Library Day

[Jeff Holdeman]

On March 8, Christina Kramer, U of Toronto, wrote:

  "I have followed the grad activities discussion with interest, but I
missed the posting on library day. Could someone please repost a
description of the event?  The only library event I do is an orientation to
the library in my structure of Russian class."


We came up with the idea of Library Day as a service project for our
chapter of Dobro Slovo (the National Slavic Honor Society). George Fowler
correctly identified the idea as a good old-fashioned "subbotnik."

Interested members will  meet in our department at 9 am on a Saturday
morning. We will have coffee and doughnuts, and be given a crash-course in
"shelf-reading"-- verifying the proper shelving of books--by a library
employee, in our case, our Slavic librarian. At 9:30 am, we will go to the
library and will "read" the shelves in the sections which are Slavic or
contain high concentrations of Slavic books, ie. "P", "PG", "DK", etc. (At
our next meeting, we will have members nominate their favorite sections,
and we will set up a list ranked according to popular demand.) The goal is
to find books which have been reshelved incorrectly (varying from "slightly
out of sequence" to "what was this person thinking?!"), either our own or
books from other areas from the library, looking for those misshelved books
that can sometimes go unnoticed so long that they show up as "missing" on
the computer (provided they haven't been stolen). A person can choose to
read a section that they do a lot of research in or that they simply find
interesting, and when finished, go to another section on the list. There
will be a coordinator in a central location who will have a checklist to
make sure that sections aren't checked multiple times. (This is the job for
the person who tries to beg off, using the excuse of bad eyesight!) This
project has many benefits: not only will the sections  be returned to
proper sequence, but participants will have a chance to get to know certain
sections that interest them, and, most importantly, in the future they will
become more aware of noticing misshelved books and will take the time to
pull them out for proper shelving. The only thing I will ask is that people
not read (in the normalsense) on the job, but it will okay if they carry a
slip of paper to jot down numbers that they would like to look at later. If
there are enough volunteers, the task could be completed by 12:30 or so,
and the volunteers could all go out to lunch afterwards.

Several of you have responded favorably to this idea and have expressed
interest in doing it at your institutions. I hope this description helps.
Good luck!

Jeff Holdeman
The Ohio State University
jholdema at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu