Day 12 - March 21, 2007

WEDNESDAY -- Halla told me today of some projects Theresa wanted me to work on. I'm supposed to contribute to the Children's Room blog: Tales From the Treehouse and I have to create a pathfinder (some kind of an annotated bibliography) for California Indians for the online Homework Help. Hmmm...well, I think I can do these without any problems at all. For the blogblog, I have to read a book and then write/blog about it. Although a newbie with blogging, I have already done a lot of book talks with my various classes at Pitt so this is easy as pie. I just need to choose the right book that will be interesting not only to me but to the young patrons as well. I cannot blog about the mainstream titles like popular fiction (i.e. Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Roald Dahl, etc.). As for the pathfinder, if I was able to do an annotated bibliography for 125 legal titles in Business Law and 50 resource materials for my Library Marketing class...I'm sure I can find enough resources on California Native Americans.

I spent most of the first 2 hours at the library tonight looking at the library's collection on California Indians. Around 7pm, Halla offered me some cake and ice cream. It is Arpine's birthday today and they had a little celebration in the back room. I had a yummy cream puff and some "dirty" ice cream (dirty because I always preferred ice cream without nuts and marshmallows in it...if it has bits and bobs, I call it dirty...heehee). Around 7:30pm, Cecile showed me a scrapbook that she compiled and I spent the rest of my time there giggling and laughing out loud! Why? The scrapbook contained pieces of paper, photos, postcards, birthday cards...stuff that people leave in the library, unintentionally or intentionally. This library is for kids, the oldest child that can use the library will be 8th graders...I have seen love notes, a little notebook filled from cover to cover "I love Gurgen...he is the sexy!" and a diary with one entry that says:



The kicker though and the one that gave me the jollies tonight was this letter that was left "intentionally" to the library workers:



Ms. Reservationer ended her note by saying "I give this place a D-...it needs to be fired and fixed and neat!" Halla remembers seeing her...it was sometime last year when this nine year old came in and looked around, checked underneath the tables, checked out the computer room and the stacks. Sadly though, she has not been back to check if the "library workers" ever heeded her letter and fixed the library.

Oh, the things that children do! Can't help but love working with kids!