Internship Journal, Week 7: October 9 & 11
08 October 2024
This week, work on the juvenile library of things continued in earnest. You'll notice that I mentioned the collective collection and not the adventure kits on their own here, as the adventure kits are not the only imminent additions, it turns out. I didn't catch any context from the Prince, nor can I find any internal documents with information, but six sets of brand new STEM kits based around buildable electronic activities have all been planned, purchased, consolidated, and organized in their totes. Outside of the cataloging and advertising and distribution that formally enshrines them as items that can circulate, the only thing left with the kits was to get all the big or important enough components stickered branded with CRRL's Library of Things logo. All 36 of them.
Nothing particularly heavy on the mind at that stage, but definitely full of drudgery, to the point that a workload that had already taken up multiple days of the Prince's schedule would start delaying the impending selecting and content deadlines that had to be filled. As much as these kinds of things are crushingly maligned and underpaid to wring the life out of anyone laboring in basically every for-profit industry, I don't particularly mind this kind of work, since there's a quiet, reliable satisfaction to getting things ordered and in their proper place. It helps that, at least at the specific libraries and departments I've worked at, there's an unsaid agreement that nobody is above the most menial of tasks.1
Friday was when we went over the actual texts of the Investigating Insects packet. As expected, the Prince had almost filled in his entire draft as if it were another assignment he'd probably developed in the past, way beyond my efforts in terms of completeness. However, no educator trained under the specter of standards can appeal to young minds without a particularly playful voice, and that is where my specific mesh of influences allow me to tailor my text for just that. Since the intent is to get kids to learn or reinforce whatever they'd read in the by doing the activities, most of that information was integrated into that section, i.e.: if all insects have a head, abdomen, and a thorax, then that'll be something they can gradually begin to identify by closely inspecting bugs with one of the two magnifying tools in the kit.
Compressed into a couple hours as it was, there were a lot of foundational decisions made in that time. Should activities use more than one item? Nope, as even if the function on a couple of items are the same, their forms are too different. Should there be directions for each and every activity—this *would* probably be useful for homeschooling parents, but might prove overwhelming for younger kids—or should they be left to make their own adventure outside our prescriptive bounds? I was leaning towards having an activity for every single book, but that would brush up against the latter—not to mention actually reading through up to seven books per kit and trying to guess what would be be the enjoyable thing for the dozens of kids that'll check out the pack, too much work when they'd follow their own whims even if they were there.
If I can't get kids to look at all the books in the kit, I can maybe get them to engage with some other books by putting together some themed lists of titles to check out after they're done with the kit. Surprisingly enough, the Prince nor anyone else thought of the idea to have companion booklists—almost certainly because there's eight lists to make for eight topics, some with subjects that are quite fluid for subject heading standards—but if we're trying to nudge patrons towards CRRL resources with these kits, might as well get 'em to further engage with the collection, too. As this entire project is a update, I limited the list to books published within this decade, whether fiction or nonfiction, *and* if they had an informative bent; a bit of a coinflip for individual titles, but checking industry reviews did at least give some assurance.
With everything done, this should make a solid template to try and copy as I develop a couple kits, all by myself. I think, at this point, I have gotten a sense enough of all the tasks therein to have *a* hang of things, so we'll see how this all shakes out over the next few weeks.
1 ^If your direct higher-ups are actually sensible enough to foster that culture, anyway, which is not always the case.