News & Notes

What fun! In recent minutes I've had two FASCINATING inquiries: one from a homeschooling mom whose son taught himself to read at age 2. Now 4, he reads at about a third-grade level, but has a 4-year-old's sensitivities to scary and/or sad stuff. I feel I did pretty well, but would be interested to know what others would recommend.

Next came a woman about my age, who explained that she recently had a stroke (WAY young for that!!), and was looking for recorded books because she lost some of her capacity to read. She wanted simple story lines but themes that might hold her adult interest. Since I listen to a LOT of recorded books, I had lots of opinions about this--but again would be interested to know what others would have suggested.

Xandi, as a side note--Matt did not appear last night.

I also wanted to take a stab at writing up some notes from our meeting last Friday, which felt (to me at least) sort of haphazard and incomplete. (I know the Queen won't take offense at my saying so: it was more a function of the nature of the day than a leadership issue--we were all running on empty by the time we sat down together.)

Anyhoo: first order of business was a discussion of how proud we are of the contribution the J. Dept makes to WPL and Jason's excellent idea to invite any interested staff people to come check us out!!

Next, AF initiated discussion of how we use our "supply boxes." It was agreed (??) that there is already, to some extent, an expectation on our patrons' part that we have these materials for use in the library for pleasure and not just for homework purposes. The markers will no longer be available at the desk, and Marcia will refresh the contents of the existing supply boxes, which should not be proactively offered to our patrons, but only given out in response to requests. (Could I suggest that we keep the rulers separate, since they are rarely requested but they get muy mucho marked-up by all the crayons, etc.? Should I replace the stubby crayons with nice new ones, or do we not care--since our patrons clearly don't?? If the rulers stay separate, we could even get smaller boxes in which to give out supplies, and they wouldn't be so tricky to fit into the file cabinet--may I?? I can't resist noting that a 2-second glance into each box as it is returned is helpful to sort out crayon-wrapping scraps and/or locate scissors gone astray, etc.)

AF has arranged that the Webster Town Attorney will be contacted with regard to whether we incur any liability by posting kids' photos online from our programs.

Discussion then turned to communications snafus, with an emphasis on Marcia's brain blip last Wednesday, when she failed to use Touch-n-Go OR the blog to let others know she would be arriving late, AND she forgot that Xandi would need to hand off reponsibility for volunteers at their shift change. (Apologies again.) The culprit promised to be more intelligent in the future, and not make her boss responsible for passing on messages of this nature. Also, it may be useful to avoid having volunteers "bridge" shifts, when future volunteer arrangements are made. If volunteers arrive and no one is available to supervise them at the proper time, they should report to the reference desk to hang out until supervision arrives... Jason also requested that volunteers be clearly instructed not to touch ANYTHING in the story room that does not directly pertain to the work they are doing.

Both Jason and Adrienne again expressed concerns over whether having volunteers doing craft prep is worth the administrative headaches they cause. Xandi and Marcia both felt that they ARE useful, and that steps could be taken which would put more responsibility in the hands of the desk-workers supervising the volunteers, which in turn might help remove administrative concerns on the part of J&A. (Xandi, were you hoping to present a database method of managing our needs?)

Marcia inquired at some point whether an ordinary paper calendar might not be a good place to note which volunteers are coming (or not coming!) on a given day, and to prioritize the tasks they need to do while here--including helping set up the story room for programming. No one else loved this idea, but Marcia announced that she plans to get her OWN calendar then and PTHHHHHBBBBbbbb! to all the rest of you.

My notes from our meeting fizzle out at about this point, but AF was on the verge of inviting us all to brainstorm about revamping the layout of the Children's Room. (I hope she will comment at length on this, or try a whole new post.) Instead of using "band-aid" approaches to improve this or that in the room--since we all know A. is allergic to band-aids!--she is working on trying to envision better ways to use our whole space, to develop a well-defined goal to work towards in increments. Stay tuned.

And then there are "Questions Marcia Wanted to Ask But Which We Didn't Have Time For at the Meeting": First of all, she hopes to clean up the storage room soon, and wants to know if she may also tackle the shelf in our cubicle? (There's stuff there that we never use because we don't even know we have it!) She also thinks the little truck and train throw rugs look pretty scruffy. Is it time to throw them out yet? There is a box back in my cubicle labled "Maisy's Playhouse." Is this waiting for some special occasion to be put up? Could we use posters/fabric to better mask the bookshelf framing that rises up over the stacks attached to our walls? Could I volunteer to help make sure that Webster Parks & Rec, and the Webster School District, both link to the WPL homepage and/or wplkids? And lastly, could we all take more care to check the poor, forgotten "Gazebo Checklist" (a copy of which is on the gazebo clipboard, just ACHING for your initials), since I suspect that this list helps us maintain general cleanliness, which is a first step in improving our "merchandizing" efforts--??

Respectfully submitted,
MW

P.S. I *still* love working here. Penny, thanks again for those nametags!!