by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
For a lot of us, summertime conjures up memories of long, carefree days on school vacations. It’s trips to the beach, eating outdoors, waving to neighbors from the porch, listening to music in the park.
In the Pocahontas County Libraries and Visitor Information Centers, summers are busy.
We’re in the midst of our Summer Reading Program. We have programming for children, adults and everyone in between five days a week—each branch hosts a day. We’ve seen lots of our residents so far. If you haven’t made it out yet, there’s still time.
Those of you who haven’t made it yet have one more week to enjoy the fun. And don’t forget to join us for our end-of-summer bash Monday, July 29, at the Linwood branch.
There’s even more going on behind the scenes.
At Durbin, librarian Jessica Walton—who is currently studying for her master’s degree in library science —is working on ways to streamline the reporting that libraries are required to do. It’s a complex job that requires creating technical database queries that will return the right data in the right format.
At McClintic, librarian Pam Johnson creates that data. You know those first few pages in any book—the ones with all the teeny, tiny print that contains stuff like publisher, ISBN, edition and publisher? That information—along with things like bar code numbers that are unique to each library—are known as metadata.
That metadata is what Jessica queries for our reports. But it has to get entered first—for every book, magazine, newspaper, CD and DVD. Pam is our expert cataloger.
Trisha Barb keeps busy on two fronts as Linwood’s librarian. Sitting right at the bottom of Snowshoe, summer is a busy period for the Visitor Information Center part of the job, as hundreds of people stop by on their way to various music festivals and bike races.
Trisha also heads up our social media work. Keep an eye out for some fun new video she has been shooting this summer.
In Hillsboro, former teacher and current librarian Margaret Worth is busy coordinating the Summer Reading Program.
But, like most educators, she’s also planning for the return of school. Hillsboro and McClintic serve as school libraries for the local elementary schools. Margaret also helps out with Pocahontas County High School, which no longer has a librarian on staff.
And, of course, Hallie Herold keeps all these goings-on running smoothly while wearing her director of operations hat. But those of you in the Green Bank area know she’s also still head librarian at the epicenter of the quiet zone.
When she’s not at Green Bank, you’ll find her putting up a story walk all around Marlinton for each First Friday, planning next year’s budget, or representing Pocahontas County at regional library meetings.
All this work is possible thanks to our stellar assistants—Joy Boothe (Green Bank), Chris Cook (McClintic) and Emily Tatner (Hillsboro). They help out with things such as technical support—for residents and library staff alike—and also pitch in with programming and whatever happens to be going on that day.
And, of course, they do all of this while also doing the thing that got them into this profession in the first place—getting residents of Pocahontas County access to our collection of materials.
Stop by and say “hi.”
We’re busy.
But we’re never too busy for a chat with our patrons!