Mel’s Desk

Last time around for Bobbi Newman’s Day in the Life project, I kept track hour by hour of a single day. That so didn’t work out this week, so instead I’m going to list the projects I’m currently in the middle of. I’m a Youth Services Librarian, but overall I spend more time on developing programs & services than I do on the floor.

Baby Storytime

I give 2 baby storytimes on Monday mornings. Each session runs about 20 minutes, with 20-30 minutes afterwards of play time together. We just purchased some new Burgeon Group pieces for this branch and they are a big hit with our families already!

This post-storytime playtime is a wonderful opportunity for the parents to connect, for the babies to play, and for me to be available to the caregivers if they have questions about books, child development, library services…anything. Plus I get to play, too! I have been plugging our new “Book a Librarian” service to them and am hoping they can help spread the word through their networks! After storytime, I blog my storytime plan and Tweet my early literacy tip of the day.

LSTA Grant Project for CLEL

I serve on the steering committee for Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy, a group of librarians and staffers from all over the state working to promote early literacy programs and services in public libraries. We received an LSTA grant that will help us expand our website to include a collection of videos, and I am on the committee that has been working to write a Request for Proposal and hire a web development team that can do this piece for us. On Monday I met with a couple other CLEL members and representatives from Rocky Mountain PBS, who are our partners in this grant!

Book a Librarian

Our library district recently launched a Book a Librarian service, which allows patrons to schedule a 30 minute appointment with a librarian, for help with a particular in-depth information need. We are just getting started with this, but response has been strong and the feedback has been positive. We have been getting a lot of requests for help with business reference, genealogy research, and tech support, but I think it’s a natural fit for parents and educators as well & hope we receive more and more interest from those groups.

Tuesday I had an appointment with a mom who had been homeschooling for less than a year. She knew she wasn’t “maximizing” her use of the library and wanted some help with search skills. It was very fun to sit down with her and show her how to run advanced searches in the catalog, how to use our Prospector partnership, and how to access the kids’ databases.

Last week I met with a grandma and grandpa who wanted some tips on how they could support language development in their 2 year old grandson, and they were thrilled with the early literacy information and book ideas I was able to share with them. I am excited by this new service and am looking forward to more awesome appointments!

Nursery Rhyme Time

This week I took my Nursery Rhyme Time program to a preschool Parent Evening for the first time! The preschool needs to have several parent education opportunities a year. On Wednesday after school, I brought everything over to the elementary school and we ran the program from 4.30pm – 6pm. The activities are designed for grownups and children to play together, and to promote early literacy skills and kindergarten readiness, and to model to parents on how they can build language skills in their kids while they are playing together. Here’s a little guy trying to knock down a Humpty Dumpty from his wall with a beanbag. Prompts for the parents include to ask the child what size (big, medium, or small) was the Humpty Dumpty they want to knock down, what color beanbag they are using, how would it feel to fall off a wall, what can you use to put Humpty together again?

We had a really nice turnout and I had some very positive feedback from the teachers and the parents, and the kids! This is my first try taking this program out of the library, so this was an encouraging success!

Literacy Based Storytime Training

The rest of the week will be spent prepping for a staff training class I have coming up. In conjunction with our Literacy Librarian, I teach new storytime providers how to plan and present literacy-based storytimes. My session with these new staffers introduces them to our district’s storytime standards, tips for how to plan and construct storytimes, tips for matching books and activities to appropriate ages of kids, and how to present early literacy tips and information to caregivers during storytime in a seamless way. *whew*

And…

So that’s my week! I love my job because I have a chance to work on a wide variety of projects and I am able to focus on early childhood programs and services. In and around my bigger projects, I am on Twitter, reading PUBYAC, taking reference calls from our call center, answering emails…and this week I’ve been trying to figure out what ten best chapter books to send to Fuse #8 for her poll.

Hi, my name’s Melissa, and I’m a Youth Services Librarian at the Arapahoe Library District, a public library in the south metro Denver area. I’ve worked here for 6 years, and my job has evolved over time from a front-line on-the-desk storytimes-and-programs librarian to…well, something else. I spend more of my time at my desk now, planning staff trainings, doing early literacy advocacy work with a state advisory group, and developing programs and services for the district. I spend some evening and weekend time on the floor and present 2 baby storytimes every week at one of our branches.

This is my day on Monday, July 27, 2009:

8:10am
Get to work, set up for storytime: put out chairs, lamp, CD player, flannelboard, cushions, puppet, books, flannels. Print out and make copies of today’s storytime song sheet; place on chairs with this month’s early literacy handout. Decide final order of storytime today, and write a cheat sheet for myself. Here’s my storytime room!

8:50am
All ready for storytime! Check email and Twitter, add to my to-do list for this afternoon. I also:
*Take a Doodle poll to plan meeting times for the IMLS grant I’m involved with as an advisor!
*Email a preschool teacher I’m working with to set a meeting for August–we’re going to collaborate on some play literacy and parent education events for her classroom this year.
*Read PUBYAC; I forwarded a message about gaming programs for 21+ year olds to our programming director.

9:20am
Head to storytime room to greet parents!

9:30am
First baby storytime…20 minutes of books, songs, and fun. The parents, grandparents, caregivers, babies and I hang out and play and talk for another 20-25 minutes after storytime is over.

10:15am
Set up room for second storytime; record attendance in 2 different places, one paper, one electronic!

10:30am
Second storytime! This is the same as the 9:30 show.

11:15am
Record attendance for second storytime, clean room and pack up storytime. Twitter my early literacy tip for the day; check email. Someone has sent a stumper to all the librarians in the district via email, so I add my two cents. Head to home branch for the rest of the afternoon.

11:30am
Stop on the way out to remind branch supervisor I won’t be back next week since we are heading into our August storytime break; we talk about possibly skipping the May storytime break next year.

12pm
I’m back at my desk at my home branch with a bowl of soup I grabbed from Panera on the way! This is the first time in several days I’ve seen the other Youth Services Librarian who works at my branch; we spend an hour chatting while I eat my soup, talking about books (she’s building a couple of YA book lists) and blogs (we’re both following the conversation about Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar and the cover controversy) and the meeting we are both going to tomorrow morning. Also, she gives me her advance copy of Fire, by Cashore; I give her a slice of the coffee cake I made for our call center team. Fair trade? Anyway, this is one of the best times of my day, touching base and sharing with her!

1pm
OK, back to work. I read my email and send notes to the other Youth Services Librarians from our meeting about our pilot After School program this past spring (for the second time; the first time I send an open-office doc instead of a MS Word doc, d’oh!) and set a meeting with our Literacy Librarian for tomorrow–we need to go over our notes for our all-day literacy-based storytime training next Tuesday. I probably also check Twitter.

1:30pm
Write and schedule three posts for this week for the in-house youth services blog I write for the district. All three of my ideas this week come from my Twitter network! I’m on Twitter @MelissaZD and LOVE it.

2pm
I take a call from our call center; someone needs a librarian to help him find all the major archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. Since I spend so much of my time now in big-picture issues, training and advocacy, general adult reference questions are the hardest part of my job. I am not as quick as I used to be with searching the web, databases, or thinking of resources to try. Fortunately the other Youth Services Librarian comes up with a great link and saves the day!

2:25pm
I make sure I’m prepped for my 4 meetings and appointments tomorrow:
*refresh my memory of our new online training program for the meeting for all the staff who do staff training in my district (at branch 1);
*print out eval sheets for my storytime observation of a librarian doing baby storytimes (at branch 2), part of our ongoing training and mentoring of storytime providers;
*pull out training notes for LBS class for meeting with our Literacy Librarian (at branch 3);
*print map for the meeting (in downtown Denver) with other committee chairs of Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy and another agency, about their possible participation in a grant proposal we want to write for next year’s LSTA grant cycle.

3pm
Now that I’m ready for tomorrow, I spend some time doing work for Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy. This is a group of librarians from all over the state who are working together to advocate for early literacy. I’m a co-chair of the Training Committee and have been running our steering committee meetings this year. I spend some time building our agenda for our next quarterly meeting, which is in a couple weeks. We’re hoping to launch a redesign of our website and I have a few tasks I need to do to help get ready for that. I send a short bio so I can be added to our next LSTA grant proposal. I start to map out what needs to happen between now and November, when we have a couple of things going on at the Colorado Association of Libraries annual conference.

4:45pm
I start to wrap up and get ready to go; check email and Twitter one last time, and head home.