Weeding: An essential task in collection maintenance

This week I managed to get half of the new nonfiction books I purchased onto the shelves. To do this I moved the 800s, cleaned all the shelves in the 800s and added the new books. I also weeded many books from the beginning 300s and will clean those shelves and add the new books. I took all of the old titles out of the computer and prepared them for discard. I am only weeding books that were published before 1970 that haven't circulated in the last 7 years or books that are damaged, faded, and falling apart. I still can't believe no one weeded these shelves, though I do know efforts were made at one point. The big task is going to be the 600s. Something is wrong with one of the chillers in the library and they are waiting for the part, so the working conditions have been terrible--by afternoon no one can work in the space. I am hopeful that the temperature will improve during this week.

This week I also went through all of my web resources from CJRLC and LII. I handed out different web sites to the staff for their content areas. I also discovered some that I liked. One of them was www.pagebull.com which is a search engine that displays the opening page of each of its result list so that you can see whether that page would be helpful to your search. I really liked using it. I compared the results with Google and found that the quality of the results were similar. I also discovered some teacher sites, which I will include in the next entry.

For grad school this week, I am preparing my casestudy rough draft. I have to include a whole bunch of data and information about the school, area, and the media center itself. I measured the space and discovered it is around 5,000 square feet, which I could be wrong about, because it is shaped as an arc---not quite as easy as measuring a box. I also have been looking over policies and procedures and realize that they are kind of old and outdated---another project to work out. For this past week's class, I had to investigate software and hardware web sites/programs. I got to play with Picasa, Google's photo management and editing program. I also reviewed www.mobiletechtoday.com --which is an online site dedicated to providing up-to-the-minute news on what's happening in mobile technology tools. It was interesting, but way above my expertise. I will stick with Picasa!