You Get to Read All Day, Right?

I wish!  I absolutely love when people assume that as a librarian, I just get to sit around all day and read!  It’s one of those days that is decidedly busy with a ton of projects that I’m juggling all at the same time!
One of our elementary school 4th graders came to the township this morning for a community helpers day – we went on a tour, provided them with a 5-minute intro of library programs, and then played Library Jeopardy.  In about an hour and a half we saw three groups of kids totaling about 75 fourth graders.  It was exhausting, but enlightening as well.  The general public keeps saying that kids don’t read, but in each of my groups the kids spouted out tons of books they were reading both in school and for fun.  Overall, I think the kids learned at least a little bit, the teachers were quite thankful and it was fun to see familiar faces and hopefully some new friends as well.  As a side note, during our tour, I always ask if any kids don’t really like to read… it’s always met with trepidation, but I assure these kids that if they come back to the library I can find something they would be interested in reading.  I always assure them that there’s a book out there for everyone, we just need to find it.
After our 4th grade visits, my co-worker and I continued working on our ever-growing (so it seems) weeding project that is focused on a “smaller” collection, but the project as a whole just got bigger.  We started out moving some books into another collection and are now in the throes of weeding out many a book that hasn’t been circulating for a few years.  Others we’re moving to more appropriate locations in the hopes they get some love!  Added to the project is the re-branding of the collection with a new name, label, and spine label.  During that process, we’ll be checking every book in the collection to make sure they “fit” with the collection’s new brand.  And we hope to get it all done in the next few months.  Thankfully, we are both trying to set aside an hour or two each day to work on some aspect of the project.
Now, I’m working on planning for some summer programs – we have an author visiting (Jordan Sonnenblick) and although we didn’t get the day we requested, I’m excited about offering this author visit to older elementary school, middle school and high school students.  I also have a stuffed animal sleepover happening soon, which means lots of planning on the front end to make sure it all goes smoothly, especially with a bunch of middle schoolers helping out, and I have a few other programs that need to be planned that are coming up sooner that I would like!  Busy, busy, busy…. oh, how I wish I could be reading right now!