A Day in the Life of a Youth Services Librarian
8:40am – Arrive at work, put stuff away, greet colleagues.
8:50am – Get program room set up for this morning’s Preschool Storytime. Get tables and chairs set up, put out display books, collect felts & scarves, set up activity tables.
9:20am – Quickly read through storytime books and make sure I know how all the felt stories and rhymes go.
9:30am – Put this week’s desk shifts and other tasks in my bullet journal, check email.
10:00 – 11:00am – Preschool Explorers. Theme: Bath time! Check out my Bath Time Storytime here.
11:00am – Clean up program room, record statistics, put books and supplies away. Type up words and source for Five Elephants in the Bathtub rhyme to add to our flannel collection. Help get room ready for a class of fourth graders coming in for a field trip.
11:45am – Check in on the class discussion for the online class I’m taking.
12pm-1:00pm – Lunch time!
1:00 – 2:00pm – On the Teen Desk. Since the kids are in school, it’s very quiet in the Teen Scene and I work on approving my staff’s timesheets, sending out reminder emails for booktalks, and typing up blog posts.
2:00pm – Off desk, I take some photos for blog posts and work on my ALSC Blog post: Using Scarves in Storytime.
2:45pm – One of our library assistants is back from vacation, so I take a few minutes to get him caught up on what’s been going on.
3:00pm – Work on finalizing my monthly report to send to my new director and read through the last of my staff’s monthly reports, which they’re submitting to me.
4:00pm – Run a report to get a list of potential weeding candidates because we’ll have some volunteers coming in who can start pulling them. Weeding has gotten exponentially easier for me since I started having teen volunteers pull carts of books for me to evaluate. I still love to spend some time in the stacks weeding, but utilizing volunteers helps me meet my weeding goals each year.
4:15pm – I change over our catalog list to feature titles for African American History Month.
4:30pm – Make coupon call for Summer Reading donations. This year I delegated this task because I hate it so much, but my teen librarian and I are tag-teaming it because sometimes these folks are just really hard to get ahold of!
4:40pm – Pull books for next week’s booktalks. I check them all out on our department library card and arrange them in my office by when I’ll need them.
5:20pm – Time to go home!
One thing I love about youth librarianship is that every day is different! Check out more day in the life posts here!
