Let's call today's day in the life post, Day in the Life of a Youth Services Manager. As a manager, I'm always attending meetings. It just so happens that one day out of the month, several of my meetings all fall on the same day and it makes for a very long and exhausting day! Here's what my meeting day looked like last Thursday:
7:50 AM-Leave for work earlier than usual since I need to be driving out to a county branch for my first meeting.
8:20 AM-Arrive at county branch for meeting. Before meeting check out book the branch had set aside for me for tomorrows storytime (my copy got checked out by a young patron and luckily this branch had another copy!), deliver a box of ARCs for our teen review board, and bring in a stash of big books to exchange with other branches.
8:30 AM-Meeting starts! This is our monthly youth services meeting for all of our youth services managers, full time youth services staff, and young adult librarians. We spent our meeting talking about our upcoming summer reading program, gave overviews of training staff had attended, and talked about ways to market librarians as experts to our patrons and how we can better serve our communities.
10:00 AM-Short break and exchange of big books between branches. Each branch has a storytime collection of large books and we wanted to rotate some around to refresh our collections.
10:20 AM-Next meeting is up! This time it's for our early literacy committee. We talked about our new summer reading program for little ones, what we can do to refresh our storytime tub collections (our ready to go storytime resource collections), and talked about how we're doing with reaching patrons with our early literacy initiative.
11:50-Meeting is over. Now time to head back to my library branch. The longer drive means more time to listen to my audiobook which is a plus! I also decide that since I won't have much time for lunch, I'll stop on my way back to work and grab something to eat. Good thing too, since I found out our meeting time got changed!
12:40-1:00-Arrive back at work, eat a quick lunch.
1:00-Third meeting for the day. This time it's our biweekly supervisor's meeting. All of our branch supervisor's get together with our branch manager to talk about what is happening at the branch, news we need to know from the administrative staff meetings, and give updates on our departments.
2:30-Now it's time for me to meet with my branch manager. I meet with her after our youth services meetings to update her on the going ons of the youth services departments and what we talked about at our meeting. This is also my chance to get her feedback on any issues I have in my department-we talked about furniture and creating reading spaces because I had just attended a training on early literary spaces and we recently had a department remodel. I'm very lucky to have a great rapport with my branch manager and we always end up having fun brainstorming new (and sometimes grand) ideas for youth services. We're both big dreamers and we work well together to make those dreams happen. It's a lot of fun!
3:40-Done with meetings for the day! Back to my desk for the first time that day. I greet staff and catch them up on the notes from the earlier meetings of the day. I also find out what has been happening with them, how the department has been for the day.
4:00-Open email and feel a bit overwhelmed at the amount of messages waiting for me in my inbox! Respond to the messages I need to reply to and sort through the rest of the messages (I love email folders-this makes my life so much easier!)
4:30-We recevied some books for our teen review board as well as some book requests, so I add the new books to the database, respond to the book requests, and mail off books to the various branches so the teens who requested them can read them.
5:00-Clean up desk and go home!
7:50 AM-Leave for work earlier than usual since I need to be driving out to a county branch for my first meeting.
8:20 AM-Arrive at county branch for meeting. Before meeting check out book the branch had set aside for me for tomorrows storytime (my copy got checked out by a young patron and luckily this branch had another copy!), deliver a box of ARCs for our teen review board, and bring in a stash of big books to exchange with other branches.
8:30 AM-Meeting starts! This is our monthly youth services meeting for all of our youth services managers, full time youth services staff, and young adult librarians. We spent our meeting talking about our upcoming summer reading program, gave overviews of training staff had attended, and talked about ways to market librarians as experts to our patrons and how we can better serve our communities.
10:00 AM-Short break and exchange of big books between branches. Each branch has a storytime collection of large books and we wanted to rotate some around to refresh our collections.
10:20 AM-Next meeting is up! This time it's for our early literacy committee. We talked about our new summer reading program for little ones, what we can do to refresh our storytime tub collections (our ready to go storytime resource collections), and talked about how we're doing with reaching patrons with our early literacy initiative.
11:50-Meeting is over. Now time to head back to my library branch. The longer drive means more time to listen to my audiobook which is a plus! I also decide that since I won't have much time for lunch, I'll stop on my way back to work and grab something to eat. Good thing too, since I found out our meeting time got changed!
12:40-1:00-Arrive back at work, eat a quick lunch.
1:00-Third meeting for the day. This time it's our biweekly supervisor's meeting. All of our branch supervisor's get together with our branch manager to talk about what is happening at the branch, news we need to know from the administrative staff meetings, and give updates on our departments.
2:30-Now it's time for me to meet with my branch manager. I meet with her after our youth services meetings to update her on the going ons of the youth services departments and what we talked about at our meeting. This is also my chance to get her feedback on any issues I have in my department-we talked about furniture and creating reading spaces because I had just attended a training on early literary spaces and we recently had a department remodel. I'm very lucky to have a great rapport with my branch manager and we always end up having fun brainstorming new (and sometimes grand) ideas for youth services. We're both big dreamers and we work well together to make those dreams happen. It's a lot of fun!
3:40-Done with meetings for the day! Back to my desk for the first time that day. I greet staff and catch them up on the notes from the earlier meetings of the day. I also find out what has been happening with them, how the department has been for the day.
4:00-Open email and feel a bit overwhelmed at the amount of messages waiting for me in my inbox! Respond to the messages I need to reply to and sort through the rest of the messages (I love email folders-this makes my life so much easier!)
4:30-We recevied some books for our teen review board as well as some book requests, so I add the new books to the database, respond to the book requests, and mail off books to the various branches so the teens who requested them can read them.
5:00-Clean up desk and go home!
1 <3 librarians!
ReplyDeleteYay! It always seems to surprise people that we don't just sit and read books all day!
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