Slogging through the Boxes

Our Maintenance staff continues to bring our old collection over and shelving it and the rest of the new material continues. However, we can't shelve the last third of easies or any easy nonfiction because the backs of the units haven't been installed yet. We've already begun merchandising on the top of the easy book shelves to help deal with duplicates. We also can't shelve board books as the units won't be delivered until next week. We finalized the setup of the Music & Movies section today and began to shelve some of our new AV.

I called all our part-time librarians today inviting them to help us shelve any time between now and next Friday. We can use all the shelving help that we can get, plus it offers our new part-timers an opportunity to orient themselves to the building and the larger collection before we open to the public.

Our "new book" area has looked pretty skimpy since there weren't many new items in the Ingram shipments. We began shelving new book returns to help fill it out. Once we started unboxing the new material from off-site storage, we found a lot more with the "new" sticker on them so it's starting to look a lot better. We decided to put new audio books in our new book area as well to free up space in the stack section for audio books.

The flooring people came today to take up the two areas of linoleum that were laid in the wrong color: the cafe area and the staff kitchen. We had to take the refrigerators and one of the microwave ovens out of the kitchen so we'd have access to our food and a heat source for it.

One thing our circulation department discovered is that they need a permanently set up table to process mail. There are two work tables in our shared office space. I believe originally it was thought that one of these could be used to process mail, but that would mean getting processing supplies out and putting them away each day. It is easier on the circulation staff if they can leave a table set up for this task.