Internship Log: July 9 (Day 14)

The CSUN campus is crazy. There are kids (OK, preteens), everywhere. It's very quiet at Oviatt though. Many of the librarians left for ALA, and won;t be back until Wednesday. I saw the chair, Ms. Helfer earlier, and wondered why she wasn't at ALA yet, but maybe she is leaving later. You'd think the chair of TS would attend, right?

9:30 AM-?: There's a question mark for the end time because I was supposed to spend the day with Delphia (Del) Williams, the Acquisitions Supervisor. Del is a recent graduate of SLIS, but has opted to stay a non-librarian in her current position. This way, she has more free time and leeway when it comes to her 2 daughters (from the pictures I saw, I can tell you all that they are adorable). I got into TS a little early to get acclimated and check email and stuff before I sent the day with Del. So, I get to her cubicle, do the equivalent of a knock, and realize Del has forgotten all about me :( She asked me to sit down, and went through her responsibilities. Del is in charge of subscriptions, both print and e. She makes sure we're invoiced, that Donna (July 28) gets the OK to pay them, and she creates catalog entries in Millennium for the e-journals, so all are aware of the holdings. She showed me one, and I noticed that she'd written the name of the vendor, in this case Ebsco, on the 245 line, and then used multiples 246's for each journal title. The catalog can also get extra info like subscription costs, procedures for dealing with the vendor, etc. All of this is important stuff that helps make subsequent decisions, and will also make sure policy remains constant, even if staff doesn't (provided they are good notes). Del is also the contact person for vendors. This means that if a title ceases print publication, is now only carried by only one aggregator, or undergoes a major price shift or title change, Del is the one who is told. She will then pass the info to whoever it affects, usually the bibliographer.

Del and I also discussed the current job market, the SLIS e-portfolio, and the advantages and disadvantages of professional conferences and networking (YES if you're an academic librarian). She mentioned that she did attend some of the more hands on workshops, and confirmed my notion that most MA programs were theoretical and didn't prepare you for real world work. In the course of this internship, I realized that my SLIS classes didn't prepare me for the job as much as my Library Tech Certificate did. Everyone wants you to show them the paper though, and come December, I should have mine in hand.

Del is also in charge of monographs that require mending or binding. Circ usually brings up a couple a day. I also ran a couple of gift books by her during my run. These were usually duplicate copies in worse condition than the ones the library already owned, and she had to decide if paying for them to be mended was worth it. Regarding her current bunch of to-be mended books, she explained that the bindery budget was at $0, so the books would have to wait, and that periodicals and journals had first dibs anyway. It sucked, since the books came up from Circ, meaning that people had tried to check out, or were returning the books.

Our session lasted until 10:00. Del even mentioned at the beginning that she didn't think she'd keep me long and didn't know what Doris (the TS chair) expected from her. She could have asked, but it wasn't too big a deal, since I still had the list of missing books from Mary.

10:00 AM-5:00 PM: I spent the rest of the day going over the missing books list. Mary said I should approach it as an art bibliographer (she gave me the art books), and decide which books should be replaced, upgraded, etc. What I'm doing now is checking the catalog to see if there are dupes, and also what the other holdings are by shelve browsing (by catalog number). I'll probably donate my artist catalogs to the library. (I'm not using them, nor did I pay for them ;)