My name is Sydney Richardson, I’m in year 10, and I did work experience at the Wollondilly Library in Picton for one week. During this time, I learned a lot of new things and I now have a great experience that I can talk about and remember.
Organising and maintaining a library isn’t as simple as hiring one librarian to scan people’s books and library cards. It’s not just a matter of putting contact on a book and sticking a few letters on the spine.
The Wollondilly Library has a whole other floor up top, where a bunch of clever and creative people work on the libraries website, design crafts for little kids to do during story time, check the books everyday to make sure they’re in order and easy for you to access and find, plan and host small events for all ages of the community, and research the present and past of Wollondilly and other nearby places in preparation for people of later or future generations who may inquire into a topic we people today may otherwise not appreciate. Even their “incredibly boring” staff meetings are fun to watch.
And despite popular belief due to the exaggerations on TV, librarians aren’t cranky old grannies. They do possess vocabularies that extend far out from the word, “Shh,” and the Wollondilly ones are great, funny and totally nice! I’ve had a great time meeting all of them. Each of them has their own invaluable personalities and I’ve felt very comfortable being around them.
I chose to do my work experience at Wollondilly Library because I love to read, and truthfully I expected that all I’d be doing was putting books back on shelves. But, I was wrong! I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in research, view the ways that the library chooses the books they’re offered to buy—my opinion was even taken into account!—and I was able to sit down and watch Story Time, which was so cute!
I was shown inside the mobile library, which is a large van filled with shelved books, magazines, DVD’s and audio-books. The mobile library drives around Wollondilly, stopping at a specific town for most of the day, giving members of towns with no library the opportunity to borrow books.
The amount of community work the staff of the library are involved in and their efforts to make many people happy really is elevating, and I’m very glad I had the opportunity to do work experience here. I’ve done many things, I’ve never sat around wondering what to do with myself, but most importantly, I had fun.
