Semester Project: the Music Room

In a series of meeting with the administration, we have come up with plans of the short, medium, and long term variety. Certain projects, like the shelf read and cataloging project, cross the boundaries between short and medium term. As with any large scale project, there is a need to “break things up” so as to avoid burnout and boredom. Our goal is a fully functional library, not debilitating ennui after all.

The way things are shaping up, there will be one of these larger, short term projects every semester. These projects will have the advantage of being visible, showing a result quickly, and providing the type of positive improvement that will drive interest in the continuing library project.

This semester’s project is to develop a music room in the library. Fortunately, there is such a room already picked out and in use for this purpose. There is still a large amount of work to be done, however. The room is located in the basement of the library, next to the art studio. Previously, it is what I affectionately referred to as the “giant pile of books room”– there were books ceiling to floor in a variety of shelves, spanning nearly every category that LC offers in its schema. Prior to my tenure, work had been done to clean the room up somewhat; periodicals were group in alphabetical order, books were moved to a single part of the room, and the rare books and institutional archives emerged in the back of the room.

Still, students are cramming themselves and their instruments into a space that is wide enough for a person to walk through, but not much wider. The room has the feeling of a left over closet, where people are tucked out of the way.

Music is an important part of campus life; there is a near constant presence of music and singing that I have not seen since I wandered through Venice years ago.

That being the case, the musicians need a better space, and we can provide it for them.

The Plan:

  • Clear the periodicals from the space.

The current plan is to box the periodicals so that they will be available for the collection weed that will occur after the full collection shelf read

  • Store the rare book collection

The rare book collection needs a better location for its own sake, but it will also free up a decent amount of shelf and floor space.

  • Move the shelves

Personally, I can never have enough bookshelves, and I suspect the same is true for my fellow alumni as well as the school. Still, we don’t need the bookshelves in this particular room. There are at least 4 which will take up temporary residence in a nearby storage closet, opening up floor space

  • Furniture!

We can do better than a handful of folding chairs. Once the space is clear, we intend to.

  • Moving the art and music collection

The school’s art and music collection is currently on the same floor of the library as the music room, but on the opposite side of the building. Because the music room will be adjacent to the art studio, it only makes sense to move the physical collection of both art and music books to the place where they will be most useful. Never fear, these books will remain a part of the circulating collection.

Next Saturday, I’ll start on the beginning of boxing things up and relocating, with the major push coming on the 24th with a little help from some of the students. After that, we’ll be able to furnish the room and lay it out, hopefully before the end of the semester.

A voyage of Discovery

Very often, I am on campus during the weekend, when most students have scattered to the four winds, free of classes for two days and determined to enjoy the New England fall before winter sets in. There is no time to feel lonely or alone when facing a project like this one, and there is something nice about being able to bear down and focus on the task at hand. Still and all, a librarian exists in part to serve his or her community, and I have been a bit of a ghost in mine.

Today was the Fall Open house, and a rare Monday off from the work-a-day world for me, so I sojourned to campus to see what could be done. The answer, as it turns out, was not as much as anticipated. What I enjoyed most as a student has come back to haunt me: the rooms of the library are constantly occupied. It is difficult to shelve books when you’re interrupting Metaphysics.

To that end, I assisted with the open house, saying hello to visitors and students and, in the process, becoming a visible presence on campus. The odd juxtaposition is that I am known among the faculty and ‘older’ alumni, but am offered help as though a stranger by the current students, and how are they to know different? The onus is on me. There will always be a part of me that would like to take up residence among the old and rare books, but such a life is impractical, even in the green world. In venturing out, I found that my addition is a welcome one. After all, the students are aware of the challenges of the library, and there is an appreciation for a return to order. My only hope is that I not set the bar too high.

My greatest discovery was the number of people who mentioned a desire to see the older books restored and gain guidance on restoring their older books. An idea that has bounced through my head for months is the idea of something like a guild, but for the library– a group of students trained in basic preservation and restoration (and perhaps a visit or two from NEDCC?) It would require fundraising, but I do love the idea of being able to pass on preservation skills along with research skills. After all, we are a school of book lovers, and it would be wonderful to be able to care for those books well. Additionally, a number of the rare books are 1st editions of authors of interest and we want to care for those treasures we possess, though they may not be costly at this time. What sort of rare books do we possess? Watch this space over the coming months as profile the collection and detail the building of the special collections.

Tales of a Saturday Librarian

Tales of a Saturday Librarian

A quick glance at Twitter for #saturdaylibrarian will generally reveal a number of librarians, in various degrees of caffeination, musing on the various reference questions they receive throughout the day, the amusing books they weed from the collection, or a general meditation on why there is never enough coffee. In many respects I am a lucky Saturday Librarian. Work study tends to happen on Saturdays, as well as music practice, so there is no shortage of bustle but few questions to be answered. The only downside was that by the time I got down to the caf for coffee, there were no mugs or cups to be had. It made me regret not installing an espresso machine in my office.

Things continue apace at the library. We are slowly combing through the extant catalog and comparing it to the books on the shelves. The issue is the amount of time it takes to manually compare title, author, call number, and barcode as well as note poor condition. Combine that with the fact that books are not always shelved in order, and you have the makings for a long library journey. My assistant slugs through, pausing every so often to wonder aloud why books are not in order, or why a single volume appears in the catalog as 4 distinct records. All valid questions, though there’s not an answer to any of them.

As you can see from the picture, there are no shortage of books moving in and out of the library, we simply lack the technology to track the movement. The first step will be implementing a rudimentary check out system. That way, we can at least consult the check out records to confirm if a book is circulating as opposed to missing when we reach that part of the shelf read. The last of the blank catalog cards will be pressed into service to function as check out records (see? Already recycling materials. Long live the card catalog!).

I’m of two minds on the manual circulation process. It is comforting to know that in some places, the access to materials is primary, to the point that tech systems limitations don’t stand in the way. We simply find a way to track what we can and make the system work. On the other hand, its a lot of manual labor. In two hours, I worked my way through 45 records, including shelving the books. Its an abysmal check in rate when you consider how quickly such things can be done when using even the most basic electronic system. While there is romance in the old library with its card catalog and lovely bookshelf check in, while it makes some secure in the borders of their green world, there is an advantage to be had in using some technology. Surely our time can be better spent then laboriously checking items in. Anyone else out there struggle through analog processes in a digital world? I’m open to any tips to move the process along.

In the mean time, I return to my records for cross check. Happy Sunday!

The Last of the Really Great Card Catalogs

Some of you may have seen the article floating around the web detailing OCLC’s last card catalog print run. The article is peppered with quotes about the ‘end of an era’ and comments on how the card catalog has been obsolete for at least 20 years. All of this is true for the wider world, but it struck me as poignant given that Saturday was the first skirmish in the battle for digitization in our library.

The cards in our catalog, like so many others out there, came from OCLC– the bottom right hand corner on each card proudly proclaims its origin. We have a primary catalog– author, title, and subject– as well as a supplementary catalog, which appears was added rather than integrating new records into the primary catalog. To be fair, our catalog has not had rigorous updating in close to a decade, and certainly nothing in the last 2-3 years (a project that yet awaits me, likely after this academic year). These cabinets stood watch as my assistant and I wrestled with the best way to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet which contained some of the same knowledge that lay tucked away neatly in each of the many drawers.

There is little that is elegant about the solution. I imagine this was true for those first movements from paper to digital as well. Currently, we’re creating new workbooks for each set of rooms in the library and manually moving each record to the new workbook once the status of the book in question has been verified. Tedious? Mildly. Efficient? Not terribly, but certainly more efficient than noting paper copies and then transcribing the information, which was the other option in our limited tech resource world.

Now, every Saturday (and odd weekdays), I sit in the foyer of the Library; my laptop perched on a book cart, I manually log the check ins and set them on the cart to shelve. I think if those cabinets could talk, they would laugh. So much effort to replace a system that, for all its manual intervention, would still work with a little TLC. The President of OCLC joked that they were going to have calligraphy done on the final card, ala an illuminated manuscript. While I likely won’t commission the art guild to lend an elegance to the decommissioned cards, it does make me wonder how we can repurpose the cards & cabinets to serve the library. After, we still enjoy illuminated manuscripts; surely we can find a new life for the catalog.

Back to the Future: OPAC Questing

If it has not already become apparent, Thomas More is a pretty unique place: its is a relatively low tech environment, it is a micro college on a campus that is full of both beauty and history, it is centered on academics in a vibrantly Catholic community. When I was explaining the school and my small role in its community in the library to several other librarians at SLA 2015 in Boston, their eyes lit up and they exclaimed “IT’S LIKE HOGWORTS! But real! And all New England-y!”

That was not to say that my catalog troubles went unnoticed. It comes as a surprise to a lot of people that we are currently on a card catalog with no online public access catalog (OPAC). For the average user, the main question would be “When can I search this online? Do I have to still use the card catalog?” During that same conversation at SLA, the average librarian’s main question was “Can I get the card catalogs when you’re done? I love those things!”

Beyond the basic issue of cleaning up the excel spreadsheet that houses our catalog in its current, nascent form, there is the question of where do we go from here? A small school has a small budget, by its nature. Many OPACs are expensive, due to their all encompassing nature– circulation, cataloging, collection development, the works. Any vendor I spoke to was amazed by the size of our collection relative to the size of our student body; there was an immediate recognition of the challenges that come with such a scenario. So while I haven’t ruled out an OPAC through one of the vendors I have looked into, I am also consider other options.

Under consideration?

  • Koha– an open source OPAC that we can simply run on our own servers, provided we have someone skilled in SQL, Perl, and Linux. Not the general skill set in the liberal arts, you know?
  • LibraryThing– I love LibraryThing. When I was working at the Bead Museum in Arizona (sadly closed in 2011), we kept our library catalog on LibraryThing. It was great! Quick, easy, pulled the records right away for you, integrates a social aspect easy as pie if that’s your jam. The drawback? I don’t as of now see a way to do circulation stats unless you’re on TinyCat, and while we are small, we are too big for TinyCat
  • OPAC vendor– I spoke with several at SLA, and there is a reason they are successful– do you really want to work overtime on making the catalog and circulation simply work? Circulation is so important in our library– we don’t have any historic stats to fall back on for collection development, and we don’t have a good way of tracking which books are where when the juniors and seniors embark on their projects each spring. The concern, as always is price. While the other options are higher in time commitment and lower in dollar commitment, this is the reverse.

In what combination do we utilize our time, talent, and treasure? Planning is ongoing, but feel free to weigh in with any experiences in picking an OPAC, transitioning, any pros or cons, or anything you wish you knew before deciding on an OPAC. For those who are not in the library world, your thoughts are always welcome as well!

The Troubles with Catalogs

The Troubles with Catalogs

I imagine I am currently going through a process that most of library land embarked on a decade or two ago. I am currently staring down a spreadsheet that contains the rudimentary begins of our digital catalog. The work was begun years ago; it predates my own student tenure at the college. For all that, it has gained a layer of the digital equivalent of dust, having been untouched for some time. One of our first challenges is to dust of this spreadsheet and use it for a full catalog read.

I confess, I am gaining a new respect for those institutions that are able to enforce a regimen of rotating shelf reads through their collection. I know that the data I have does not encompass a number of new donations and acquisitions, so the challenge is real. How did library land manage the original transition to digital? I have been looking as I have time, but so many institutions have been digital since the 90s that there is not a lot of information to be had. What little I have found is all in terms of obsolete technology.

Thus far, I am scrubbing the data in preparation for the shelf read: noting apparent duplicates, adding publishers, dates, and full titles to those records which contain ISBN numbers, and trying to note how many records have been barcoded. There was a project several years ago to start the OPAC process; it got as far as adding some books to this spreadsheet with barcodes, to eventually be loaded into an OPAC. I do hope that methodology will still work; my attempt at building and converting to an Access database did not go as well as I had hoped (though to be fair, it has been about 5 years since I built anything in Access).

Food for thought: are there better ways to do this project? Is this simply an example of the manual labor of love involved in building this library back up? Have others had success with Access as a “bridge OPAC” to coin a phrase? As for me, you’ll be able to find me buried in my excel spreadsheet, dreaming of the day we finish our digital conversion 🙂

Begin at the beginning…

Begin at the beginning…

11 years ago, during an early fall not unlike this one, I found myself enrolled as a freshman at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. I wandered campus aimlessly, sticking with the pack of equally lost freshmen who were part of my cohort. It took only a day or two to become part of the college community, to grow used to the rhythm and cycles of the days. My bookish heart rejoiced in particular at the sheer volume of time I was able to spend in the library.

When I look back at that time, I realize that I spent thousand upon thousands of hours in the various rooms of the library: attending class, studying, checking email, hunting up some lost tome that I simply had to check for my junior project or senior thesis. It comes as little surprise to me, then, that after a somewhat circuitous route through grad school, marriage, and various modes of employment, I find myself back at the beginning, at the Warren Library at Thomas More.

The work load is not light: the library catalog must be checked and digitized (currently, we have a very charming and labor intensive card catalog), the collection itself reevaluated and grown where needed, the arrangement of the library itself will come into scope as well. There is a need to evaluate the rarer holdings the library has and establish a special collections room. The college’s need for digital resources is acute as well. And that, dear reader, is where you come in. This blog will be both record and forum. When I attended SLA 2015 in Boston and told the story of my little library to my fellow information professionals, they lit up at the challenge I described. I was encouraged to start this blog to invite the community to share our trials, our victories, our defeats, as well as to offer their own hard-won wisdom along the way, in the hope that we might build this library up into the library it should be. Won’t you join us?