Why do it?

When I was at ALA Annual in June, I attended the Morris Book Award celebration. A woman sat next to me and I asked her if she was on the 2022 Morris committee and she said no, that she'd never been on a book award committee and would I recommend it? Would I???? You know…

Minor Musings

Wow, it's been a while since I did one of these.  As we move into the Winter Break season, here are some links to enjoy/bookmark/get inspiration from. Books, Reading, etc. The Cybils are always a good RA tool, and now they have playlists!  What could be better to share with students? Yes, this is a…

Challenging Times

I've been very lucky in my professional career with only two book challenges, neither of which went anywhere. And neither case went through our challenge policy procedure for very legitimate reasons. In the first case, an administrator challenged a book that their church had asked members to look out for because it said things about…

Here we go again

In my never-ending quest to perfect our collection and catalog, I've started our new project: working on our subject headings. What does that mean? It's a project looking to make the ways the subjects clear and helpful. Some of it is due to outdated language ("Indians of North America" anyone?), some of it is due…

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 b: serious weeding of old, outdated, caterpillar infested, falling apart books.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…

Past their best by dates

As we've been doing a (I hope) final pass on the collection, we're noticing a lot of books that are just past their "best by" dates and having to determine if they should stay on the shelf until something new comes along, keep them anyway, or remove them and try to replace. This isn't the…

You say “slim”, I say “skeletal”

No, I'm not body shaming. I'm publisher shaming. We're busily looking at the collection now that we've moved things into place. This requires asking the question "how many books on [topic] do we need?" and "if we have that many books, shouldn't some of them be more up-to-date?" It's also an opportunity to see where…

Keeping busy, part III

Honestly, dealing with the call numbers is so much easier than dealing with subject headings! As we know, some have become controversial. Others, well, let's face it: these mostly date back to the days of the card catalog and use language that doesn't reflect how students think about things. We've been working on this project…

Keeping busy, part II

In my last post, I talked about how we looked at the shelves as part of our goal to make the entire collection easier for students to access (particularly with the limited time they have for research, including all those afterschool activities!). One of the things we've been talking about, to the point of possibly…

Keeping busy, part I

When I look for an assistant, one of the things I am careful to warn them is that there is a lot of "soul sucking" work in the job.  I'm also quick to say that there are many tasks that don't fall into that category, but let's face it: every job has that aspect.  I'm…