We Have Desks!

Friday we got our office furniture, and everyone was able to begin moving into their desks. Staff with desks in the middle of the room were advised to put little in/on their desks since partitions with electric and data lines still need to be installed between them. We expected delivery of our CD browsers and Community Playthings items as well, but they didn't come. Our event planning teams continued working on their projects even as they moved into their desk space.

We also received our second shipment from Ingram. After lunch, department heads met to prepare a plan of action for Tuesday when we begin shelving these items, plus we'll receive 10,000 items from Midwest that require turning on the RFID tags. Our full time circulation staff will work on the Midwest items while librarians and CAs (shelvers) unbox and shelve the Ingram material. We'll have teams of 2 people unboxing, armed with a cart, a box cutter, and new book stickers. Each team will look for items that should be designated as new, items with no spine labels, and items with incorrect spine labels. All three of these types of material will be set aside on their cart. When the team finishes with a box or a few boxes, they'll bring these materials to a central staging area where they will be set aside. The new materials will be shelved later in the new book area. The problem materials will be boxed, and we'll ask Tuesday what we should do with them.

I spoke to a selector in our Collection Development department on Thursday to find out which other branch was closest to our projected opening day size (approx. 120,000). No one was really close, but White Marsh was 102,000 and Pikesville was 132,000. Since White Marsh was the closest to our physical location, I sent 3 librarians there after lunch to note the breakdown of collection per shelving unit for all of the large collections. When they returned, I asked them to use that information to calculate what ranges we should mark for the units in our collections and then go post that information on each unit in our stacks. This will really help us out once we start unboxing next week. Using other staff to do these calculations freed me to do other tasks.