Consultation

Wednesday:

My second day of work placement yesterday was similar to the first. Being trained in various library things with frequent interruptions from clients. BTW, as a library user how do you prefer to be labelled? Client, customer, patron, user, member? The internet wasn’t working on a random assortment library’s computers so we had a lot of queries about that, and the printer and photocopiers also had issues. I only experienced one student asking for help finding a book!

At home in the evening I checked my email. I got mildly annoyed at my uncle who wrote that I hadn’t responded to Poppa’s 100th birthday invitation (my records say I did, a month ago), and then got very annoyed at the TAFE staff member who is teaching most of my online courses - she pointed out that I hadn’t yet enrolled in the online unit for my work placement. Um... what online unit? I thought it was covered by the customer service, IT and team management units, which all include things I have to complete during placement. Apparently there is also a seperate unit. The things you miss when you are studying online instead of attending face to face classes. I totally blame this on her, I’m quite sure I was never told about it in my limited contacts with her. So I enrolled, read the content, found I was supposed to keeping an online journal (luckily I’d been keeping my own records) and had this big document to work through and get assessed by my TAFE supervisor (who comes out for a visit) and a checklist for my work supervisor, and there was even a list of things I was supposed to do before placement. I had a big rant to my husband about it all, but after venting I found it wasn’t too bad, I’m still in the first week of placement so not too far behind in the work. Hmm, my workload just got a bit heavier.

Today I had the first of two consultations with my teacher for a different class about my major research assignment - the only times I will go into TAFE this term. This teacher, Julie, is also the person who will come out to check on my placement (not the negligent one who does the online part) so I could talk to her about that as well. She was happy with how my research assignment is going and gave a few useful suggestions.

The librarian at work had suggested I do a children’s storytime session for my practical assessment for placement, but I wasn’t really that keen on it. While I’m sure I could do it successfully, interacting with a large group of young children isn’t why I want to be a Library Technician. It was kind of hard for me to speak up, I’m not really very assertive, so I was a bit waffly, but I did say I was more keen on cataloguing. The librarian was open to me doing that, so after discussing it with Julie today I’ve decided to do cataloguing as my assessable task. I may end up still having to do the storytime anyway, just not as my special assessment! One of the joys of library work is that there is a wide variety of tasks.