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librarydayinthelife

Library Day in the Life 4 – Monday

It’s another edition of Library Day in the Life, where you can follow along as I talk about the exciting (hey, I think it’s exciting!) goings-on in the world of this collection development librarian. 🙂

My Monday started with the daily visit to Starbucks for a nonfat Awake Tea Latte. the day cannot begin without some caffeine.

The first order of business, as always, is catching up on the email, and a perusal of the social networks (twitter and Friendfeed, in my case).

I have a few FirstLook carts to review, so I prepped them for review. These are carts sent monthly from Baker & Taylor highlighting forthcoming titles. I got through the general nonfiction one, but I still have two Science/Technical/Medical carts to review.

My email included a few purchase suggestions from patrons/branches, so I reviewed those and added them to my carts for future purchase. I also had a couple of books that had been donated laying around, so I got those ready to be given to the Acquisitions dept. to be added to the cataloged. Decided we need a couple more copies of one of them, so I added those to a cart too.

I am working on revising our genealogy booklist, so I emailed the librarian I am going to work with on this to arrange a time to get together. If we are lucky, I’ll also be able to talk with her about the areas she’s in charge of at the main library. We’re trying to increase our communication with the librarians at the main library in regards to their collection, so this would be a good opportunity.

aaaaaand, it’s lunchtime!

I believe that during the last round, we had just started floating our collections (materials stay wherever they get checked in).  We are still figuring this out, but overall it’s going pretty well. Those of us here in collection development are involved in an additional way now. As you can imagine, sometimes branches get overwhelmed with materials for certain areas. We have an email group for them to ask for/offer up books and some other set routines (Branch xx sends their overflow to Branch yy).  Anything that isn’t claimed comes to us here in Collection Development, and we decide what to do: basically, re-allocate or weed. The carts we get are almost always a mish-mash of a variety of areas and are sometimes a challenge, since you can get stuff you aren’t familiar with at all, like when I get a whole bunch of YA graphic novels. 😉  And they can take a loooong time to get through, since you pretty much have to touch each book.

Here’s today’s cart:

Float cart

Sometimes these are duplicates (branch had more copies than they want on the shelf), sometimes they are ones that have been sitting around for a while, sometimes they’re just random ones that didn’t fit on the shelf that particular day. Lots of random on this cart for sure.

That took up a big hunk of time. I finished out the day with some work in ILLiad. moving some requests to different queues, canceling some requests we aren’t buying, and doing some sleuthing on the “what the heck are these” requests. They’re my favorites!

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