Wednesday was the first day back for all staff and we had a relatively breezy get-to-know-you/welcome back kind of thing. Everyone seems happy with the new principal and were happy to meet me. I wore my "Librarian By Day/Ninja By Night" t-shirt to represent! My clerk kept getting pulled to help in the office, but we did get to go over what needed to be done before Monday.
Thursday was Open House/Registration. Again, clerk (I wonder if she'll mind if I nickname her Miss Information?) got pulled for office stuff, so I was totally alone in the empty library. So I set up displays and straightened between glad-handing people who poked in for a look-see. I knew our numbers had gone down but I didn't realized there had been some jiggering with the district lines so some students were coming from a neighboring school. I haven't been to that one but maybe ours is newer or something because those kids seemed impressed with ours. Which was nice to hear, of course!
The two displays I set up were one for Seymour Simon (whose birthday is next week) which includes a globe of the moon and a globe of Mars along with a bunch of his books. The other is a "What did you do this summer?" with books on beaches and baseball and fireflies and summer camp and anything else I could think of in that vein.
I had many people sign up to volunteer, but I'm betting mostly for read alouds. But that's ok. Any help is good and if it gives them a good feeling about the library, it can't hurt with advocacy efforts. One fellow asked if it would count for his community service hours. I told him I supposed he'd have to ask his PO on that one. Freaked out the clerk when I told her. "What did he do?" she wanted to know. Like I was going to ask! I'm sure if it's just community service hours it could be anything too nefarious.
Friday was more meetings (but not too many) and helping teachers. One wanted "back to school books" so I went a bit crazy. I checked out a big pile to her, took them down to her room and let her pick what she wanted. With the rest I checked them back in and decided to make a third display!
One thing I did Friday which has nothing at all to do with getting ready for school, but proves I'm a big anal librarian is reorder the series fiction section into alphabetical order by series. It was just random before and was bugging me. And it had "Star Trek/Star Wars" as one thing! When they're clearly very different! Sheesh, people.
But no. The main ting was meeting the staff and starting off those relationships. Monday will be continuing those and beginning to make some relationships with the students. That's what it's all about.
I can't wait!
Seymour Simon has a great website, by the way. Something to share with the staff on Monday.
