I'll start with work. As I mentioned before falling off the face of my blog, I went back to work. I work at the Millcreek Community Center- it's a library, a rec center, and a senior center all in one! I'm a shelver just like I was before. Here's what the library looked like when I entered on March 5th.
Painters, computer tables with no computers, and shelves- empty, empty shelves. I just have to out myself as a nerd and admit that the potential of these bare shelves made me giddy inside. A new library when so many "experts" proclaim the library is dead? Awesome.
I met my new coworkers. All very nice and extremely welcoming. We had no books to shelve (yes, that was a tad bit funny), but we got to work labeling shelves. I spent my second day mostly shelving graphic novels.
We shelved all of the brand new books first. While the library was closed, new books were still being ordered and kept in storage for us. After that, they started bringing us the books the Millcreek staff had boxed up. The boxes felt endless...
We shelved a lot of them, decided some should be deleted, and worked like crazy for a few weeks getting all we could on the shelves.
As we got closer to the opening, it got interesting. Things were happening, to be sure- like the new library sign that was not there one day and there the next. However, we did get to a point where it seemed like the library staff had run out of things to do. So we started spiffing up our collections and cleaning off old due date stickers from the older books.
We had to do some shifting when our beautiful shelf ends came in, and that helped keep us busy until opening.
April 11th finally came. It was a whirlwind five weeks, but we were all so excited to open. Mayor Peter Corroon was present for the big ribbon cutting ceremony. I am so sad he lost his campaign to be Governor, and even more sad he isn't running for County Mayor again. He has done so much good in Salt Lake County, especially building this combined agency, LEED-certified building during a time of economic hardship.
And then the doors opened and we got to work welcoming the public. We had so many festivities going on that day. The Wild Thing, tours, showing off and explaining our awesome new sorter machine, crafts, animal shows and more. Adam and Brayden had been asleep when I left for work that day, so I didn't expect to see them there. But Adam took Brayden on his first bus ride to get there and I am so glad he did. Brayden got to meet and dance with the Wild Thing and he loved it. In fact, saying he loved it would be an understatement. He's still talking about it six weeks later.
And there you have it. How a library goes from empty to open to the public in five weeks. We've been open for six weeks now, and we just went "live" on the system today. Administration wanted to make sure that Millcreek patrons got first dibs at our new, never been checked out collection. I'll just confess that I checked out dozens of board books that first week. Board books that hadn't been chewed. I think you get the point. Anyways, today we went live and that meant our items were open to go out on hold to patrons at other libraries. We had 1,300+ items to take off our shelf ad send to other people. Even more evidence that libraries are not dead. Good thing, because libraries are where I belong.
