Heather's comments (member since Oct 27, 2007)

Heather's comments from the Public Librarians group.

The Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead is excellent, too.

Can you get a job as a page, or spend a few hours a month volunteering at a nearby library? A little experience goes a long way!

I finished my MLS at UW-Madison in 2001 and have worked in public libraries ever since. It's a lot of fun and every day is different.

We decided to have patrons replace the batteries themselves. This has worked out really well - I was worried that we'd either waste time checking the batteries to see if they still had juice (my staff's idea), or throw out perfectly good batteries by replacing them all upon return (to save time). So we sell batteries at the desk for $1, which folks rarely buy - most of them have batteries at home and switch them out themselves.

Each audiobook comes with earbuds, and we pull those out during processing and sell them for $1 each at the desk -- again, most of our patrons have earbuds already. Those who don't just buy a pair of ours to use with the playaways.

We ordered through BWI, and the title selection was still a little thin last summer when we started. BWI, Recorded Books and Playaway themselves are offering more and more, though. We have a mix of classics and popular titles, and they all go out.

My library bought 65 titles last summer - they circ like hotcakes and we're going to start buying more of these and fewer books on CD.

Oh oh oh! Try Playaways!

I run a small library in Michigan. We have a healthy budget, but everything costs $$$, and audio books are so popular that I started looking for ways to add more titles for less money.

We bought a start-up collection of Playaways this summer, and they're going like gangbusters. They're small, dedicated MP3 players with one book per player. We order through BWI and get locking cases, which helps with security. We bought 2 cassette adapters and FM transmitters for people who want to use them in their car. And we have batteries and ear buds for sale at the desk (we don't replace the batteries as they wear out, a small cost that our users haven't objected to).

Best of all the prices are very reasonable, $30-50 ea, maybe cheaper if you have a negotiated discount. They're available from BWI, Recorded Books and Playaway, and probably others. Production quality has been good on all of ours so far. We're planning to buy more this winter and I'm dropping my cassette SOP with Recorded Books to get these instead.

Hope this helps - good luck.

I'm trying to perfect the art of the 15 or 30-minute "read." I start the book, skim through the middle, and read the end. Often I grab books off the processing cart and run through them at lunch.

I'm sure this is sacrilege to many, but what else can you do? There's a lot of stuff that I'll never get to read, and I get tired of having nothing in my brain about them but what I read in a review. For me it's better to have at least a small understanding of the author's style and book's content than none at all.

And I'll admit, this works esp well for books that I don't find personally appealing, like horror.