Day in the Life. Part 4 : October 18, 2023

Arrived 9:25 am. My day off didn't yield a boatload of leftover work; my supervisor in the office did his usual yeoman job solo yesterday.

11:05 am: Spoke to reference head, who informed me that they were quiet today and didn't need me to fill in, and reminded me that Professional Development day was next Wednesday.

11:15 am: tackling the backlog from yesterday, a small pile of returns from libraries hither and yon, including a historical fiction title called "Captain Caution" by Kenneth Roberts (Doubleday, 1934). The title put me in mind of a former fellow WMU music student who had referred to a previous conducting student as "Captain Adagio". Having met him on one occasion or another--it's been a few decades--I thought it an apt description. Taking "Captain Caution" next door to Tech Services for binding repair. It's not as simple as walking the book 50 feet to a technician; I have to change the record in Polaris so that people don't try to check it out while the repair is being completed.

4:30 pm: a light day for the UPS shipment. not much to report today. Onward.

Changes, op. V

 Hey all, Daniel here.

I've been at my "new" job for about a year. I'm the lead ILL Clerk at Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library. It's a quiet hump day morning; not much in the pipeline as far as fulfilling or finishing requests. My big thrill for the day is the arrival of my "date-received" rubber stamp, which keeps me from having to hand write that information 20-30 times daily. (It was actually supposed to be "date-returned" but I'm not going to quibble.)

The job entails receiving and shipping library items to various points on the globe. Not everything is eligible for InterLibrary Loan; reference books, historical items that don't circulate, older items that have grown brittle (or as I like to say, "crispy", new items--although I will confess that our policy on new items is more generous than other institutions. For example, the Free Library of Philadelphia won't ship anything within 12 months of publication. If everything is kosher, than we ship it for six weeks as a rule; exceptions are made for libraries using items for book discussion groups. 

I continue to get a geography lesson just about every day I report for work. I've lived in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for over 30 years, but I still get requests from places of which I haven't heard. We get requests from small rural libraries all over the country; the other "usual suspects" include the many K-12 and higher education libraries, governmental and military libraries--there are several in Pennsylvania, including the War College in Carlisle--even military intelligence units scattered across the US. Doin' my bit for Uncle Sam... 😏

Our biggest client libraries are, as you might expect, in Pennsylvania--

Adams County (Gettysburg)

Bucks County (Doylestown)

Chester County (Exton)--the ILL Librarian is my old boss from Spring City PL.

Carnegie Library (Pittsburgh)--arguably our #1 client in terms of volume shipped and received.

Dauphin County (Harrisburg)

Delaware County (Media)--our branches do more business with them than we do, but we get to distribute them when they ship a box of returned items.

Free Library of Philadelphia--I know their ILL Librarian, having worked with him a few years ago.

University of Pennsylvania--always asking for new items, almost always being told "no"

Paterno Library (Penn State University)

--but we do receive items from just about any library who will ship and not charge us. We charge $10 per item when they're headed to libraries out of state, except for the hodgepodge of public and university libraries with which we share reciprocity agreements--selected institutions in New Jersey, Michigan, Oregon, Washington state, and South Carolina, among others.

More to follow, but lunch is coming soon.

Onward.

Come Monday*

 Random thoughts on a Monday afternoon in mid-March (UPDATE: for some reason I just happened to come to this page and saw that I left the page unfinished)

1) I've been away from trombone for nearly four years now. Truthfully, I don't miss playing that instrument--which I started because that's what we had in the house; my brother's Bundy peashooter, stuffed into a closet on our tiny Cape Cod's upstairs. I probably would have played just about anything else brass--or sung in choir, if I'd realized sooner that being outnumbered ten to one by girls in a class where girls and boys mutually enjoyed singing wasn't necessarily a bad thing. 

I came to realize years later that school music was kind of a economic class thing. The kids of academics and more financially secure families played in orchestra, band was middle class, and choir was, well, just about everyone else. There were notable exceptions, but that's how it was (and still is, in many places) where I grew up. The choir always had its share of All-State members--three or four annually, if I remember correctly. An occasional band member would make all-state band or orchestra, but the Michigan Youth Arts Festival was always held on the same weekend as the annual Tulip Festival, and of course the band would march and squawk "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" to its thousands of adoring fans. Band members stayed home, even if they qualified for States. I didn't, and never regretted it. The trip to Central Michigan University was worth it. I played well, the band played well, and I was privileged to hear the Youth Arts Festival soloists with the Michigan Youth Symphony, as well as the All-State Orchestra. I look at the roster and the program and wonder what my fellow musicians are doing now.

*--Jimmy Buffett, Livin' and Dyin' in 3/4 time, 1974.