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!
Hi Cathy,
Do you have someone at your school/district that provides computer support or is that also your responsibility? I was wondering if you have an electronic workorder system for those computer requests. I am the Tech. Director at our school and we use an electronic system, but would like to make it web-based in the future. We still struggle with prioritizing the needs of everyone. Would love to hear your comments.
Tina–the computer work order process is online on the intranet….just learned that today. I hate being new, but ti will come easier each day. I had several offers for help from my fellow colleagues today too. : )