And so it continues ...

Yesterday finished up the stock take of Classics; not a huge collection, but with more than half of the books requiring catalogue corrections, the "clean up" took more time than the actual inventory process.

Today was Professional Development day; ditto for tomorrow. Then it's 5 weeks annual holiday, where I plan to once again to bring order to the chaos currently known as the Home Office. Do notice particularly the word "plan".

I'm at the stage where I'm almost prepared to "do a deal" with a Teacher Librarian Colleague whereby I will go do their stock take for them at their library, in return for them coming and doing a heavy "weed" of the Home Office.

Only problem is, of course, that they're likely to throw away all my useless little treasures, souvenirs, miscellaneous documents ... and all that realia that is currently clogging up a whole room. Wait a minute! If I didn't have that stuff, I wouldn't have the problem. Hmmm ...

Stock take and Other Duties ...

Finished inventory on Fiction last week, today it was the Reference collection, Visual Texts and the "Quick Reads". No library work tomorrow, it's the school's "Big Day Out", where I'm going to be supervising students walking from the school to the railway station, on the train, then to the theatre for three hours of Harry Potter, then to the Food Court for Lunch, then back to the station, another train, then the walk back to school. Heavy rain is forecast for the day.

And I actually volunteered for this. I did have the option of skipping "Big Day Out" and continuing stock take.

So all those folk who claim I'm crazy can use this as evidence ...

Weirdness and Mind Power

I have to start, right here, by swearing to you that this is true. You can choose to be sceptical, which is your right. If I was sitting where you are now, and about to read what you are about to read, I can honestly say that I wouldn't believe it either. But that's probably more to to with being a cynic than anything else.

So I'm working away, doing what I'm paid to do, during the course of which some YouTube resources were being evaluated. A small and unexpected deviation into the area of Zen philosophy resulted in a number of footages of streams/forests/mountains with the feely-floaty musical background.

Next thing I knew, and I kid you not, into my office flew a Superb Fairy-Wren. Our American cousins should maybe thing along the lines of a "blue jay". It fluttered around alarmingly for a bit, then settled on the top shelf of my professional resources. For a moment there, I thought it might poop on the folders containing the last 7 years of stock take records. That alone gives pause for reflection.

I co-opted a colleague from a nearby office, and together we gently encouraged my little feathered visitor back out into the Wide World. Bird poop on stock take records might be a fair call, but it sure would be a financial tragedy on expensive reference books.

Being Friday, Staff Morning Tea was the next event on my schedule. Don't laugh - its a serious venue for exchanging information, strengthening working networks, ensuring sufficient sugar levels are maintained until lunchtime.

But Blow-Me-Down! (an Australian expression meaning a surprise of sufficient proportions to knock an individual horizontal). When I came back from Morning Tea, my small feathered friend was perched next to the main door of the library, waiting to be let back in.

Now the really spooky part of this is the thought of what might have happened if I'd been reviewing material on, for example, Continental Drift. Would we have had an earthquake?

Just wondering.

And the stocktake begins ...

Yep, tomorrow stocktake ("inventory") starts for the Non-Fiction location. Having spent the last 4 months culling/weeding/deselecting, it's down to a mere 7K-ish volumes. Five days, 2 people ... hmmm. With one person scanning and the other screen-checking (with regular swapping under OHS), that's only 1400 books/movements per day, on and off shelves.

Over a five hour period (six hours, less 20 minutes morning break and 40 minutes lunch break), that's 280 per hour, or 4 per minute. But allowing for an average of one in ten resources - which was about the going rate for Fiction last year - having a problem that will require approximately 5 minutes to correct (eg catalog error, incorrect spine label, invalid barcode) that's an additional 140 books x 5 minutes work time. That's only another 12 hours work, or a little over 2 additional days.

If the equipment doesn't fail, the network doesn't go down (two power surges in the afternoon on last Friday), no one stops for any reason, like they die or something ...