New Experiences

I began my job in November, (although I did work in Academic for four years during college) and I feel like I have a relatively good handle on things. I know the kids, I know the collection, I'm learning more about collection development and weeding, I can run the story times (sort of), and I'm pretty good at trouble shooting.

All of that being said, summer read is driving me a little insane and technically it hasn't even started yet. How is that possible. People are beginning to register for summer read but here in CT we're experimenting with this new online program called Evanced that's suppose to make it easier and more efficient to record statistics. The issue is, in my community a lot of people don't have regular access to computers and we can tell them about this program all we want, but a lot of teens don't really seem to be willing to exert the effort to use the hour of computer time that they get at the library to sign up for summer reading, so I find myself partially registering them, then handing them the keyboard so they can enter a user name and password and it takes more time than it sounds like it does. I hope that if I at least get them to sign up, then it will make it that much easier to get them to log the books that they read.

There are also a fair amount of generous companies in the area. There is a restaurant that gave us free kids meal coupons attached to little awards for kids 12 and under, an indoor water park than has given us tickets, a zoo that has given us tickets, and a ton of other things that I can't even think about right now. We need ways to give these away. It sounds like a no brainer but we want programs and winners attached to these things. We've got some big prizes saved for the big winners at the end of the summer, but there are still all of these little ones to make up and manage. We're thinking about arranging raffles for a few things, but we'd like a few educational program attached as well. For this month I already have two reading challenges set up for various age groups, not to mentions a summer long reading program that kind of bumps heads with the June reading challenge for 12 and under.

We have our big summer kick off on the 15th but we're running into registrations issues because so many people just can't remember to register their kids online and we don't always have computers for them to do it on. I think what I'd like to do (and I'm having this thought as I'm typing this right now) is to set up one of the library lap tops and use it just for summer read registrations and demonstration, why the heck didn't I think about that before.

In addition to planning program around all the new stuff we have to give away, there are the usual library help questions, as well as final projects that kids are beginning so yeah... that's happening.

To top of everything, the other person I work with is still new and I feel so bad because it's like she's literally stepped into chaos. Talk about grabbing the bull by the horns. I knew summer read was a big deal and I knew it would be challenging, but I think part of the shock is because it's almost as if June crept up on me. I feel like it was snowing a few weeks ago.

However, I have hope, if I can change an actors from head to toe in twelve seconds during a live performance (back in my theatre days) then I should be able to get through this... I hope :)