Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Greensboro College Practicum, Day 1 (5/20/09)

Today I began my practicum at Greensboro College. I am working in Technical Services at the James Addison Jones Library with Technical Services Librarian Jennie Hunt. Jennie is a graduate of UNCG's Library and Information Studies program, and a long time friend. She has hosted many library interns over her nine plus years at Greensboro College.

I arrived today at 9:00 a.m. Jennie and I had a brief conversation about cataloging and librarianship in her office before she gave me a tour of the library. We also discussed what I will be doing this summer. Among other things, Jennie has a box of bound theses that need cataloging. We will be doing original cataloging with those theses. Jennie is handling interlibrary loan this summer so I also plan to learn the ins and outs of an ILL librarian's job.

The James Addison Jones Library is a small academic library with only four floors of stacks. The library has recently converted one of their front rooms in order to house their serials collection. This room will also house a coffee bar when the Fall semester begins.

Today Jennie and I worked in interlibrary loans. I learned how ILLs are requested, received, and returned. The Jones Library uses OCLC for all of their ILL transactions. Jennie also keeps a separate spreadsheet to keep track of all the ILLs that are coming into or going out of the library. I assisted Jennie with preparing some ILL books to return to their respective libraries. We also filled a few lending requests from other libraries.

Jennie left at 4:00 p.m. today, and after she left I was going to familiarize myself with Classweb. However, the password I had would not work, and so I decided to browse OCLC FirstSearch instead. I left the library at 6:15 p.m.

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