Interview Preparedness Strategies and In the news...

Preparing for an interview has several steps for me. First I like to look up the website and make sure I know what is going on, in this case, at the branches in question. I also want to know what their mission statements say and any other pertinent information. Next, I go through my notes and old class assignments, brushing up on my knowledge of reader's advisory, reference and programming. For this interview, I also plan on calling one of the other branches of SPL and doing an informational interview with one of the librarians on the subject of Collection Development. I know how it works at other systems; both KCLS and Sno-Isle have their CD centralized--books are selected at Service Center. The librarians can mostly choose what books they want to promote, although there are some collections that are given more importance than others. Requests from patrons also comes into play, although often books that they request that the library doesn't have are likely on order already. I also know that selection involves reading reviews from several sources and keeping up on what's popular with different agegroups and genres. Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus are mainstream sources of reviews, but I also like to check out reviews by teens, often posted on library websites and Guy's Read, a website dedicated to getting guys to read. The Literary Resource center is a good place to look up reviews by author or title, but I haven't figured out a way to look up the most recent reviews on any title. That might be a good project for today.

In other news:
KCLS and SPL's reciprical borrowing has been cut back hugely, which may mean that SPL will be buying more materials in the future. SPL patrons were using KCLS materials much more than the opposite and now SPL patrons will not be allowed to put KCLS materials on hold, although they can still check materials out in person. This will free up KCLS's most popular items to circulate amoung their own patrons much more quickly and make the demand for the same materials at SPL go up quite a bit. I see this as good timing, as it is several years after the building of the new SPL library and now attention can be turned to this task more easily.