Day 1 of Boxing

We accomplished a lot today--over 350 boxes filled. We were hoping that our Facilities staff would be able to get rid of the public computers and their furniture to give us more room to stack boxes, but they won't be able to do that for a couple more days. This meant that instead of being able to stack all boxes of one collection together, everything is stacked rather hodge podge due to lack of space. We also had a few misunderstandings about labeling of boxes. I suggest filling out a sample of the label so that everyone is on the same page instead of simply explaining how it should be filled out. And in spite of all our aggressive weeding for the last several months, we still accumulated 2 full carts of withdrawals as we were boxing!

We were supposed to have special neon green labels to put on the boxes, but they weren't all ordered at one time so we ended up using white due date labels. Hopefully our green labels will come tomorrow. We also ran low on boxes and packing tape shortly after lunch. Fortunately, our maintenance staff was able to bring us more of both not long after we ran out. For future reference, it would be best to have all labeling and other boxing supplies 1-2 weeks before you expect to start boxing. I suggest starting with 36 rolls of packing tape, and plan to have 500-600 boxes on hand for day 1 since everyone is fairly energetic on the first day. We also had plenty of goodies on hand to help keep the energy level up!

There were several tasks that had to be done before we started boxing any collection: shelving all display material; boxing all cassettes for the trash since we aren't taking any with us; shelving any unboxed items we had changed to ~PE so they would be boxed with the appropriate collection. As slatwall displays were dismantled a team boxed the acrylic display fixtures. Another team boxed the easels used to display books. As returns mounted up, these were boxed as well.

We used teams of 2 people to box each collection, and I had prepared for up to 7 teams. We tried to team up a person from circ with a librarian or failing that, a new staff member with one who had been here for a while. For each team, I listed 4-6 collections in the order that they should be boxed, factoring in that only one team could be in an aisle at one time. So far this has worked very well, and we haven't gotten in each other's way very much. In late afternoon, I assessed our progress on my lists for the teams. We had about half of the 300s, 600s, 900s, Young Adult, and Large Type to finish tomorrow. I put those items first on team lists for tomorrow, then added other collections.

We are using 2 flip charts to list jobs for each day. One chart lists the standard tasks for the day: answering the door bell, answering the single phone line left at the branch, accepting returns, checking out holds to customers, clearing material from the drop box, processing mail, taping boxes together, withdrawing as needed, and boxing unprocessed holds. The other chart lists the teams and their assignments for the day. As a team finishes a collection, it is crossed off the chart. We are also keeping a log of how many boxes there are for each collection so the team also records this information when they finish a section/collection. Everything needs box #s and you need to record the total number of boxes for everything, including returns.