Well mateys,
last weeks blog was light but this one is going to be more on the long side
as I have various things to report on since attending my exciting monthly PIC meeting.
Most important of all: The city is having a Halloween Party and although its at the civic auditorium in Santa Cruz, you can participate if you want to enter their city employee costume contest by taking a photo of yourself and sending it as an attachment to Jason McCluskey (mccluskeyj@santacruzpl.org) by Halloween morning at 9 am. He will send them on to the city and our esteemed city council will be the final judges. I am not sure what you win (a key to the city of Santa Cruz?, free parking for life?) but it might be fun to try if you think you have what it takes.
Now business: since we have had our first rain I am going to review power outage information before the winter season gets underway and I ask that all of you take a bit of time to read over the power outage section of our emergency manual (pp. 31-32). There is an emergency manual on the counter behind the circ desk. Let me know if you can't find it. October is emergency preparedness month anyway, so if you haven't read through the emergency manual yet this year, this is the month to do it. Feel free to grab a binder in any slow moments and have a thrilling read. Some of it is not as up to date as it should be, but in this case even a little information is better then none.
Most importantly: There are various flashlights throughout the branch: one under the circ desk, one in the discharge room, one on each of our workstation desks and two tall standing flashlights on the top shelf above the Tales to Tails basket. Please wander around and make sure you know where to find one BEFORE you are caught in the dark.
If the power goes off the person in charge will call LIT & HQ from our power outage phone to report the outage. To use this phone you must dial 9 to get an outside line.
Public restrooms should be locked for safety reasons. (its dark in there?!)
If the outage is during the daylight hours we will remain open and provide whatever reference and information services we are able. We do have a branch IPAD so if wifi is still up we can use that to access our catalog (depending on if the entire network is down). It is also handy in getting general dewey decimal #s when trying to help patrons find particular subjects. However, it does travel back and forth with me so if the power goes out on a day that I am not at the branch you will have to do without.
If the outage occurs at dusk or beyond patrons should be cleared from the branch and after 15 minutes the branch will close. We will put signs on the door indicating the reason we are closed and follow our usual closing procedures as best we can, turning things off and locking up as per usual.
There is signage for almost all occasions on the back counter so it is not necessary to create new ones.
(There are also Branch is closed due to Power Outage signs in the Power Outage notebook)
For those of you who work the desk, in the event of a network failure, wherein we still have power to run the computers but evergreen is down we have been asked to start using the evergreen standalone interface instead of creating a word document. There are two screens: one for checking out and one for renewing.
The instructions for using this interface are printed out and on the branch information clipboard so I strongly urge you to read through them, look at the interface and familiarize yourself with this process. It is most important to SAVE THESE TRANSACTIONS after finishing with each borrower before moving on to the next.
All offline transactions MUST BE UPLOADED at the end of the day! The person most in charge at the branch will be responsible for this. We no longer however have to send any e-mails stating that "all branch off line tranasctions are done" and in fact we have been pointedly asked NOT TO, unless we receive an e-mail stating otherwise...
During any power outages we will limit check outs to 5 items per patron.
I have put together a POWER OUTAGE NOTEBOOK which will live henceforth on the back counter behind the circ desk so we don't have to prowl around in the dark when we forget all the instructions.
Secondly, once again I have to insist that everyone pay even greater heed to watching the screen when checking items in as well as really focusing on where said items are supposed to go, as there have been an inordinate number of items that are supposed to be going to other branches, on our shelves, as well as many claims returned items that have not been properly checked in. I would rather everyone go slow and we have a backlog of things to be shelved then to have to unshelve items that have been mishandled. For those of you who shelve, please flip open the books and make doubly sure that these really are Capitola books and if in doubt run them through check in again.
Kari Gunn, our own personal programming person has hosted her first Tea and Talk event this last Wednesday. She had a decent turnout and it appeared a lively discussion. If any of you know people who are looking for a bit of adult social time, Kari will be hosting this event on the second Wednesday of every month from 9:30-11 (before we open).
She is also here on Thursdays @ 3pm running the Tweens and Teens group, which currently is pretty sparsely attended so again, if you know of anyone who might be interested please pass this info on to them. I believe she has a craft organized and would happily plan games or book groups if she had any takers.
Tales to Tails is on a temporary hiatus and will NOT be scheduled on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month, despite what our flier says. Please encourage interested patrons to call the programming dept. as they need to make appointments if they wish to participate and programming should have the most up to date information on when the program occur.
The story hour subject this week is Boats and Voyages so if you are seeking kids books with that might fall under this subject check in the pile above my desk.
NEW PROCEDURE: Since this is emergency preparedness month, I have instated a special new emergency procedure specific to Capitola. It is the procedure for rescuing your co-workers from unfortunate encounters. This is covered in the problem patron manual but at Capitola we are lucky enough to have two white "doorbells" under our circ counter. If you are trapped at the desk with someone you need to get away from please feel free to ring those bells and any staff that happens to hear, please step out into the circ area and tell the trapped staff member they have a phone call in the back. Do attempt to be subtle as to not further excite the patron.
ok, this is so long it will take you 1/2 a shift to read it and then you have to move on and read the emergency manual and the clipboard.
Happy abosorbing,
Cappy Dick
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