Hi friends--
Thanks so much for your ideas for a long-term project for my wonderful
assistant! Just to recap, she likes to have something she can pick up
and work on during those times when she has a few free minutes. She has
been replacing faded and scratched barcodes and is almost at the end of
that task. Here are the suggestions I received from this group:
#######################
Making sure books have the right spine label? Some of my old ones have
only the first letter of the author's last name rather than the first 3
as we prefer. And she can also look for and clean the "dirty books"
spraying the plastic covers with Windex. How about the genre stickers,
we put them on many of our fiction because teachers assign kids to check
out a science fiction or a mystery etc.
#######################
Of course I saw barcodes and immediately thought Call #'s! We have a
label maker we can use for either, but it can get expensive for the
entire collection.
#######################
Have you added complete formatted contents notes for all of your
collections of plays to your records? Have you changed short stories
to the fiction category (assuming you want to keep them together as I
do). You can start inventory in a relatively unused part of the library
- shut down circulation from there for a while. You might want to do
contents notes for the short stories.
########################
I am often looking for a project for several of my aides as well, but
here are a few we have going on right now.
1. Relabeling spines of books. Many of the old labels were hand
written or the type is faded. I also wanted the height of the labels to
be uniform so we are relabeling many books.
2. One of the aides is going through the cataloging of the fiction to
be sure a price and subject headings were assigned. If not, she is
adding what she and if she can not find a subject heading she leaves the
book for me to look at.
3. An aide is also checking our fiction series. Many students tell us
we are missing a book in a series here or there. She decided to check
all of our fiction series sets to see what we have, what is popular and
what is missing from a set.
########################
Making sure books have the right spine label? Some of my old ones have
only the first letter of the author's last name rather than the first 3
as we prefer. And she can also look for and clean the "dirty books"
spraying the plastic covers with Windex. How about the genre stickers,
we put them on many of our fiction because teachers assign kids to check
out a science fiction or a mystery etc.
########################
Oooh, send her my way. I would have her pull all my books with
inconsistent spine labels. That is one of my goals this year. The way
things are going, it will have to be a 3 year goal!
#######################
Do you allow her in the database? Authors are always getting messed up.
When ever you put in a new disk, the authors seem to come in anyway they
want. You can end up with 3 or more entries for a particular author.
Same with subjects and titles.
#######################
Well, if she were here, she could do the same with the spine labels --
we seem to have an inordinate number that are faded and illegible. Or,
if you have a video collection and a previously sloppy cataloger --
checking all the video catalog records to be sure that they indicate
that it's a videorecording rather than a book. But, that's just here!
######################
I would LOVE to have someone tackle my 920s (collective biographies).
It would be SO helpful to have all the people covered listed as a
subject heading.
#####################
Cleaning front covers of books is one of our long-term projects. We
find alcohol-free baby wipes work well without drying our our hands too
much.
#####################
How about cleaning up the mismatched dewey numbers on your books? We
buy cataloging from various places, and while we use abridged dewey,
some vendors sell books with full dewey cataloging. We have to go
through and clean them up to be consistent. It's a big job, and one we
never totally catch up with. Same for conforming subject tracings in
the card catalog. We don't like to use "Juvenile literature" because
everything we have is juvenile literature. Also, different vendors use
different subject tracings. Trying to be consistent is very difficult.
Also, how about weeding your beat up books, and ordering replacements.
We found many of our "classic" books (Dr. Seuss, Brian Wildsmith, etc.)
weren't being picked up because, even tho we had copies available, the
copies were so battered they weren't appealiing. So one of our
volutneers went searching for "beat-up books" and ordered replacements.
Good luck,
####################
How about fixing all the books in the "book hospital." I know we have
several and it never seems to get done.
####################
We work on building bibliographies which are searchable in our OPAC when
we have time and find the need. Things like mysteries, science fiction,
fantasy, which don't always show up using a standard subject search.
Also it might be a good idea to list the short stories and or poems in
your collection in a searchable way.
####################
Adding the authors and titles of short stories to the record of the
short story collection book that they are in--very handy if you have any
classes that use short stories. Similarly adding names to records for
collective biography. (Not for the big multi-volume series, but for
something like "Scientists of the 20th century" etc.) Replacing spine
labels where they are peeling off or if there are some that do not have
the 3 letters for author names, only 1 or 2. Checking the
catalog/shelves that all of the animal books have the correct DDC
number. I've had several instances where we hadn't gotten changes done
with a newer version of DDC so we had wolf books with 3 different call
numbers. All were in the 599's, but were not right next to each other.
Various truncation schemes can cause this also. Hope some of these
ideas make work for you
#######################
What about replacing dust jacket covers with fresh ones; retyping FIC
and BIO spine labels to spell out the entire author's last name (and
first initial) and/or the biographee's name (also needs to be changed in
the computer); renumbering those sections greatly changed in the latest
DDC (500's!!); standardizing numbers in NF areas where some numbers are
carried out further than others (histories, social issues,
technology...); pulling and repairing books; listing books to possibly
go to a bindery and/or be replaced with newer copies; reviewing a
section (arts & crafts??) with an eye to update, replace, and add
titles, looking up suggestions on Amazon and giving all to you for final
consideration; deleting books YOU have pulled; seriously weeding the
catalog file...
#######################
are all of the items in your catalog dated by copyright year and priced
for replacement value?
#######################
Would she be able to clean up subject headings and author entries?
#######################
You are very fortunate to have such an assistant!!!
We went thru last year and put NEWBERY AWARD spine labels (from Demco)
on all applicable books. I was amazed at how many--especially the older
ones--that WE had. I gave my assistant a list of the winners and she did
the project.
Also, we have been cleaning our books, just with a cleaner such as 409
and paper towels. They are looking much better.
#######################
My assistant is working on replacing spine labels that are not readable
because some of the numbers wrap around to the front cover of the book
(She retypes them & turns them sideways to read the same direction as
the title on the spine). This helps my student assistants to shelve
their books more accurately.
#######################
One of my assistants decided to add the titles and sometimes the
subjects of the stories contained in the folklore, fairytale, myth and
short story collections to the MARC record of each volume. This was a
very long term project. But the nice thing is that you can enter the
title of a story and find out which book it is in instead of having to
search the table of contents of every possible book.
#####################
inventory; run list of overdue books, double-check if they're on
shelves; re-label directional labels on shelves, spruce them up; put
your book suggestions/wishlist in Titlewave database
shelf read
#####################
How about spine labels. She can come do mine! :) I love that many of
the new processed books are stamped right into the spine. What a
fortunate person you are, treasure her!
#####################
When was the last time you replaced plastic book jackets? That might be
a good job. When we automated our library and did a major weeding, some
of the books that were left looked rather dismal, especially with all
the new titles we were getting. When we put bar codes on the books I
also had my assistant replace the jackets. Makes the collection look so
much better.
Emily Mulch, librarian
Great Bend High School
Great Bend, KS
mulche@usd428.org
Emily, the library goddess
It's great to be a Great Bend High Panther!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law.
To change your LM_NET status, e-mail to: listserv@listserv.syr.edu
In the message write EITHER: 1) SIGNOFF LM_NET 2) SET LM_NET NOMAIL
3) SET LM_NET MAIL 4) SET LM_NET DIGEST * Allow for confirmation.
LM_NET Help & Information: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/
Archive: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/archive/
EL-Announce with LM_NET Select: http://elann.biglist.com/el-announce/
LM_NET Supporters: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/ven.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------
LM_NET
Mailing List Home