July 24th

Children’s Musicians:

Ella Jenkins: well-known national artist
Nancy Stewart: local artist

Keeping Statistics

The Young Adult Librarian at Ballard has kept a paper and pencil graph of YA circulation statistics for the past six years. She keeps them for the year-end totals and also month-by-month totals so she can see busy trends during different times of the year. The graph is a visual indicator of how YA circulation statistics have gone up. She puts an asterix next to anomalies to explain any large dip or large increase. For example, a dip might reflect the library being closed for two weeks that month. Conversely, a larger than normal increase may reflect when a neighboring library closed, so her library experienced more traffic. Circulation statistics went up the year that non-fiction books began to be cataloged as YA. The horizontal axis has the date. The vertical axis has circulation numbers by the thousand.

I need a study guide…

A woman came in looking for study guides for a test. When I asked her what kind of study guide she said she didn’t know. She had just enrolled for classes at a local community college and needed to study for placement tests in Math and English. She wanted to know if we had any study guides for placement tests. I didn’t understand what kind of test she was taking and so I didn’t understand what kind of study guide she needed. At first I thought she wanted an SAT test book or something like that. The key to her answer lay in the need to study for “Placement tests in math and English”. She was enrolling in North Seattle Community College. We went to the NSCC website, clicked on “Enroll” which took us to “Placement Tests”. In the FAQ for placement tests we found “Is there a study guide for the English Placement Test?” which took us to a COMPASS Review Study Guide. We put a COMPASS Review book on hold for her. She also took home an SAT study book and a Math Review book from the 378.1662 section.