Miss Christine: What I've learned as a new librarian

Sunday, September 11, 2011

What I've learned as a new librarian

Some things I've learned in the past two months:

Worldcat is your cataloging friend.
Use pencil in the lesson plan book!
With a big job - like entering over 400 books into the catalog - divide it out, a little chunk at a time. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
I should have taken a class in copyright.
Have one place to make lists. Either a planner that is always with you, or Evernote. (Or better yet, I'm thinking of buying an iPhone.)
Have one place to put papers. I do most everything digitally, but not everyone is sold on that, so know where you put that paper.
Even if you use multiple computers (desktop at HS library, desktop at elementary library, work laptop, home Macbook), designate one as the default for keeping documents. Better yet, use Google Docs.
Organize emails and online documents with the same folders - administration/collection, elementary/tech, etc.
Use Diigo and Pinterest to keep links - Diigo for text, Pinterest for images.
Twitter is important, but RSS is even more so. It's easy to miss important info on Twitter, but on RSS, it waits for you.
Do preschool storytime! Talk about putting a skip in your step.
Know the names of the janitors and secretaries. Mucho importante! I've been picking up names of teachers pretty well, too. 700 students? Not so much, but a little at a time. I have no idea why I thought it'd be easy to learn everyone's names in a small school - rather than a bigger school where kids wear nametags and I wouldn't be expected to know their names at all. Ah well, this is where I want to raise my kids, so I know it will come eventually!