Rising from the ashes (part six)

I've spent the better part of the past week ordering books and checking in new books. In between that, and since the fire, I've been thinking about the way forward (or, as Chris says, not standing still).In the midst of all this came the whole Cult of 2.0 controversy. Annoyed Librarian said, among many other…

Up from the ashes (part two)

Very Important Idea: 100% replacement valueSeriously, if you don't have 100% replacement value as part of your insurance policy get it now. We have it and it's going to help us with our rebuilding. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that I have until I leave work tomorrow to re-create POs for…

Up from the ashes (part one)

This is the first in what will be a long series of posts on how we rebuilt MPOW. Here's what the building looked like from 1905 through August 3, 2007:And here's what it looked like on August 4, 2007:

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…

Am I missing a message?

As my faithful readers know, in 2007 the Hackley School’s Kaskel Library burned down. In a mere 10 hours this:. became this and then this Sigh. Milton’s William Coburn Cox Library is a little less Gothic, a lot more Brutalist, and 65 years younger, but still (apparently) fragile. You see, it was built in the…

National Library Week

It's National Library Week again, and because it's so close to the end of Spring Break I never feel like we're prepared to celebrate properly. Last year we did quizzes, this year we're use Kahoots to engage our students and faculty. They seem to like it - we'll see how tomorrow's live lunchtime Kahoots go.…

Up from the ashes (part four)

Choices... choices... that's what it's all about these days. Our initial decision was to reorder the books we'd ordered over the summer - seemed a "duh" since we knew they were wanted. But what next? Luckily, the catalog server was in another building and so we can retrieve circ. data from the past two years…

What was I thinking (and what am I thinking now)??

Shortly after the fire at Hackley, I decided that I needed to seriously look at the amount of junk I'd accumulated in my house... a few months later, much of the "nope, don't need this" stuff was finding new homes courtesy of the Salvation Army. But then there was The Collection. I'd never really gotten…