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librarydayinthelife

Library Day in the Life – Monday

So I have decided to participate in the Library Day in the Life project.  Thanks to Bobbi Newman for starting it all!

Take a peek into my collection development life. I am a Collection Development Librarian for a public library district with 13 branches. I am responsible for a big chunk of our adult nonfiction collection, so I do selection and collection maintenance in those areas. I am also responsible for our staff library and some other random fun stuff, as you’ll likely see.

I started my Monday by spending the first hour catching up on the email that had collected over the weekend (Good grief, mailing lists fill up my inbox) and checking out some RSS feeds/Friendfeed.  Took some time catching up with my co-workers and talking about the weather. Seriously. It’s going to be over 100 this week. in the Northwest. I will be in heaven. 🙂

Did some weeding of staff periodicals, then made a couple trips to the recycling bin. (reminder to self: keep warehouse activities to a minimum this week or get them done in the morning)

Tackled a cart of weeds in the endless quest for finishing the 900’s. When the branches weeded their 900’s, all the weeded books come to me and I make the final decision on what happens to them. For those who don’t know all things Dewey Decimal, the 900 DDC range covers geography and history.  Have I mentioned that I love weeding? No? ok. I LOVE WEEDING! Getting rid of outdated, unnecessary books, or finding a more appropriate home for a book that has been sitting on a shelf, collecting dust: I love it all.  My process for each weeded book, simplified:

  • Look at the content of the book, when it was published, see what else we have on this subject.
  • Review in our ILS – check circulation statistics, see how many other copies we own.
  • Sometimes I’ll also look it up in Worldcat to see what other libraries have it.
  • Decide: keep or discard?

Weeding is… interesting right now. We just recently started floating all of our materials between our branches, so we are definitely in a transition period. Instead of looking at individual branch collections, we really do have to view the entire collection as a whole. We also have a new branch opening at the end of the year, so we’re starting to gather materials for that opening day collection (the new branch is significantly larger than their current building, so the collection will be about eight times bigger than what they have now).

Well, that ate up a large chunk of the morning/afternoon, paired with a break for lunch. Mixed in there were a few interruptions, because, well, that’s just the way things are in a library. 🙂  Looking at Writer’s Market to decide if we want to cut the number of copies we order, and if so, how many.  Trying to figure out if older editions of The Gun Digest Book of Firearms Assembly/Disassembly are superseded by newer ones (verdict: unclear. need to visit the main library and compare).

By about 3 I was hitting the afternoon wall, so I venture out into the 97-ish degree heat (YAY!) to visit the trusty River Maiden for a coffee fix. When I got back, I dove into my budget reports, tweaking how much I can spend every month and make the money last until the end of the budget cycle. it’s a moving target.

Spent the last half hour or so checking email and going through the last few Shelf Awareness emails and reviewing the Media Heat sections for books in my areas that we don’t have yet. Gotta get the new cookbook from the Neelys ordered.

So goes my Monday. Time to head out into the heat again!

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