Internship Week 1

This week I began my first hands experience at my internship.

Saturday

The week started off great on Saturday with Skokie’s Madden Bowl II. Richard Kong and Toby Greenwalt set up an amazing Madden 10 tournament for teens in the Skokie community. It was a great experience to be involved with new methods of community outreach and networking. Thanks to Richard Kong for this amazing video documenting the weekend:

Please also check out the Flickr Slideshow the of tournament

Monday:

On Monday I had my first desk experience working at the A/V desk at the library. I enjoyed fielding questions and learning more about the A/V department at the Skokie Library. I was very impressed with their Movie List Compiled By Librarians. During my desk time on Monday I assisted patrons with looking up movie titles, giving some recommendations, and placing holds on up and coming movies. I was really blown away the amount of new releases that the library has and the popularity of these titles with their patrons. Truly impressed by their helpful RSS Feed for New Releases.

Friday:

Friday was spent at the Readers Advisory desk. This was an exciting opportunity as I saw a wide variety of reference and advisory questions and was invited to participate in a manga club and book discussion group on The Plague by Camus.

We experienced two really interesting questions. The first was a patron looking for material on Middle Eastern/Arab Americans and their experiences with coping with their heritage and ethnicity. The librarian in charge did some great searches for the patron and we pulled a couple short story anthologies and novels. I remembered the recent movie Towelhead and brought the patron to the AV section to grab that as  well. I explained my internship and was flattered when she responded that I’ll be a great librarian because I seem so passionate and excited to help.

The second question was a patron looking for the number of copies of The Lovely Bones sold and how long the title remained on the New York Best Sellers List. We looked up this information in a Publisher’s Weekly Database.

Overall a great week, looking forward to spending more time at the SPL.