Still moving...

I went in to the library for a couple of hours this afternoon to see if the carpet layers had finished putting down the carpet in the Periodicals section. They had, well almost, the carpet is down but the borders aren't in yet. And they haven't put my shelves back in place. So I finished up the new shelf list that we'll use to re-shelve everything in call number order. I couldn't find a way to make our ILS, III's Millennium, output a list because we use two different location codes (well, actually three if you count newspapers which aren't interfiled with the rest of the periodicals) and it wasn't creating a trustworthy review file (it left out some titles for no apparent reason). So I did it by hand...dumped the holdings into a spreadsheet and sorted it into call number order mostly by hand by comparing it to a search in the patron view. Not very efficient but thorough so now that I'm done I'm fairly certain I've got all the titles included and in the correct order. The finishing touch was to annotate the list by identifying which titles included volumes that are at the bindery. It took about a week of my time, not something I'd care to repeat. I s'pose I should write an article about it so no one else has to repeat it either.

Moving ranges of books in libraries

Did you ever wonder how they move entire ranges of books in a library without having to unload all of the books and take the shelves apart? For instance when a library is redecorated and new carpet is installed? It's pretty cool. They have wheeled lifts that actually raise the shelves, stabilze them and make them mobile! We're installing new carpeting in my library and that's exactly what's happening. Here are some photos to give you a better idea...


The orange carpet is old, the blue is new.


The lift has arms that fit through the shelves about midway from bottom to top.


Of course sometimes things don't go as planned.

Crash course in LC classification

My staff and I got a crash course in LC classification of serials recently as we began a project to shift our periodicals collections in print and microform into LC call number order (from alphabetical order by title). We all new enough of LC classification to find materials in other parts of the library, of course, but now we're all much more expert in LC classification for serials! Avoiding duplicates and using Cutters to collocate titles that have undergone a title change were the biggest challenge. Now, of course, comes the real work: actually moving all the volumes into the right order. We'll be at it for weeks!