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…

So now we know… sort of…

Last week we finally heard from our Head of School what the start of the year would look like. Because Milton is such a complicated school, with three divisions, two of which are day only and one of which is day/boarding, decisions needed to be made by division rather than school-wide. Result? Our Lower and…

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…

Two weeks in

It's been two weeks since the end of Spring Break.  Two weeks since this great Remote Learning adventure started.  Two weeks of a new kind of normal. It's also been two weeks of Zoom meetings and chats and working from home.  One thing I've been grateful for is knowing that my librarian friends and colleagues…

Not a fan

There are words that we, in polite society, don't say.  Some of those words have been claimed, or reclaimed, by the group intended to be insulted by that word (eg, queer).  And some are supposed to be used only "in group". I raise this because one of our popular databases here is the online OED. …

The art of “yes… but no”

One of the big project we've undertaken has been to go shelf by shelf, moving books to better fitting DDC numbers so our students can find what they need more easily.  Sometimes the error was a simple transposition of the numbers, with something belonging in 973 ending up with 937 on the spine label.  Some,…

No time

One of the blogs I follow, Being More with Less, had a post recently called 9 Things I Refuse to Make Time For Anymore. Now, most of these are self-care things, like not rewriting the past or guilt and resentment.  I wholeheartedly endorse those, but that's not what I want to talk about just now. …

Feeling vindicated

I know that there's been very little blogging here the first half of the academic year.  In part it's because of a massive project we've been working on for the past two years that needed to be finished by the start of Winter Break.  Well... ok, part one of the project needed to be finished. …

The average day, fall version

Last October, the AISL blog had a post called What do you do all day? (sort of similar to the Library Day in the Life posts I did years ago).  I thought it might be interesting to share what an average day in my library looked like but quickly realized that we have two very…

Time to breathe

Because second semester is essentially Research Semester, with three months of classes (often 15-20 classes a day), we tend to tackle major projects in first semester.  Perhaps not the smartest idea, given the exhaustion I and the other librarians face by, well, now.  Luckily Thanksgiving Break is just around the corner, and then it's a…