I finally met my supervisor! She’s going be a great person to work with. Jen is in charge of fiction selection, so we went over that process. Fiction selection involves standing orders for popular authors as well as selecting books based on reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus. We also discussed the maintenance of the collection, including ‘weeding’. ‘Weeding’ is basically what it sounds like – removing books that are rarely checked out or in poor condition. Maintenance also includes changing call numbers for consistency (e.g. moving a book from Fiction to Mystery, because the rest of the series is shelved in Mystery). We also discussed the specifics of building a Jewish Fiction collection, which is a popular section with the Heights’ Orthodox population.
We also worked on Jen’s Home and Garden display. This is a certain art to creating a good display – the books chosen need to be relevant and attractive to patrons. I’ll be helping with Jen’s next display as well as possibly organizing one myself by the end of the summer.
Jen is also in charge of the circulating eReaders. The Heights Library was the first library in Ohio to have circulating eReaders. This program, of course, has its own issues – not returning/damaging devices, deleting eBooks, trying download new eBooks, etc. It’s an interesting program. We’ll also be discussing Overdrive, which is the platform a lot of libraries use for eBooks that patrons can download to their own devices.
I’ll be back at the library on Thursday, probably shadowing on the floor. This continues to be something I’m interested in and wanting to learn more about.