The Joy of Working in the Trenches

After over a year of silence, I am once again inspired to write about periodicals.  Why the lack of inspiration?  Mid-life crisis, interesting state political struggles, trusted staff retiring, more emphasis on face to face teaching – the possibilities are endless!  As we still have not filled our open staff position and our lone student worker is out for three weeks enjoying a field experience, I find myself filling in as a periodicals student worker  for a few weeks.

It has been a pretty amazing experience so far.  Checking in new microfiche and microfilm titles has led me to the decision that we really don’t need to continue receiving two microform formats.  Also, I now see clearly the need for putting our microform shelflist online.

By re-shelving our current titles and gathering use statistics, I have a better sense of how our print collection is getting used (or not!).

When uploading our print barcodes to our use statistics database, I discovered that 18 of our current titles had physical barcodes that did not match the barcode in our catalog.  Meaning, of course, that these data were not being included on reports.

Small discoveries, perhaps, but ones that help me to remember that in order to have those wonderful teaching/learning moments with our users,  there is still much technical work involved in libraries, and it is important.

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