- Summer reading and programs are over, but lest you think I am resting on my laurels, it's time for projects! I've been working on these things on and off all summer, but I had time to really buckle down and spend some serious time on them this week.
- Weeding the YA fiction
- Publicity (flyers, update the calendar, etc.) have barely skimmed the surface on this!
- Signage (took most of everything down when I moved stuff, now updating and replacing)
- Inspired by our adult services librarian, we added covers to the floor to lead the kids to the juvenile series, since nobody can find them now that we moved them.
- The biggest project was my replacement project. This is one of those things that people who don't work in the library have no idea how time-consuming it is. I've always done it piecemeal here and there but this year decided to do it once a year in August, send all the replacement orders then, and that's it for the year. These are the steps:
- Inventory - this involves scanning every single book (I had some staff to help with this and a volunteer, but not everyone could work at the same pace and each location must be completely scanned in one day or the reports won't run correctly. This took us from May through July and we still completely missed out on the biographies. But it's better than when we used to do it by hand with pencil and paper. To put this in perspective, our teen collection, one of the smaller areas, has 2,000 books. Our picture books, one of the bigger areas, has 4,000)
- Reports - thankfully, our head of circulation runs these for me. I get reports of everything that was not scanned, and therefore is theoretically missing. They can include 100s of items.
- Theoretically. Then I search for each title (quickly) and then run those I don't find through the computer. Many of them will show up as lost-claimed return or paid-discard, even though that last is not supposed to. Everything I haven't found or that isn't in one of the aforementioned categories I mark in the catalog as missing.
- The paid-discard category I look through to see what I've already reordered and what still needs to be ordered. Then we send a help desk ticket to find out why the 50+ items that were all supposed to have deleted last month did not delete. Fairly simple.
- Lost-claimed return - For some reason, many of these weren't deleted when they were supposed to be and I had a list of 150. Our head of circulation is going to deal with it. Meanwhile, after much discussion, I decided to just go through and make a list of everything I needed to reorder, which totaled about $150, and if they do miraculously reappear or are paid for, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
- Missing - after running this list through and marking which titles we had duplicates etc. of, and then going through the whole list again because the first report came out not quite right!! I and my associate did one final search for missing titles. I started with 700 but got it down to 400 before we started looking. This took us the better part of two days, especially since we had to do major shelf-reading before we could find anything. Everything missing that we found had to be discharged and reshelved.
- Then I had to decide how long something had to be missing before I replaced it, if we should wait in hope that we'd missed something and it would show up again, if we needed a replacement, was it out of print, etc.
- Then I took the carts of books, realized I didn't have that much budget, and spent hours trying to figure out where to cut back.
- Then I had to go through the list of all the replacement items - discarded for damage, weeded for ickiness (yes, this is an official category in my world), needs a new cover if we ever hope to circulate it again, a small number of updated titles for nonfiction, etc. Then I had to go back to the shelves and pull the items I was replacing that weren't already weeded.
- Finally, orders were sent! Our cataloger got a large list to delete, but I kept all my lists in case the books mysteriously reappeared in the catalog (this has been known to happen and she and I call these Zombie Books, because they rise from the dead)
- Of course, everything has to be cataloged etc. once it arrives but that wasn't my job, thankfully! Finally finished late on Friday and LEFT only an hour after I was supposed to go home!
- Final stats
- 15 items left on the missing list in hopes they will return
- 182 missing items given to our cataloger to delete
- cost - $380 for media, $380 for books, $50 for tub books
- 80 items on the replacement list
- cost - $920 (the small number of nonfiction replacements were expensive!)
- 150 items marked claims returned
- cost - $150 for replacement items (many already reordered)
- I also had a miserable sore throat for most of the week - probably a combination of stress, exhaustion, and allergies, but at least I didn't get the stomach bug! (knock on wood)
What the kids are reading
- Wow Wow Wubbzy - I took actually have a couple dvds of this show, but omigosh it's awful!
- A read-aloud for ages 4-7 while on vacation - I ended up just recommending some classics, Encyclopedia Brown, Charlotte's Web, Three Tales of My Father's Dragon, etc.
- Monster High books - I still don't have any. So they asked for Ever After High, which I do have and I also gave them Poison Apple and Candy Apple series, which was a suggestion from a neighboring librarian and they definitely liked Poison Apple. Then they asked for American Girl, which I also had.
- Dog Diaries - need to see if there's more past the fourth one
- Wings of Fire
- School visited - more requests for drama, celebrity bios (I will add these at some future point when I finally weed the biographies)
- 6th grade teacher - books on bullying at different levels. Gave her Squish, Bystander, Warp Speed, Misfits and Blubber.
- House of Hades - all but one copy is missing!
- Panda books - I think I need more. Have gotten a lot of requests for panda books this summer
- Ellen Hopkins - for a wonder, only about 2 books are stolen. I also gave her Glimpse and Because I am Furniture, which she was excited about.
- Allegiant - boy wasn't very thrilled with any of my alternative suggestions, but agreed to try The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
3 comments:
I had to laugh - Monster High, American girls, yeah, I can see being into both on the same day:)
You know, this is the perfect time to start that re-carpeting, bwahaha!
We got the carpet spot-cleaned - and the storytime room roof is still leaking. One thing at a time!
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