Days, STEAM, 1000 Books, Summer Reading Program (with Kelly), basically anything that involves our kiddos. We have her participating in our new outreach program which includes doing a story time once a month at a Stover and Versailles daycare. Our outreach also includes our area schools; we are currently using Stover as our pilot location. She has started our first step which includes creating and delivering book baskets to the preschool teachers, we will be adding the Kindergarten teachers in March. In the fall she will add another story time at the school. She creates and presents our story time every Wednesday. This year will be her first Summer Reading Program, she will create and present during the June and July Wednesdays, plus the added Family Fun days that we will have every Monday afternoon. I said she does all things with our kiddos, but in January she started some adult programming. Every 3rd Thursday she presents OUR Story Time, this program is for our special needs adults in our community and involves reading and a craft or activity. Yesterday I watched her make around 30 individual packets of homemade playdough for our adults to take home. She does all these things and is excited about expanding our programming. So perfect! Someone who really loves working with children and wants to do it more!
As I mentioned last week, there are many hats to wear. I have an outstanding staff that makes my job way easier and I cannot stress enough how much I appreciate them. I know I have missed things they do, but hopefully when you see them at the desk you realize their tasks are real, they are not playing solitaire, I promise. But better yet, may we all realize everyone’s job is that, a job. People should respect what everyone does and not be hateful, mean, degrading, or just anything negative about others tasks. You know what I am talking about. Maybe we all need to job shadow each other, you know walk a mile in their shoes. I have mentioned my 2 dream jobs, and if you have noticed I have not pursued them. Park rangers don’t just get to hang out in pretty places and travel bloggers make traveling a job, not sure I want something I love to have the title of “job”. So as always I end with “be kind,” if something looks better than what you are doing, pursue it.