Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Today Bob Sprankle (guest blogger on Wes Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity) wrote about his 30 days of Twitter and how he gets it and is a transformed person because of it.  Bob, I’m right there with ya!! I have decided that Twitter can be really informative and downright fun!!  I have used it to preview blog posts–some of the folks I follow post a URL to twitter long before it hits my aggregator–its almost like getting a sneak peak. I got to see Will Richardson dance! I get tipped off to fabulous global projects, like Chris Craft’s “Life ‘Round Here” digital storytelling project.  I can get sports updates from golf, baseball, football, soccer, racing, and just about anything else.  It’s a cross b/w professional conversations and gabbing on the phone about anything. I’m totally hooked on Twitter.  If you like Twitter, follow me at “Cathyjo.”  I only hope some of my contributions are as meaty as the pros I’m following.

I forgot to carry in a camera and I didn’t have my phone so no pictures of all those books.  I finished unboxing all of them—there were around 30 boxes of books packed up.  If I had to estimate, I would say 400 books were shelved, and perhaps 300 were left for discarding.  My assistant came today for the first time, and we talked a lot. I think we are going to get along fine. She is so excited with my plan t purge the library of 2000 books.  She told me some of the policies about discarding books, and with some help from another assistant who had to work (she is like a shadow for a student) but did not have a student to follow began the process. Evidently part of the procedure is t remove all evidence that the book was in the library, including blacking out with sharpies stamped school names and other writings, and then remove the barcodes and spine labels.  They did not remove the barcodes, but did do the other stuff.  We have a remote scanner (an expensive panther) and  as soon as it is charged up, we will begin scanning those books so we can do a batch delete.

The rest of my day was spent troubleshooting computer issues. It looks like there is going to be probably an hour a day devoted to  addressing computer workorders.  Hopefully I can manage most either before or after school.  We’ll see. I have an all day library district meeting tomorrow, and I hope and pray that I am matched with a mentor of sorts to call and ask questions (like how to do this batch delete!) I also hope they hand me a district P & P manual and also give me so guidelines for serving as the tech contact for my school. I understand many of the district media specialists serve in this manner.

I do not go to my school tomorrow, so pictures of the large number of books to be discarded will have to wait until Thursday…I hope everyone else is having a jam up back to school week!