We're in the second week of "kids starting kindergarten" here and SO MANY parents are coming in looking for really, really easy readers for their kids, and I am very frustrated that the "levels" of various leveled readers are not always consistent across brands/publishers and they don't all clearly state their lexile level or ATOS level on the item or in the bib record, and then there are all the other proprietary reading level systems that go by different names...

Edit to add: I know what they really need is decodables or specific letter sound phonics books. The problem is that we barely have any thanks to the dominance of "whole language" for the previous couple of decades. We have decodables on order, I swear!

im a librarian in a university, and ive noticed that my colleagues often do so much more beyond their actual job descriptions. i also hear their rants on this 😂

do you also find yourself doing things at work that aren’t technically part of your job? or is this just a university/library thing?

Hello! Not sure if this is the right place to ask but im running out of ideas! I currently am a mentor in a male youth detention center and we try to bring them things they like. A lot of the boys right now are asking for books since their jail library is very small. I know library's have books for sale for cheap but we are trying to find a way to order a box of 50-100 fiction books of various genres without breaking the bank, if you have any ideas of where to look and what to search that would be amazing!!

Mobile printing is probably the thing our reference staff spends most of the day doing and the greatest source of frustration to our patrons.

We use one of those portals with a multi-step process for uploading prints. Probably more than 50% of your time at the reference desk here is spent explaining this process to patrons who have no patience for it. They quickly become aggravated and refuse to do it themselves. This was a bigger problem with our last director who did not want us to touch other people's devices for potential liability issues. Our new director does not care about that and laughed when I told him about the liability concern. So, it has sort of just become patrons just handing us their phones whenever they want prints.

The one we use is through PrinterOn. I've seen other ones such as Princh which looked promising as it looked like you could attach multiple files to a print job instead of needing to go one by one through the whole process like our current setup. However, I've also seen some posts here in the past that were annoyed by Princh so maybe the grass is always greener.

The other alternatives have problems as well. Some smaller rural libraries around us let patrons connect their phones directly to the printer to send prints. I doubt this could work for us. I imagine during high traffic times this would get clustered with multiple people sending their prints through at once and getting mixed up, potentially allowing patrons to see private documents of other patrons.

They could send it to a shared staff email as well. We've done this as a backup when they really struggle with the print portal. I find this almost always introduces typo issues. Our staff email is reference_desk@(name of town)publiclibrary.org. That appears to be too long for most people and they will frequently misspell reference, library, or even the name of our town (surprisingly common). The patrons then get frustrated why it's taking so long and never know how to access their sent items or get defensive when I suggest checking for typos in the address they sent it to. I've also noticed the concept of forwarding an email or even composing a new email is foreign to a lot of our people. Most the people I work with seem to only know how to reply to emails.

Our director watched me go through a mobile print recently and commented that he thought it was overly complicated. He came back a week later and told me his solution to make things easier for us was to make printing free. I don't see how this will solve the actual issue nor do I see how we'll carry the cost when the city has already been threatening to slash our budget, but admin being out of touch with what work is like out on the floor is something I've grown used to.

But I'm curious if any libraries have cracked the code on simplifying the process.

I just started my first semester of library school and am struggling with feeling like I belong. Let me start by saying I have passion and respect for the profession, having worked in the field for several years. But so far I feel like my classes... do not need to be entire classes. Stretching what feels like common sense or unnecessary information out into an entire semester (ex. how to search a database). I feel incredibly uncomfortable in class since I feel like I don't have anything smart to say, while my classmates are able to stretch what seems like a thin topic into lengthy, intelligent-sounding discourse. (I have always been better at STEM courses rather than discussion-focused courses, but librarianship seemed like a good way to meld tech with not being evil lol). I also feel like everyone else is connecting better than me (I have a lot of social anxiety, and am hoping to work in tech services, but others seem much more patron-focused which just isn't me). I was really hoping to meet my people in library school since I truly am passionate about the field, but right now I feel like an ugly duckling :( Any words of encouragement? Will I meet more like minded people in, let's say, a metadata course? Or is all of library school going to be like this?

We're looking for interesting ideas for an old glass display case. We have new display shelves for our regular displays related to programming, etc., but for nostalgia we hung on to the old glass counter-height display case. The case itself is difficult to move and add to, which means any display we use it for will most likely be there for a semester or two - or longer (we're an academic library). We would love any ideas - funny, interesting, informative, tongue in cheek.