Date: Monday, May 22
Time: 7-9pm
Hours: 2
Total Hours: 2
Today was the first day of my Culminating Experience internship at Perry Public Library. It began with a quick tour of the library from full-time circulation clerk Therese. The library was very quiet and mostly empty this evening. The only program taking place was a ukulele club using one of the library’s meeting rooms.
I spent my two hours primarily on the reference desk. I spoke with part-time reference associate Emily, who has recently enrolled in the Kent State SLIS program. Emily began volunteering at the library in 2014 and later became employed as a circulation substitute. In August of 2016, she began in her current role. Her responsibilities beyond answering reference questions include ordering adult fiction and managing ILL requests.
Emily and I discussed Library Snapshot Day, an ALA advocacy project used to document a day in the life of a library. Perry will be conducting Snapshot Day at Saturday’s Summer Reading Program kick-off event. A iPad using the SimpleBooth app is already available to create photobooth-style pictures, which can be emailed or texted to patrons. On Saturday, there will be a printer available for patrons to print out their photos.
Therese also gave me a thorough tour of the circulation workroom. I also spent time exploring the library. The library building and collection is sizable for such a small community, but appear underutilized by community member. For much of the night, there were more staff members than patrons in the library. I will be interested to see if and how much library usage varies based on time of day.