Fourth time’s the charm!

I’ve been at Milton for seven years, and in that time I’ve overseen a real revamp of the collection.

b: serious weeding of old, outdated, caterpillar infested, falling apart books. It looked a little like this:

Years Two – Four: Second and Third passes through the collection, cleaning the “junk drawer” and moving books into areas where students will better find them. It was great when one class found lots of resources for their research, having originally thought we’d have only a few.

Years Five and Six: only a little work, thanks to the whole pandemic thing.

Year Seven: Look at the larger sections, deciding how many books on a topic we really need (eg, biographies of Dylan pre-Nobel or books on Roe v Wade or overviews of the Vietnam War). Some books we need to add information to the MARC record so they’re easier to access, others still need to be updated. But… as of Wednesday, we’re done. The last pass we’ll need to do for quite a while. ‘

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we won’t been looking at sections and updating as events and courses change. But big picture, massive change evaluation on the collection? Done. It’s been a long time, and a lot of work, and the other librarians were amazingly helpful as it progressed. Now the collection is where it should be, and it’s on to updating the catalog, editing MARC records and creating subject heading norms.

Yay us!