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 Some of it is due to outdated language ("Indians of North America" anyone?), some of it is due…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 b: serious weeding of old, outdated, caterpillar infested, falling apart books.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…

Getting a little giddy

In March, just after we closed due to COVID, the library's focus was on supporting our history classes doing research (around 600 students, all researching away... just a little crazy, right?). So we added EBSCO's Academic and High School ebooks collection, entering 3500+ MARC records into our catalog while encouraging students to search the whole…

The past five years in 21 slides

Ok, maybe not everything that's happened in the past five years, but this is a short distillation of the Really Big Project we've been working on in the library. One of the other librarians and I presented this today at the NELA 2020 conference. There's so much more I could say about the nitty-gritty but…

Cataloging is FUNdamental

https://twitter.com/adr/status/1220894739110801408 Seriously?  How is ALA not requiring this? When I went for my MLS there were four required classes at the Palmer School and (you guessed it) cataloging was one of them.  My professor was the man who literally wrote the chapter of AACR2R on music cataloging, but friends who had other professors learned just…