Picture Burke, May Book Order for Non-fiction, Archive Project, SRP

Friday, April 20
9:00 am -2:00 pm
5 hours
Total hours to date: 112

Since there were few staff members in the library this morning, while the library was closed, I had limited options for activities. First, I spoke with Nicole, who is in charge of ordering books for the fiction section. I asked her to meet with me sometime in the next week to discuss her collection development procedures as I had done last time with Page. Today wasn't a good day because of other duties and limited staff, but she would try and work me in next Friday. Page had left some work for me to do regarding the May order for non-fiction; I completed cards for each book that would be ordered, using information from her spreadsheets. These were sorted by branch library, and would be given to Karen so that she could process the orders.

The rest of my day, I spent in the NC Room with Gale. First, she showed me the ins and outs of "Picture Burke" a huge repository of local historic photographs that have been digitized and are being cataloged into this collection. This project was funded by a grant, and up to now, there are about 3600 photographs in the collection. Requests are often made by local businesses to get copies of these photographs to display, which they are able to get for a small fee.

I spent the rest of my time further documenting items in the archive collection. The most interesting of these items was a school reader that was published in 1880. It had original handwriting by the children who had used the book, and there were also imprints of pennies worth one cent and two cents in the end pages at the back of the book. There was also a sweet poem written by one of the book's owner's sisters.  I also had the chance to review a catalog that Gale uses for ordering archival products and helped her process incoming supplies from this catalog.  It was amazing how expensive these archival items are.  I imagine it is somewhat difficult to justify the expense.


At the end of the day, I had about 30 minutes to spare, so I went down to the YA office and noticed that the nametag lanyards were not complete, so I spent the rest of my time attaching the remaining nametags to the lanyards.  These will be used for the summer reading program for the Young Adults.