Friday, September 05, 2003
Banished to 'The Greenhouse' again to cover staff holidays for a week and I turned up to find a nice long 'to-do' list, which included shifting the fiction stock round. One of the latest grand ideas from 'those who dwell above in darkness' is that we categorize a load of our stock, 'Crime and Thriller', 'Science-Fiction' (in to which I would dearly love to stuff Margaret Atwood if I could), 'Classic', 'Modern Classic', 'Black and World' (Mmmmmm!) and a few others. So this has involved shifting our fiction around because these collections have to go in front of the fiction, of course, rather than behind the fiction, where there was space. So, if you go looking for a Terry Pratchett book, you'd look under 'P' in the fiction section wouldn't you? Not necessarily, if we bought it in the last couple of months it could well be in 'science fiction'. Similarly our copies of John Grisham are scattered between the regular fiction stock and 'thrillers'.
And when I've gone through that I have the edifying task of going through all the stock that's come from the closed library. When I was there I was making sure before I sent stock out that the library I was sending it to didn't already have a copy. Whoever was doing it while I was on holiday wasn't so careful. So there's a lot of stock they've sent here which I'm just going to be throwing away. And beyond duplicate copies, we just don't have that much space here anyway!
Still, yesterday evening had a very nice chat with a schoolgirl that was doing a project on how libraries managed before computers and I explained to her as best I could the whole mularky with cards and card files and everything. I'm just old enough to remember when they still used card files at the libraries in Maidstone, though that was phased out in favour of computers in the early 80s. Now we just have computers and computer systems that look as though they date from the early 80s.
And when I've gone through that I have the edifying task of going through all the stock that's come from the closed library. When I was there I was making sure before I sent stock out that the library I was sending it to didn't already have a copy. Whoever was doing it while I was on holiday wasn't so careful. So there's a lot of stock they've sent here which I'm just going to be throwing away. And beyond duplicate copies, we just don't have that much space here anyway!
Still, yesterday evening had a very nice chat with a schoolgirl that was doing a project on how libraries managed before computers and I explained to her as best I could the whole mularky with cards and card files and everything. I'm just old enough to remember when they still used card files at the libraries in Maidstone, though that was phased out in favour of computers in the early 80s. Now we just have computers and computer systems that look as though they date from the early 80s.
