Progress!

The great thing about being away on vacation is that sometimes (at least when you have great staff) you come back and amazing things have been achieved.  Here are some pictures from the library yesterday. Books are in a logical order, most shelves are labeled, the NLB books have arrived and been checked and scanned into Delicious Monster.   AND ... big bonus ... the ladies from kindergarten and the head were around to have a good look at the "store" room and "cupboards" where all sorts of stuff was being stored in not related to the library and BINGO - they've agreed to move them upstairs to the kindergarten area.  As that was one of my "nice to have" items on my transformation plan it feels even better.

Also, we met up with the IT / Systems guy to have a look at the catalogue.  That's a hmmm.  They've got a sort of home made database that they've managed to populate with the library book list from about a year ago.  The potential fields they have are:
* Book ID (automatically generated)
* ISBN
* Title
* Category
* Loan type
* Loan status
* Location
* Ownership

Of which only the Book ID and Title is filled in!  Eek!  After being used to working with Follett Dynasty and another systems as a user, it's rather lean.  I then have to take a step back and ask myself what is really really needed and why.  Our task is going to be to scan all the books in that can be scanned in (seems only English at this point), and then do some kind of export to excel and field match and discard the ones that are missing and add the ones that are new.  Joy.  And tell them what additional fields we'd like to see - like "author" may come in handy.

Ms. Katie forwarded me an email from LibraryWorld who is offering a month's free trail for their online system. It's certainly not terribly expensive, but of course it's more than an in-house home made system.  I tried to export the 2000 odd books we'd scanned into Delicious and immediately ran into the age old library barrier of MARC.  It only reads MARC ... so I contacted them, sure they could convert - for $300 - now that ain't gonna happen I can tell you now.  Second problem I ran into is that it didn't recognise the ISBN of our Chinese or Korean Books and third was I couldn't find a logical spot to distinguish between NLB and own books.    May I make a comment as a "not yet quite librarian" - really you need to make things simpler and more intuitive and exchangeable.  I know I know I know about MARC and spent a whole semester getting intimately acquainted with him and his mates Z39.50 etc.  But to tell me in your manual there is no get around having to pay you to convert my data, when it's a simple database matching exercise ...  nope.  If contact software can covert from one to another with ease this isn't all that much more difficult - especially since all you really really need is the ISBN number to get going.

Anyway, let's keep positive, and here are some very pretty pictures!

NLB boxes - 3 of those our old books!

Ordering our PYP books

Primary books getting in shape

2ndary books all sorted by call number

Shelves moved passage either side

NLB books on shelf

Hardcovers on display

Moving the deck chairs - well at least the shelves

Old VCR boxes as flexible shelf labeling

A huge amount of progress has been made by Ms. Sheryl who has managed to get rid of the boxes cluttering up the floors and to start sorting those books which have any type of DDC number on the spine into DDC number order.  But there still are piles and piles of orphan textbooks that no-one appears to particularly want to use.  We've been lugging them from shelf to shelf it seems each time trying to find a logical space while we sort out the rest of the library, when actually the only logical place for them is ANYWHERE but the library.... which is why I titled this moving the deck chairs...

Yay an empty wall

In order to make the library shelves a bit more accessible physically we decided to move the magazine shelves out. Another factor was that due to the humidity, anything displayed on them started to have curling corners.  Since we wanted it done sooner rather than later, we just rolled up our sleeves and played moving ladies ourselves.  As you can see from the photo it's looking good - albeit empty. These are the shelves where the NLB books which arrive next Thursday (whoopee) will be located so they don't get all mixed up with our own collection.

Shelves ready and waiting for NLB delivery

We managed to finish sorting and shelving the 000-300 DDC sections using the old VCR covers kindly donated by Ms. Katie.  It's looking like a real library - at least on those six shelves!  Did I mention that the library is really quite dusty and everything has to be cleaned and wiped down as we go?

Progress:100-300 in Chinese sorted and shelved

delicious Monster 3.0 as a temporary solution

 The biggest issue right now is the arrival of the NLB books next week and we still haven't managed to locate the old catalogue, nor the cataloguing system, nor does it look like anything will be in place on time.  That called for a quick meeting with the HOS to talk about a plan B.   Which had to be quick and easy and cheap.  I brought along my laptop with my home system - yes ironically at this point, my home books and CDs and DVDs are better catalogued than the schools.  I've been using Delicious Monster 2.0 and quickly upgrade to 3.0 in order to show the potential for doing something, that would be better than handwritten lists and checking.  At $25 it was somewhat a no-brainer, but it had to happen and be confirmed. I also broached the question of cleaning ... (captive audience) and got permission to exchange some of the duplicate Korean and Chinese books with Ms. Katie for some of her surplus donated books that were needed, particularly in the primary section.  At this rate of shelf and book and box of book moving I'm going to be able to cancel my subscription to the gym!