Tuesday 7 August 2012

Well hello again!

It has been a very long time since I blogged about anything isn't it?
Well I did draft some posts earlier in the year, then I lost my Blogger dashboard and I gave up blogging as it was getting so frustrating.

As it seems that Google have fixed the problem, maybe I'll resurrect those earlier musings.

Since November 2011 (the last blog post) there have been quite a few library-related changes.
The library I work in is scheduled to close in January 2014 and merge with one of the main campus libraries, so a programme of stock review and reclassification has formed the majority of the last twelve months.

A major review of unique items (not held anywhere else in the university) has culled quite a few items which were, quite frankly, over-the-hill, and the reclassification project is in the home straight.

Changing circa 14000 items from Library of Congress or National Library of Medicine classification to Dewey Decimal Classification is no mean feat.  Luckily, we didn't have to reclassify by hand - only a small fraction of our stock was so unique we had to send it to our catalaoguing department.

But, we did have to check each item for correct classification numbers and print off new class labels (because there's no guarantee that everything is right - several human errors have been found and corrected).

And currently, I have 22 shelves of books to relabel. I reckon that's about 750-800 books still to go.

Mind you, I've got arm muscles to rival an Olympic gymnast, so can't be all bad...

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