Birmingham Central Library

of Librarian IV at the Houston Public Library. The position provides an excellent and exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of initiatives to refine and improve collections at the branch and organizational level. With over ten years of customer service and collection maintenance experience, I have a set of skills and qualifications that will make me an asset to the department. I have developed and maintained collections at several Houston Public Library locations, mostly in low- and…

into the library building, would you miss that? Touching books, writing in them, highlighting them, bookmarking them. Libraries are suffused with so many different resources for researching rather than just books. The card catalog categorizes all the books and where to locate them. Now this process has gone electronically along with the mechanism of checking out books. Is this the future of libraries, a virtual library where everything is downloading ebooks. This is the problem, libraries have…

How a library functions begins at the level of the individual patron. Each patron who crosses the threshold, be it the physical or the digital, is looking for a combination of resources that is specific to their person. The library as an institute is responsible for providing equal access to information to those who seek it through intellectual freedom, and receive education that furthers the learning of the patron either drastically or minimally. These are the most basic values on which a…

When I arrived to the Lakeland Public Library, I was quickly whisked away into a small room and handed a schedule. The schedule was because I would be rotating through each different department of the library over the course of the day. I gathered my things, and began my day at Reference Services. Reference Services was a quiet job, consisting of answering peoples’ questions and overseeing the computer section. My time at each rotation was about an hour, and near the end of my shift at…

The organization is an academic library for a university, so employees of the library at librarian status or higher positions are MLS-holders. Employees of the library are expected to have reference skills, customer service skills, and technical knowledge. Workers for the Carlson Library are recruited nationally, but mostly in the state of Pennsylvania. In addition, there are student employees as well, who are solely on-campus students and recruited locally. There are specific needs for each…

The library in Roger Williams University is in the center of the university; directly in front of the Gabelli School of Business. The library is open from 7:30AM-2AM on Monday-Thursday, from 7:30AM-6PM on Friday, and from 10AM-8PM on Saturday and Sunday. In the library, there is 3 floors; each floor has their own purpose. The first floor is the main floor; where there is computer and printers and technological services for assistance. The second floor is the tutor center; where students can get…

with professional and disciplinary expertise have curated academic library collections. (Walters, 2012) However, the current trend of shrinking library budgets has led to staff and collection budget cuts. With the increasing proliferation of publishing – especially electronic publishing – it is not possible for librarians to create fully comprehensive collections foreseeing patrons’ needs. (Weir, 2012, p. 41) Some academic libraries are using patron-driven acquisition (PDA) of electronic…

Gibbs reflective cycle As requested, I’m going to apply the Gibbs reflective cycle to a moment in my life, the moment I’ve chosen is of me decided to attend Birmingham City University instead of choosing other options available to myself. Experience: What happened was I got accepted by several University’s and I had to choose between Birmingham City, Staffordshire University and Derby University. Feelings: My feelings at that time were pretty jovial, because I was happy to see that I had so…

Library the Noun Are physical libraries really going to stay important with the Internet quickly becoming the monopoly of information for students, and even experts? Libraries have been around for so long that sometimes they are taken for granted. Has the Internet stolen the niche that libraries have held onto for centuries? Or do these two things have the capabilities to coexist? The real question is whether they will just survive in this transition or thrive in it. Some of the different…

Half-Priced Books The children’s and young adult’s section at half priced books is not everything that one would expect it to be. Both sections were at the back of the store stuffed into a small corner area which made each section feel very small. There were also more parents in these sections than children, but my description of these areas may explain why this is so. Overall, I felt that these sections were more laid out for adults to buy books for their children than for children to come…