I brought my laptop today thinking I would use the wireless connection and work on my website. I'm hoping it will connect faster than my work computer. Between issuing new books to a student and getting involved with weeding some books in the morning, I never got beyond the weeding. I did some sort of inventory last year, but don't know if I completed it all, and I spent time deleting things that were not only from the 1980's but from earlier. There weren't even copies on the shelves for a lot of these items. I only went through part of the 970 range, and the sad thing is that this weeding still leaves me with copyrights from the 1990's. I am down to very few books on states and colonies, and if I don't scrounge up some money from somewhere, this library will be down to nothing if I keep weeding.
There isn't even one a good section in the library. My 000-099 section has an average copyright date of 12 years, and that is as good as it gets. If I were a 22-year old library clerk starting out on this job, I would be younger than the collection on an average. By my being older, the library looks good when compared to me. It took me all morning to do this, which, of course, is one of the things library clerks do to waste time.
The textbook side of my life is just as complicated. The school secretary calls and asks me about some kid owing a book at another school that she can see on Aeries, and I tell her that I don't use Aeries and that my system shows me less and less, so I don't see anything owed. Some of these kids went to schools that are now closed, and the books were never checked in. I have little ability to know if kids at this school actually took home the book checked out to them because the books were in the classroom when the Williams people came through to check on students having books, and when the teachers gave them out, many of them didn't get the book that had been assigned to them.
I am a smoke and mirrors textbook clerk, since I really am a library clerk and not a textbook clerk. The whole system doesn't work from the top to the bottom beginning with the principals borrowing books from each other without getting them off of the original site's inventory. Each layer down has its own problems, and a lot of books don't come back or get paid for no matter how much I growl or how many bills I mail. I am not going to stress out over it. I rather imagine that the ACLU wants kids to have access to an education, and next layer up can try charging for those books if they think they can convince a parent to pay.
Now that lunch is over and my little friends are off with their teachers, I hope to hook up the laptop.
Reading Chuckle: the little news item on Yahoo about the guy who got a $11,000 bill after letting his kids stream videos while on vacation from Canada to the southwest of the U.S. I bet he never spends a $1,000 on books for them, which is what he settled the bill for with the wireless carrier. He could have bought each kid a ton of activity books for a $1,000! I wonder if he thinks reading is an option now!
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