I told my staff and my boyfriend that I pretty much spend the entire month of April in a haze of anxiety as we wrap up our spring programming and it really becomes time to buckle down and iron out the Summer Reading Club.
This April has been no exception. I've been scheduling visits to the schools to talk about the Summer Reading Club. This year we're switching to doing the reading program online using Evanced's Summer Reader. It's going to be a big change for patrons and for staff, so I'm trying to get everything airtight with our setup before we start staff training. We've all been working on our summer programs, getting copy together for the summer program calendar (we have patrons asking for it every day now, despite the fact that there's still over a month of school left) and figuring out what supplies we need to order.
I've also been reading rather frantically for the Young Hoosier Book Award committee and I've been busy with our Indiana Library Federation district conference which was held last week (I'm on the planning committee). Free time has been scarce. Heck, time to even just think about anything has been scarce.
I actually love summer once we get into it. I have a cracker jack staff and we have lots of fun programs planned. Summer's the time to put aside some of the work that can wait until later and concentrate on serving patrons. It's a time of year when we see people we may not have seen since the summer before. Yes, it's busy but that means that people are using their library. Our shelves will look completely different by mid-June, bare space everywhere!
Of course, we can't put aside all of the other work - we'll definitely be planning some new programs for the fall. We're revamping our preschool storytimes and adding a beginning reader storytime and possibly other programming.
Anyway, all of this is just to say that I may have been a little absent on this blog and I will probably continue to be a little absent. I'm just dealing with all that April stuff, trying to check things off the massive to-do list, just like the rest of you public youth librarians probably are.
And if you, like me, feel overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to get done, just try to relax and take things as they come. We can only do what we can do and no one will be harmed if things don't go exactly like the ideal summer programs we have in our heads.
Tally ho! Summer's a'comin!