Finished le stocktake!

 Vive la France! (?!?) or rather Vive la Reine! (just in case my new citizenship if not enough... don't throw me out!) or.. vive moi.

 

"Queen Elizabeth II" by Harwich & Dovercourt is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

Really happy with that, I finished the stocktake last Monday, perfect timing as we had a meeting yesterday and I was able to provide some accurate information about numbers of missing books etc. 

Pleasant also to know that when the catalogue states it is available, or missing, it is exactly reflecting the reality of the shelves. 

I was quite appalled to see so many books not catalogued at all! Well at least we go some extra-books then, as they did not "exist" before. What took the longest time was not the scanning of barcodes but all the corrections done to the cataloguing records. I'm not saying it's perfect now, but it is getting close to a proper catalogue now.

I can't believe it took that long! I had at first planned two weeks and a half in the middle of summer to do this, but really glad I have done it earlier. It took, more or less, the whole month of June to do this first stocktake.

I'm really glad I did set up a Missing Event for each stocktake I did. Easy then to gather a whole list of missing books from the Reports menu (Accessions with a 'Missing' Event). Then you save this reports as a favourite so you're ready for next year!

In memoriam Chris Fowler

 Today's post is not about work I do in the library. It is to celebrate the memory of Chris Fowler. She was one of the best subject librarians I know, Arts subject librarian at Brookes University, and I would, from time to time, have a look at her pages. She would always encourage her students to this and that exhibition. I would also at times see her in Jericho, about to go to the Phoenix Cinema there to see an art film.

She was my first librarian mentor, encouraging me to go to library school, and like her, I choose London Metropolitan to study for an MA. Like her, I was a library assistant at Brookes, and was working while studying. Well I suppose we all do it to a certain extend, but it is always so great to have someone giving you that example. It really helps.

She was always passionate about her profession and I very much hope I continue to be so.

It is quite a shock she's gone so soon.

Anyway, enough of me blabbering, here is her Tribute page so that you can donate and get information about the ceremony.

Doing the stocktake (oh yeah)

 As it is exam week and almost no one uses the library right now, I have started the stocktake.

I fully understand what it means to have a "stable" stock... mine is so unstable it crumbles... a good occasion though to clear up some wrong shelfmarks, and also, quite simply to check the shelfmark is the same as the classmark! 

As I'm still pretty "new" to the job (about one year in) it's also a great occasion to see the stock in details and I am amazed at discovering books I thought we did not have anymore, or we did not have at all. This helps me then when I give students recommendation for this and that book. 

As there is so much to be done still, I am doing one mini-stocktake at a time. This saves me:

Pain on my wrist

Stress for wanting to finish a very long section

and yes, there are still students demanding help and this is my main duty!

It's really working well, I'm scanning barcodes directly into Heritage stocktake thingie, and it tells me if it is outside the section, or if it does not recognise the barcode. I set these books apart and sort them out later. After searching for missing books, I ask the system to change their status to missing, and get a list, and do not delete this data. You never know... some books might come back, either misplaced on another shelf or returned before the summer. I have sent an email to all the full time students, so there's some hope there!

 

                                    "Library 1" by vastateparksstaff is licensed under CC BY 2.0. 

(I choose this photo because this is how my books look like on the shelves after the stocktake, still a long way to go but getting there!)