Old, Out with the

Today was an interesting day. For whatever reason, we did not have any classes come to the MC today. The Library Ladies took advantage of the opportunity to catelog the class sets of novels. We have dozens of sets, and we decided it would be in our best interest to barcode each book, instead of a "paper check-out" as has been done in past years. They completed several sets of novels. I stayed out of the way, and tried to take care of the students who came in on a pass from their teachers.

When the MC traffic was slow enough, I continued my work on the Geography and History section of the library. We are in the process of weeding and ordering new books for the Social Studies department. Library Lady #1 and I figured out how to create a report from Surpass so I could know the current collection titles, and the year of publication. We have approximately 2230 volumes in our geo/hist collection. Sounds impressive...but...735+ of these books were published before 1981. That means that 1/3 of the collection is more than 25 years old!

My next step is to get a couple of student workers to pull some of the old books from the shelves so I can make a determination of their value to our students and teachers. This will be a year-long project, but I am amazed at the average age of our collection. YIKES!

We have to update books, video, audio, and other technology too. If you could only see me shaking my head right now.