The Cranston Public Library Central Branch has asked for the organization of information in the Children’s catalog. They would like to index their “picture book collection for popular literacy topics like letter sounds, figurative language, word families, and literary genres… determine the best format for the index and share the resources with library staff” (personal correspondence, Emily Brown).

One unexpected challenge was the extra reading which was given to me the first day. I felt overwhelmed by the three books given to me with specific passages that needed to be read. These readings were amazing, once I settled down and digested them. The wording in the readings unlocked old memories about learning to read and my difficulties. They also reinforced skills I learned while teaching my children to read.

On my second day, a patron and her father came in looking for books that had character names that were easier to read. This is my pet peeves with school testing, standardized tests, and some early reading books used in the school systems; which include names that are not easily decoded or names that are nationality specific where the letters do not follow the language the child is learning. I worked with the patron to find a few Easy Reader series that had easier names to decode. I showed the patron the Owl Diary series because it was the correct age range and reading level needed. We looked at the first few pages to find character names. We found the city name of Treetopolis, Miss. Featherbottom, and Sue Clawson. The patron and I worked together to decode the city name. She was very happy with the result.

The third day was the most difficult. My supervisor told me she would not be there that day. We worked together the week before going over creating reports. The purpose of the reports for me, is to find what types of tags, notes, description, label, internal notes… anything that will help in a keyword search for the item. We are looking to add keyword information on books we find that meet our new organization of picture books. The wording is not truly known to us yet but we want to set a baseline for the picture book collection. My first report and only report I tried to create was of the entire picture book collection for the Central Branch. I used my notes, a Create List Instruction handout, and some tutorials. With many zero result reports created. The report I created at first was too small. So, I ran it again correctly. This one report to run took me two hours. Then I could not figure out how to export the report into an Excel sheet. I asked for help from a children’s room librarian. Once the report was in the Excel sheet, I found that out of 15,500 items did not have the correct information in the correct fields. At first I did not see it as too much of a problem, then with a few different sorting tries the problems became bigger. 104 items had a dash in the barcode field, 186 had part of the description in the barcode field, 938 had blank or empty barcode field, and 1880 had the author's name. After fixing some of these problems before I went for lunch at 2 pm, I wondered if I had run the report properly. After lunch I ask the librarian that helped me before about the amount of items with incorrect fields. She thought it may have happened when the report was transferred into the excel file. This report will need to be recreated. Thoughts on how to improve the report is to transfer a few fields at a time into an excel spreadsheet; example title, author, barcode, circulation information, and notes. But I truly need to speak with my supervisor about the problems I had. Creating this report properly will make accomplishing my Goal 1 Foundation: 1.4 Graduate explains the principles involved in organization of recorded knowledge and information easier. This report is the foundation of this PFE.

Yes, I am doing what the learning contract says. In my naïve mind, I thought I would be further along than I am. I thought I would be reviewing chosen items, creating piles of books for each identified topic, and dazzling the library with my information skills. But reports are tricky in a new system. I am not good at reports in the system I use for work now. This project is big, has many dimensions and levels, and will take time to complete. Once the reports are created and organized into a working document with all the fields and information needed the work within the collection will go quickly.

Yes, my supervisor has been very supportive and in her absence the other librarian’s in the children’s room are very approachable.

I intend to create more meaningful reports over the next few weeks. This will help me while I review the picture book collection for items with specific teaching topics. These items will be labeled either Figurative Language, Letter Sounds, Word Families, Phonic Sounds, or Literary Genres within the catalogs item record. This will help librarians, library staff, and patrons that are looking for these teaching topics.

One obstacle coming up with is to create a survey for the Cranston Library system. The survey is to find possibly more teaching topics that other patrons have been asking about but are not already identified. Figuring out the correct questions to ask on the survey will be challenging. Learning a new Google App is fun but sometimes challenging and frustrating at the same time. It is also time consuming in the creation of the survey and the reviewing of the data collected. My goal is to have a rough draft by the end of my next PFE day. After I create and fix the reports I attempted last week.

My fourth day felt more productive than day 3. My reports were done correctly. The results were exported again with almost the same results, the Note field was disposed over a few other fields due to the commas used in the description of the item. This did not happen to all item results. Fixing these field dispersion problems will take a few weeks because of the amount of the research result, over 15,500 items in the picture book collection. I went through 3000 items in the report and made the proper corrections. This time I did not try to resort to the results. Once I noticed what had happened, it was more logical to either retype the displaced information into the Note field or cut and paste the displaced information, then shift over the information that was pushed to the right fields. This is kind of addicting to do, once you get a rhythm. It’s like picking a scab or eating something that you do not truly like but kind of do not mind the texture or part of the flavor.

I look forward to Day 5 because I created a survey/questionnaire for the Children’s Librarians and workers asking for professional and personal feedback on the topics of teaching and literacy topics that patrons ask them. I sent it at the end of the day on Friday and hope all 7 individuals respond before my next PFE day.

One unexpected issue is with getting paid. The PFE library is having trouble figuring out exactly what forms or information is needed by me, from URI, and from themselves. Last request was for an invoice of hours worked. I contacted URI and my advisor, gave my PFE location their contact information, but the individual who requested this information was not there the day I provided the information. Should be interesting to see how this worked out and what I need to complete next.

I am working on achieving my goal of organization of recorded knowledge and information and employing standards of cataloging by sorting and finding specific literacy and teaching topics within the picture book collection. A shared Google document will be created and a Literacy and Teaching Topics list within the catalog. These documents and lists will allow the patrons and staff the ability to access this needed and requested information. By locating, retrieving, evaluating, and synthesizing these literacy and teaching topics within the picture book collection, patrons and staff will be able to quickly perform relevant and accurate reference searches within the library catalog.