libraria miscellanea

January. Another new year. New resolutions, new projects, back to the grindstone. I didn't actually make any resolutions this year, just resolved to continue the positive path I started last year regarding health: physical, emotional, and spiritual. This also means updating my outlook about life, including my work. Part of my job as a part-time librarian is teaching computer literacy classes every Tuesday. I teach two classes each day, each lasting 1.5 hours in the subjects of mousing and basic computer skills, Microsoft Word, Internet and web-based e-mail. People take four classes total, one each week. I used to dread teaching them at first (my very first librarian/supervisory position), but now can honestly say I enjoy doing it. Sometimes, I teach mentally handicapped folks, those who have never touched a computer before in their lives, seniors and people my parent's age. Many times, people want to take the classes again, and sometimes more than twice. This is okay,

There are very few things I really dislike doing at work- one of them is usually helping people find genealogical information. However, today was quite different. For some reason, things were super busy at work as soon as I clocked in at 5pm. One patron was visiting from out of town to search for a grave of a family member, and needed some help with microfilm and cemetary stuff. This person was very grateful for the help, and I learned a lot along our quick journey. We jetted from microfilm to internet pass to map of Payne County to cemetery index, to finding a map of the townships. Phew! I did forget that we have a gigantic map of Payne county, including townships, mounted in the main library by the bathrooms, but we also had a pocket sized map in the locked case. (Locked case is for rare or really old items we want to keep. Overflow for this stuff is called the "reference closet.") Anyhow, sometimes I have to tell people to come back on Tuesday or Thursday from 12-4