{"id":282,"date":"2009-07-28T03:31:42","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T03:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/?p=282"},"modified":"2010-01-28T18:57:19","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T18:57:19","slug":"a-day-in-the-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/a-day-in-the-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Day in the Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi, my name’s Melissa, and I’m a Youth Services Librarian at the Arapahoe Library District<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

This is my day on Monday, July 27, 2009:<\/p>\n

8:10am <\/strong>
\nGet 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! <\/p>\n

\"CW<\/p>\n

8:50am <\/strong>
\nAll ready for storytime! Check email and Twitter, add to my to-do list for this afternoon. I also:
\n*Take a Doodle poll to plan meeting times for the IMLS grant<\/a> I’m involved with as an advisor!
\n*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.
\n*Read PUBYAC<\/a>; I forwarded a message about gaming programs for 21+ year olds to our programming director.<\/p>\n

9:20am<\/strong>
\nHead to storytime room to greet parents! <\/p>\n

9:30am<\/strong>
\nFirst 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. <\/p>\n

10:15am<\/strong>
\nSet up room for second storytime; record attendance in 2 different places, one paper, one electronic! <\/p>\n

10:30am<\/strong>
\nSecond storytime! This is the same as the 9:30 show. <\/p>\n

11:15am<\/strong>
\nRecord 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. <\/p>\n

11:30am<\/strong>
\nStop 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. <\/p>\n

12pm<\/strong>
\nI’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 <\/a>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! <\/p>\n

1pm<\/strong>
\nOK, 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. <\/p>\n

1:30pm<\/strong>
\nWrite 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. <\/p>\n

2pm<\/strong>
\nI 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! <\/p>\n

2:25pm<\/strong>
\nI make sure I’m prepped for my 4 meetings and appointments tomorrow:
\n*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);
\n*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;
\n*pull out training notes for LBS class for meeting with our Literacy Librarian (at branch 3);
\n*print map for the meeting (in downtown Denver) with other committee chairs of Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy<\/a> and another agency, about their possible participation in a grant proposal we want to write for next year’s LSTA grant<\/a> cycle.<\/p>\n

3pm<\/strong>
\nNow 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. <\/p>\n

4:45pm<\/strong>
\nI start to wrap up and get ready to go; check email and Twitter one last time, and head home. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-librarydayinthelife"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2LHEP-4y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/melissa.depperfamily.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}