blueorange94 (blueorange94) wrote in library_mofo,
2012-10-25 09:33:00

I haz a happy. :D

After two months of sitting there empty, I've been told that the shelves occupying what will be our new teen zone will FINALLY by removed tomorrow. Huzzah!!!

I'm especially happy because that means the bar unit in the old teen zone will be moved, and the face of it contains shelving which will allow us to spread out our French picture book section, which has been crammed ridiculously tightly for about a year.

On the (minorly) down side, we've recently received an e-mail telling us to shelve non-fiction letters first, then cutter, as in:

635 MAC
635 MOR
635 M123z
635 M456a

After having shelved NF the other way, cutter before number, for about seven years, this is proving hard to get used to. We're far too busy to shelf-read the entire library right now, but we've been asked to correct the teensy section we shelve a book in as we go, to make it easier for future shelf-readers.

How is it in other libraries?
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  • 4 comments

takiaizawa

October 26 2012, 15:14:21 UTC 6 months ago

Hmm. All of our cutters for each section (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) are the same. If we had 2-3 different cutters per section, I'd start a project to make all the cutters uniform per section.

We also have a few pages and volunteers with eyes for detail who catch spelling and formatting mistakes on spine labels. I appreciate what they do but I've heard grumbling that these people spend too much time picking out problems and not enough time shelving books or whatever. I believe if the problems were caught by the staff who were supposed to catch them before the items even made it down to page and volunteer handling, there wouldn't be an issue. (It's funny how you can measure the overall health of a library by the management structure.)

blackdisa

October 27 2012, 19:04:09 UTC 6 months ago

Nothing looks worse than empty bookcases in a library, it makes such a crummy visual first impression. Good to get rid of them.

We don't use Cutter numbers on our NF. I've seen them mentioned in theoretical texts, but I've never actually seen them in an IRL library. In practice, we don't even bother to shelve by the letter part of an NF call number. Small branch, small collection, small staff - but shhhh, don't tell Head Office.

blueorange94

October 28 2012, 15:20:13 UTC 6 months ago

The shelves in question were empty because of a massive weeding/shifting project. They removed two of the three rows, and didn't move the bar unit, but they're short-staffed in that department, so we're hoping the rest will get done next week.

tigerlibrarian

November 5 2012, 04:36:20 UTC 6 months ago

What little we have left is shelved first. Ah, I remember the days of the cutter numbers. I actually worked to catalog books at a tiny college library many many years ago. Now it's so much more user friendly. :)