Conversations I get to have over and over and over again

So my new library is a lovely, lovely place filled with lovely people and the occasional pack of junior high kids that I have to throw out for using the f-word in the children's area after being warned about the language.

One thing my boss mentioned when I started is that although our patrons are kind, dear people, they also expect us to earn our keep. And by this I mean that they will never try to look up something on their own in the catalog using any of the 8 million catalog terminals but will instead come straight to me and ask me if a certain book is in. A lot of them are older and not comfortable with computers, but some of them I've decided are just lazy and like the idea of having a personal library shopper.

So scenes like this happen quite a bit:

Patron: "Hello, I'm looking for this book." (Actually, no, you're not. If you were looking for it, you would be on a computer right now or in the stacks. You're asking ME to look for it for you.)

Me: "Okay, let's look for it together. Please take a look at the monitor in front of you." (This is when I hit a really cool button that lets them see what I'm doing on my computer. It shows them exactly what they would have seen if they'd gone over and used one of the terminals. Because I'm not letting anyone off the hook entirely. It's baby steps towards information searching skills before I throw them to the wolves by walking them directly over to a patron terminal and making them learn how to use it.)

Patron: "It's the new book by an author named [So and So]." (Note: That's not his name.)

Me: "Sorry, I'm not seeing anything under that name. What's the title?"
Patron: "The title is [The Something Something]." (Note: It isn't.) "He wrote another book called [Such and Such]." (Note: He didn't. And neither did the actual author.)

The level of their wrongness in this situation is directly related to the amount of time it will take to figure this all out. In this case because she had read one of the books by the author I finally thought to ask if she remembered what that book was about and then I Googled the key words from her description.

That is how the "Blue Something" by Peter Finch who also wrote The September Group or possibly The September Music actually became A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch who also wrote The September Society.

Seriously, what would I even do without Google?

Posted in: library gossip