Day 2 & 3 of Boxing

By late afternoon on day 2 of boxing, we only had small parts of 3 collections left to box out of a total collection of approximately 52,000. We also had assorted supplies, the kitchen, and staff desks to be boxed. Since we needed to save some of this for staff the following day, we called a halt to boxing. This gave staff time to catch up on e-mail, type up minutes, or do any other tasks that had been put on hold.

Today several people started boxing their desks. We also packed branch supplies and files, programming supplies, storytime reference collection, Business Services, Ready Reference & the Info Desk, Princeton files, more bookends, and acrylic display fixtures. We've also been boxing miscellaneous returns, and our withdrawals are boxed for Maintenance staff to take to the dump.

We were excited that our special green labels came today. Even though we were almost finished boxing, we started using them. However, they didn't stick to the boxes as well as the white due date labels so we went back to using mainly the white labels.

Today we ordered pizza for everyone for lunch, thanks to our former branch manager who left us money for this purpose. Between the pizza and the goodies staff have been bringing in each day, we stuffed ourselves.

While we are very glad our new staff could be with us to help box and bond, there has been some concern about finding tasks for them to do while the "old" PE staff box up their desks. We have to pick out a sofa for our staff room, plan a preview tea, and plan a community day so the library manager is hoping to spend time on these activities on Thursday and Friday of this week. Some staff are also taking leave here and there too.

One activity some staff worked on today was naming our 2 meeting rooms and 2 group study rooms. Staff were asked to suggest names for rooms. A sheet of all the suggested names was handed out on Monday, and today the group reviewed the votes so far.

We also took time today to pick out our desks on the floor plan. The managers' desks were already labeled on the plan, but managers didn't want to assign the rest of the seats so we numbered the seats on the floor plan: C1,2,3,4,5 for circ and L1,2,3,4,5,6 for librarians. We put the numbers on slips of paper and staff drew a number to determine where they would sit. Then we wrote each person's name on their desk on the floor plan. This seemed to work very well, and staff liked seeing their name written where they'd sit.