6 things to do with an LMS (and 2 men) — day 5
Today I was in Westbury-on-Trym library, which is similar to Sea Mills, but busier. My colleagues were two men — no women. So my first suggestion, since they weren’t expecting me, apparently, was to say ‘shall I walk around and familiarise myself where everything is?’ was met with ‘no, we had our delivery yesterday, and we need to get all the crates emptied’ (or words to that effect). Well, I felt confident with that, so happily either cleared the books, or put them on the reservations shelf.
I’ll mention my colleagues briefly. As I said, two men, no women. I don’t have a problem with that, but they work differently. For a start, they had run out of milk. Would a woman? There were no niceties — we got straight down to work. One of my colleagues was a ‘manager’ (younger and bearded) which meant he was in the office on his computer all day, except to cover tea breaks (of which there are an incredible amount; and of which I must mention the ‘lunch cover’ girl, complete with ring in her nose; imagine!); the other, a bachelor, had been a civil servant, and it showed — although I think by the end of the day he warmed to me! Neither of them had any idea how little time I’d been working in the libraries so they were quite happy to let me get on with it, which was great. MY problem was not trying to figure out how to do things when customers had queries, but to ask one of my colleagues if I didn’t know.
So, what did I need to know? Well, I have worked in IT a long time, and worked with some programs, but Galaxy is one of those programs which I think was created by someone who’d never worked in a library, and just liked to code. There are about 6 things I’ve done most often:
- issue books
- discharge books
- renew books
- add members
- search for books in a particular library
- check the status of reserved books
Now, you would think that all these tasks would be easy, and indeed the first 4 are. But searching for books in a particular library? Check the status of a reserved book? You can do a catalogue search of course, very Booliean, but if it doesn’t recognise the author’s name (e.g. Lindsey Davis… Lindsey Davis! No books in Bristol libraries!), you just get a list of every single author, starting at ‘A’. And a list of all the books, without indicating which is their home library. My head is still reeling from the convoluted way to find out where a reserved book is — I can’t even explain it here, except to say that there’s a little button at the bottom of the screen that needs to be clicked. Apparently there’s a new system on the way (SirsiDynix, as used in Chepstow library), so let’s hope that’s more user-friendly.
Other common questions today: booking a computer; paying for a computer print out, and releasing it once it’s been paid for; can I still take books out if I’ve lost my card (this is common — of course we can get their info but again, it’s not that easy); where are books on x. By far the trickiest thing was issuing a replacement card for a child when his guarantor adult did not have her card, either! I managed to fumble my way through, whilst the woman’s child ran amok in the library (not too badly, though). I felt so clumsy, finding my way! But no doubt I’m a lot better than I was a week ago (and having been to an interview where they told me it would take 6 months to get trained, I’m really happy with what I did today) and I’m sure in no time it will all fall into place.
