The Mystery of the Children's Mystery Book!
My first day was exciting. The very first question I had was from a young girl, maybe 10 or 11 who had a stack of books in her arms. She came up to the desk and didn't look directly at me, her eyes kind of traveled around like they were following a lazy butterfly. She said, "I sure do like a good mystery and I was wondering if you could show me a good mystery." Pamela started to ask her if she had read some titles and she hadn't read any of them.
She suggested the Chasing Vermeer, the Sammy Keyes mysteries - a girl detective, and the Hannah West series which is written by a local author. Pamela walked her over to the children's fiction shelves to see what we had. There was a Hannah West story and Pamela booktalked it right on the spot! The girl enthusiastically said, "Wow, that sounds good! I really want to read that!"
As we walked away I said, "That was cool!" and Pamela agreed that that kind of enthusiasm is very gratifying. She said that if your knowledge of a certain genre isn't too strong (for example of the girl had already read the mysteries that you knew) I could have gone to a link on the SPL webpage for Children's Booklists.
Magazine Indexes
We did a comparison of two magazine index databases: "General Reference Center Gold" from Thomson & Gale and "Proquest". I'm familiar with Proquest from my work at the UW. We did a comparison of what Consumer Reports magazines General Reference Center had compared to Proquest. Proquest did not have the most current 3 months while GRC didn't have full text access to the most current 3 months but they had citations. After 3 months they both had full text.
Collection Management Debates:Inter-filing vs. Special Collections
As Pamela was giving me a tour of the Ballard Library children's section she mentioned how different libraries will shelve the collection differently. For example some libraries will inter-file J Non-fiction with the the adult non-fiction and vice versa. There's all sorts of pros and cons which I'll go into on another post.
World Language "Magnet Collection"
Books in foreign languages are expensive to purchase and to catalog. With tight budgets some branches only had small world language collections. A decision was made to take the smaller collections out of some branches and only have the collections at a few select branches. Pros and cons: A person who doesn't speak English very well has to figure out how the catalog works and find their book and place it on hold. Not very freindly. They're giving the idea a year to see how it works out.
Automotive Questions:
Patrons have the option to use Chilton's or use the automotive database called "All Data" where you can print out pages and take them home!
Book Groups
Washington Center For the Book supports book groups by supplying multiple copies of one title for a two month check-out. This service is for SPL only but it's really cool! More later...
