Crunch Time Approaches

We finished shelving all of the 600s and have continued shifting backward so that we can give more space to talking books, adult fiction, and mysteries. We also continued unboxing the old nonfiction collection. Although we tried to weed worn material before we boxed it, we've been withdrawing quite a bit of the old collection due to condition or duplication in the opening day collection. We were finally able to begin shelving the opening day collection of easies and easy nonfiction yesterday. We shifted to even out the easies today, and we also interfiled our old easy nonfiction collection onto the shelves. The Children's and Teen areas are almost completely ready for opening day. The units for our cardboard books are due tomorrow.

There are several parts of our old collection that we won't unbox until after we open and a lot of material has gone out. Our returns room is packed with duplicates from the opening day collection that can't be shelved yet. We also have been boxing most of the material returned at the drive-up window.

Our Assistant Director asked me today if we had baskets for our customers to use when we open. She indicated that people will be selecting so many items that they will need them. We only have a few at the branch, and our Supplies department doesn't have any on hand so I guess we'll need to order some. It's unfortunate that we didn't think of this ahead of time.

I'm getting a little worried about finalizing our opening and closing procedures and having time to go over them with our staff since we only have 2 working days left before we open. We also haven't had time to reallocate jobs and team members with our expanded staff. We talked about some of this at department heads meetings in December and January, but once things really began to roll on the project, we haven't had time to revisit these topics and make some decisions.

I'm also concerned about lack of signage in some areas. We met with our Graphics department in January about our signage needs, but I've noticed some areas which we overlooked. There's no signage for our Just Arrived shelves, New Audio Books, DVD Classics, DVD Series, and other New sections of various collections (J Fiction, Easies, Easy Nonfiction, etc.). There's not even a good place to post a sign in many of these collections. We don't have our end of stack signs for the main stacks either. Since we're still shifting to see where things will be, we can't yet give the Graphics department the information needed to put on those signs.

The flooring contractor finally started re-laying the linoleum in the cafe and staff kitchen areas today.