Library Day

[Jeff Holdeman]

Dear SEELANGers interested in the "Library Day" idea,

I apologize for the long silence, but I am in the throes of MA exam
preparations and time isn't something which visits me very often, and it
definitely doesn't stay very long when it does.

We held our Library Day at OSU two weeks ago and it was a great success! We
had fourteen volunteers (thirteen grad students and our department chair)
who gave up a Saturday morning to "read" shelves in the library's stacks,
looking for mis-shelved and mis-catalogued books. The original idea was
just to make sure all the Slavic books were in proper Library-of-Congress
order, but we decided to get adventurous and we raised our goals...

Last fall, our library changed over to a new cataloguing system, and all
the books were fitted with unique barcodes. Many of the barcode labels
include the title, the LC call number, and the copy number. The volunteers
pulled each book, checked the barcode label information for mistakes,
compared it to the spine label, then made sure the book was in its proper
place. Countless books were returned to their place, and 37 problems of
various kinds (transliteration mistakes, call number mistakes, wrong
barcodes) were discovered and are being corrected on the books and in the
database. The only drawback to such scrutiny was the small percentage of
books which actually got checked. Nevertheless everyone seemed to think
that it was worth the effort and were willing to make this a quarterly
event over the next few years. But once it has been done, it won't need it
again for a long time. For libraries which don't have our extenuating
circumstances (ie, new barcodes), a simple shelf-reading day would suffice.

The experience was very positive. We had a lesson on the intricacies of the
Library of Congress system over coffee and doughnuts, and everyone seemed
to learn something new. The participants also got a better understanding of
the mistakes which can be made by other patrons who reshelve books
carelessly, and now have an idea of where to look on a shelf if a book is
missing. And hopefully they are now more careful when reshelving books, and
are more likely to pull books which they see out of place and return them
to where they belong.

In conclusion, if anyone has questions or requests for copies of materials
I compiled, please e-mail me directly, and hopefully I will be able to
reply in June (after the end of the quarter) before I leave for the summer,
if I'm not overwhelmed by requests or by my MA exams.

Jeff Holdeman
jholdema at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu