GEN: Reserving books for students

[Gayle Hodur <ghodur@REDSHIFT.COM>]

We offer the option for students to reserve books that are checked out. Our
automation is sometimes helpful with this and sometimes not. I know others
must run into the same problems. The automation system lists books as IN
when they are not on the shelf. Both you and I know that there are several
reasons why this could be true, unfortunately students are harder to
convince, and for this reason running a reserve list from the computer
doesn't help, since it doesn't actually show whose books are available and
whose aren't. I have worked to come up with a more reasonable way to
publicly show whose reserves have come in, but none of them seem to work
very well. I would really love to have an easily updateable (and accurate)
method that the students could check for themselves instead of endlessly
bombarding the counter asking me or my aide to look it up for them. The
only semi-successful method I've found is having a running list as a
spreadsheet file which we update and sort weekly and print for posting. I'm
still looking for a way to do this on our computer workstations. I've tried
a HyperStudio card and a link to our spreadsheet doc, but neither of them
work very well. If either is protected so that students can't alter them or
fool with other aspects of the parent program, then it makes it also too
time consuming for us to get in there, edit the file, re-protect it, and
save it to a remote location on the other computers. Anyone else have a
creative way to do this that isn't harrowing? If I was only at one school,
I wouldn't be so pressed by this, but I have 3 schools to deal with, only
one part-time aide, and I don't want to do away with reserves.

*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)*)

Gayle Hodur                             Snail Mail:
District Librarian                      Main Street Middle School
Soledad Unified School District         441 Main Street
(408) 678-3923                          Soledad, CA  93960
ghodur@redshift.com

Pager Screen Names:
UnGayle (IM and ichat)
10682291 (ICQ)
15661301 (ICQ - this is the number for &LibraryChat, if you have ICQ w/chat)

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