When I used to work in a bookstore I’d sometimes feel very tired at the end of the day though if I was basically working the register and talking with other people non-stop, without having a break to load up book trucks and go shelve.

I had a bunch of face time today. I taught a couple classes for ESL students, and it was interesting. There seemed to be a bit of a breakdown in communication between the program director who contacted me to schedule the classes and the instructors of the classes. I was told that all the students would be researching a topic of their own choosing, but the first class that came didn’t initially have any kind of research topic, even something as basic as finding an article and writing a bit about it.

So I punted, and decided to show them some things about Boston history since at least it would be related to the region of the world they were currently occupying. I told them about the great molasses flood and the Boston tea party and discussed the horrible curse of the bambino and then showed them what they could do to find books, explaining that the catalog showed you the items that the library owned and talking about keyword searching. I talked a little bit about call numbers and how they would be used to find the books on the shelf and talked about where they could go to find them.

I should have done a better job explaining this, because the instructor mentioned that she was surprised that the books weren’t all on the computer (!). So I also showed them how to search an online encyclopedia. We ended up having an adventure as around half of the class actually managed to find a book they wanted, write down the call numbers, and then I walked them to the bookshelves to locate the books. So that was a small victory, I thought.

I had a couple other classes arrive early for their session (some sort of miscommunication), but they did have a research project where they were supposed to write about a topic. I asked the class for topics, and it ranged from the foreign policy of president bush, french literature, finding dvds, and people wanting to travel to various US cities.

So, this gave me something to work with, i was able to use the student topics to show how to search the catalog and a couple of article databases, and the classes seemed fairly engaged.

But after all that I had around three and a half hours on the reference desk, so I’m looking forward to vegging out for most of the evening