Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Well today marked day 2 of this school year project.   I have become aware that I am expected to deal with all computer issues, though I have yet to receive any formal training or given any policy/procedures for dealing with such issues.  I am new too, and have some of the same questions everyone is coming to me with.  I am begging forgiveness and telling them I will get right on it.  Some of the issues deal with computers not logging in, login names and passwords that worked Friday not working today, computers that haven’t worked since last year–and still do not work, overhead projectors that were tagged for repair but were never picked up, and you name it, it is on my list.  That’s okay, I’ll focus on them sooner or later.  It is a new challenge to my job that I haven’t really had to deal with in six years, so I just need to get back in the groove of things.  When I asked about some of this, I was told that the media specialist meeting Wednesday would answer a LOT of my questions.

So today once again I focused on the collection and getting the books in the boxes sorted and shelved. Once again I used a simple method to identify books for weeding.  Mainly I looked at the book first for obvious age and disrepair.  It wasn’t hard to find them.  I will use a more strategic method by looking at the collection analysis once all the books are shelved.   I found another jewel today!!  The title is  Stories of Our American Patriotic Songs by Dr. John Henry Lyons. It’s copyright date is 1942.  The author died in the 50s. I know I shouldn’t but I googled the author, and only ran across 2 pages of google hits totalling 19 in all. Apparently Camden, New Jersey has it in a library up there, because one of the hits led me to their book database online.  It will soon NO LONGER be a part of CMS’s database, though in all fairness, it looks like a pretty good book with some historical value.  The cover is ugly, the pages are musty, and it smells.  That is reason enough to remove it.  If my teachers truly value this title, I will seek a replacement that is more up to date.

Here is the book:

I have not learned yet what the district policy is on discarding old books.  I will find that out Wednesday too.  I’m sure one of the options is to allow teachers to “adopt” titles for their classroom. And I did have some teachers today come in and request some of the books. Tomorrow I’ll share a picture of the stacks of books I intend to discard, just to show you how many are going so far.

Here are some statistics on the collection as of the last Titlewise Collection Analysis:

Number of records = 8634

Holdings =  11, 259
(this tells me there are lot of multiple copies of books–I have seen that especially in the Fiction section)

Average Age = 1988
That’s not too, too bad. I’m just 19.5 years in average age!)

Enrollment = 566

Books per pupil = 19.69 books.

Implications as I see them:

• SACS requires ten books of quality condition/age, so I see that I have some wiggle room in tossing books that are too old–YEAH!
• In studying the analysis further, there are 800+ books that have a copyright date older than 1970; there are 1800+ books that have a copyright date of 1979 or older (including the afore mentioned 800+)
• The oldest books in the library (and EGADS there are 3 copies!!) are 1921 editions of Willa Cather’s My Antonia! - My goal tomorrow is to go find those jewels and get them off the shelves too.

I copied and pasted the data from the Titkewise analysis into a spread sheet so I could sort by age first, which helped identify these jewels.
I will study the books some more tomorrow…

I still have to get ready for an open-house Thursday evening.  I cannot even fathom how I will make the library look presentable for that.