Re: Barcode labels

[Suby Wallace <swallace@NIC.CRSC.K12.AR.US>]

Another suggestion about putting barcodes on books.  When i did mine two
years ago, it was my first year on the job.  I inherited a huge, outdated
collection when the jr hi moved and left their books behind.  They merged
with the high school and they beefed up their budget for new books and left
us their ooutdated, age-inappropriate collection.  So I weeded heavily as I
also had to go online my first year!  (The Winnebago contract had already
been paid for.)

Our teachers insist on having library - it is a break to them.  So, I had to
barcode my whole collection without being able to close the library.  (Other
schools in the system have an aide, and were able to close for two weeks
while barcoding.)  I didn't allow kids to check books out for two weeks,
however.

So, contrary to what I'm usually adamant against, I rented a video to show
during library classes and enlisted kids to help me with barcoding.  When my
classes came in, I divided them into teams.  I let each team work 10 minutes.

We had an assembly line.  I would take one shelf at a time off and put it on
a booktruck.  I had a kid sit beside me with the barcodes, and they would
read them off one at a time.  Another kid would find the book on the book
truck and hand it to me.  I would look at it, decide what category it was in
(I'm talking about fiction here).  As the kid took it off the shelf, he
handed it to a third kid, who had also been handed the barcode.  He would
put it on, hand it to the next kid who had the label protectors.  I would
have looked at the book by this time and would have said "science fiction"
or whatever.  Each kid would say, as they handed it down the line, "science
fiction".  It would get to the next kid who had the subject stickers.  He
would put a science fiction sticker on the spine, and hand it to the next
kid who would put a "bandaid" (as we call our label protectors) on the
subject sticker.  He would hand it to the next kid, who would be standing or
sitting next to the empty shelf, and he would put it back on the shelf.

This way, we were able to pull off the shelf the books that, for some
reason, didn't get barcodes, and I could deal with them later.  We got the
shelves read, as the barcodes were in shelf order.  And, I was able to put
subject stickers on the fiction at the same time.  We did the nonfiction the
same way, without the subject stickers.

The kids absolutely loved doing it.  In my collection (at that time) of
about 4 - 5000 books, I would venture to say I've found 1 or 2 mistakes on
barcodes at most.  Because we had an assembly line, a book couldn't get
passed and get out of order.  If someone got behind, we all stopped and
waited until they caught up.  It seems to me we usually had two kids on
subject stickers, because I had about 10 different ones, and it took a while
to look through them to find the right one.

Anyway, without being able to shut down the library and with no one but me
and the kids doing it, we were able to barcode the collection in 1 1/2
weeks.  We did it in late Jan-early Feb., and at the Valentine parties, I
went to each class and read a poem i'd written about "I couldn't have done
it without you" and gave everyone a blow pop.

Just a suggestion, but it worked for me.  The kids would come down on their
lunch hours, they would ask to be excused from class to come help when I
didn't have classes.  They really took pride in helping, and every single
kid in the school had a hand in it, even the special ed.  It was fun for me,
and helped me to get to know the kids better.



Suby Weston Wallace
Nettleton Intermediate Center  (grades 5-6)
3801 Vera
Jonesboro, AR   72401           swallace@nic.crsc.k12.ar.us