Internship Log: July 21 (Day 17)

9:30 AM-5:00 PM: Hello :) Well, you won't believe it. I was scheduled to spend the day with Meredith Lyon, the Order and Receiving Specialist. Meredith lasted much longer than the other people I met with, most of whom averaged 30 minutes. I spent over 2 hours with Meredith, as she walked me through the order process. While Paula deals with approvals (ie Yankee and Blackwell deposit accounts), Meredith does firm orders, and also has more pots from which she can allocate or appropriate funds. OMG, the acquisitions budget is one of the most confusing things I've ever encountered. There's the funds from the university (or I guess the CSU gives the campus a "huge" sum and the President dishes it out to whoever). Out of approx. $400,000.00, monographs get $40,000.00. The rest goes for subscriptions and e-databases. WOW!!!!!!!!! Then there are state funds, theoretically. They also get lottery funds, sometimes. Actually, Meredith said they got this year's lottery funds last year, so they were able to dump a lot into deposit funds. So, then, they get money from donations and trusts, and also endowments, of which they use the interest. Sounds like a lot, but Meredith and Paula ordered a little over 10,000 books last year. For a medium-sized university library, that's so not a lot.

OK, how are all the funds kept straight? That's Meredith's job. Each bibliographer has a subject code (actually they have multiple subject codes since they cover multiple subjects), and each code gets a designator. For example ####d, is deposit fund, ####l is lottery, etc. There are a total of 240 funds from which Meredith can pull money. Paula is stuck with the deposit funds, but her job is much simpler than Meredith's. Meredith has to shop around and figure out which funds to use. Paula doesn't have any choices. I liked how Meredith thought of her job as a game. At the end of the year, if most of the funds are near $0, she wins, and by default, so does the library.

Oh, Gina just popped her head in and asked if I was busy, since they have a new project for me. I just finished Mary's replacement project so the timing is perfect. So, for now, I am AFK.

I am back. I think I've mentioned the shift project. Books with low use are moving into storage and high use storage items are getting placed on shelves. A lot of law related books are going down to storage. The bibliographer, Eric, decided that prior to the shift, the catalog should reflect more information than just a volume number, so that users aren't forced to have every volume pulled. When these books are on the shelf, it's a simple process to scan the spines to find the volume you want. Dates, and beginning and ending letters/words are right there. So Eric brought a print sheet by, in which he designated how each title will be amended. That's where I come in. My new project is to add the information. It's pretty easy once you figure out what Eric wants, and find it on the spine or tp. Then you call up the record and plug in the information next to the volume number. Oh, and don't forget to save. The ones with dates went by very quickly actually, since I copied and pasted and just changed beginning and ending dates. I did 3 trucks in 2 hours. Woo hoo, only 7 more to go.

Actually, I really liked this idea, since it shows that the librarians are thinking about the users and making it easier for them to find the items they need. Here's an example of how this change will look on the OPAC. Let's take The statutes, from the twentieth year of King Henry the Third to the [tenth chapter of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years of King George the Sixth] A. D. 1235-[1948., which I just finished. If you click here, you will directed to the OPAC entry. Notice how each volume also contains date information, versus just a volume number, which provides little content identifying info. If you click on view additional copies, you'll get a list of the entire title holdings. (A very interesting title that any history buff should peruse.) This is much more useful than the Encyclopædia britannica entry, for example, which doesn't provide any info other than volume number. Of course, these are on the shelf, so patrons can browse the spines. However, I do have to say that having the ID info on the OPAC would be helpful to students who are finishing a paper late at night and realize that they failed to include the volume number of their source. I've had instances where I've had to do a virtual reference chat and ask the librarian to get me the volume info and number.