GIFSL* 66: Requests (made public) (+ Eragon, book 4)

(Two years ago)

Miss, I want to reserve Eragon book 4
Um, as far as I know it's not written yet - ?
No, it isn't.
So is he going to write it, do you know?
Probably.  Maybe.  I hope so.
Well...
I'd really like to reserve it, Miss.
OK then...

The kids know I have a collection of requests on post-t notes on a laminated sheet in my office .  This is what it looks like pretty much all the time:

It's very much in plain sight, where the kids can see it and I can too.  When a book has been requested and ordered, if it's orderable; Eragon book 4 clearly wasn't) it goes onto a post-it note with the kid's name and goes on here (the white sheet was a rather long list a kid brought in with her).  When the book comes in, we marry it up with the note and the kid/s on the list get to borrow it first.

It's also really effective (in terms of me remembering and in terms of the kid making the request feeling nicely important and valued) to, if you can, ring your wonderful local independent bookshop at lunchtime while the kid is there, to ask them to get in/put aside a copy of this title.  Kids have this happy shine when what they want is treated this way - it's good library PR too. 

I put a lot of my orders through a wonderful local independent bookshop - they know their stuff, especially with young adult fiction, and are fabulously helpful.  And it puts money back into the local area's economy.  And they put up with lunchtime phone calls when I order a single book or two at a time; so the kids also are alerted to a wonderful local helpful bookshop, which is not a bad thing either.

So cut to this week.  Same kid, two years taller, two years older (but still at school.  I'd kinda begun to wonder if he'd still be at school when Christopher Paolini got around to writing book 4....) bounces into my office with a happy smile on his face:

MISS!
Yes?
ERAGON BOOK 4!
Yup, I know, that post-it note is still there...
It's coming out in November!
What, he's written it?
YES!
Really?  Wow.

We look it up.  He has. It will.

The happy life of teacher librarians: wishes do come true.

Cheers

Ruth