Job Shadow Responses

During the block I had the opportunity to shadow three of Cole’s librarians.  I felt that these experiences helped round out my internship and gave me the chance to understand what goes on in a library outside of the archives.

Machele Pelkey

I shadowed Machele on Monday morning during the second week of my internship.  Machele is the Technical Services Assistant at Cole Library.  She is responsible for the ‘birth’ of new books and the ‘death’ of old books.  All collections orders go through her; when professors, librarians, departments, or student organizations request new books, she is in charge of ordering the books and applying the deduction to the proper fund (departmental or public).

She has several student workers and that morning Emili Vondrak was working.  Machele had Emili show me how to prepare new books for circulation first physically and then digitally.  To physically prepare each book for the library, it has a barcode applied to it, a security strip inserted on or near the spine, a due date slip added to the inside front cover with the date added on the first line, and a stamp on the top of the book and the cover page.  If the book has a dust jacket, a protector should be placed on it.  To digitally prepare a book for the library, it must be catalogued by creating the record in Voyager and then added to IMV’s WorldCat holdings.  It must then be sent to wherever it needs to go both physically and digitally.

I also learned how to destroy records.  Space on first floor is going to go down soon and there will no longer be room for LPs, so the LPs will no longer be a part of the library holdings.  The digital record on Voyager must be deleted (there are three individual records), followed by removal of the holding listing from WorldCat, and then the LPs can be moved elsewhere before being sold, given away, or donated.

Aileen Chang-Matus

I shadowed Aileen on Thursday morning during the second week of my internship.  Aileen is the Serials Assistant at Cole Library, she is responsible for all aspects of serials.  Aileen began by giving me a primer on serials; parts of the record, what happens when a journal name is changed, online databases and how they affect journal subscriptions, microfilm, and death of older journals.

 We then went upstairs to see take a look at microfilm; she showed me how it was organized and that there was room for growth in the collection, an important consideration for serials.  Back downstairs she showed me how to remove individual serials issues once the microfilm or other collection had come in for that year; after that she showed me how to troubleshoot problem items within the catalog.

 After this, we picked up new serials from the mail room and prepared them physically and digitally for circulation.  This was a process very similar to the process of added books to the library, though with different sorts of holdings records in Voyager.

Mikki Smith

I shadowed Mikki on Thursday evening during the second week of my internship.  Mikki is the Reference Librarian at Cole Library.  We talked at the reference desk about what a reference librarian does and some of the projects that she was currently working on.  As the reference librarian, Mikki is in charge of deciding which reference sets it would be best to order.  She hopes to be able to look into electronic reference books soon because online reference may receive even more use than physical reference books.  Mikki also gets quite a few interesting side projects.  Earlier in the year she looked at Illiad records for video loans to try to identify titles that should be added to Cole Library’s collection.  When I was chatting with her, she had a shelf of books from first floor that were set to be recatalogued and moved up to the stacks on second floor in order to save space for the same project that is causing the demise of the LPs.

Additionally, Mikki answers reference questions, and we had the opportunity to research the answer to a couple while I was there.  A patron inquired about when the City Hall was built, when it burned down, when the Strand theatre burned down, and when the Mount Vernon Bank building was completed.  We were able to find the information about the City Hall and the Strand in the book stacks, and I checked the archive holdings on the bank in order to find the answer to the