Since I’ve been working at my library for almost 4 months now, I thought it’d be fun to do a Day in the Life to show what I do as a children’s librarian.
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A Day in the Life: Morning Routine
During the mornings, I wake up at around 7 am for about an hour long commute to the library. (That was an adjustment for me because I’m not a morning person lol) 🤣 Once I get to work at around 9 am, I start to work on our Pick List.
A Pick List is a list of books from other libraries in our area that request our books to be sent out. My library is under the BCCLS consortium (Bergen County Cooperative Library System) pronounced like “buckles” which I thought was funny! But BCCLS is basically a library system of over 77 libraries in northern NJ, which spans areas like Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Passaic counties.
You can find more info about BCCLS here!
Once I find the books I’m looking for, I scan them using our Polaris LEAP web-based integrated library system. Watch here to see an introduction on Polaris LEAP.
A Day in the Life: Afternoon Routine
After my break, I focus on whatever program we have for the day. Most of our children’s programs range from:
- Storytime for babies and toddlers (Tuesday and Thursday mornings)
- Sensory Frenzy Playtime for children age 0-5 (Wednesdays 2x a month)
- Take Home Crafts (once a month)
- Drop In Crafts (once a month)
- Lego Mania (once a month)
- Tween Lego & Game Night (once a month)
- Read to a Therapy Dog 🐶 (once-twice a month)
- Special Guests
My favorite programs are the Storytimes, Lego Mania, and Sensory Frenzy.
Check out my library’s youth calendar here!
A Day in the Life: Canva Pro
I use Canva Pro to create flyers and sliders for the library display tables, the youth department’s seasonal map wall, and the Home page of our library website.
They’re not too hard to put together, just a bit time consuming if I have to reschedule or if an event or program gets cancelled.
A Day in the Life: Shelving Books
I also have the pretty tedious task of shelving picture books in the children’s section. Our picture books are organized alphabetically by the author’s last name. The youth services department also has a cart in the front circulation desk for the patrons who return books there. That cart usually gets full quickly, which stresses me out sometimes!
A Day in the Life: Night Routine
On Mondays, I work nights from 1 pm to 9 pm, so my work routine includes our closing routine. Basically consists of announcing to patrons the library is closing in 30, 15, 10 and 5 minutes. To be honest, after about 7 pm, the library is pretty empty. But we still have to make sure the people know when we close.
And that’s pretty much my whole day!
The job itself is wonderful and I love giving back to my community. I’m exhausted every day hardly get any sleep 💤 😴 but at least I go home knowing I make a small difference in a baby, kid, teen or parent’s life.
Comment below…What was your favorite part from my Day in the Life?
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Thanks for reading,
Ah that’s interesting you do storytime in the afternoon? I feel like everywhere I’ve seen does it in the morning under some assumption babies and toddlers must all wake up at 6 am lol.
No haha most of our story times are in the mornings. Yeah I feel bad for the babies and toddlers who have to wake up super early!
It’s funny because I know a lot of people whose babies are up all night, so of course they sleep in in the morning (assuming a stay at home parent so they don’t have to get up for work or day care or whatever), so they do not want toddler everything (whether it’s swim or storytime or whatever) to be at 9 am because they are finally asleep then! But toddler everything is always in the morning lol.
Yeah a lot of our story times are at 11 am to 11:30 am (half hour) because the library knows that babies and toddlers are most active. Some parents show up with their kids at least an hour before! Like did those babies sleep at all?! 🤣