Why I missed the Wimba chat

I missed the recent Wimba chat because… something… came… up.

Here’s what happened…

We try to do an inventory at the end of the school year but apparently there had not been one done in a few years and so this spring we discovered many discrepancies and so we did not finish the inventory before school was out and staff left for the summer.

I went to the library several times over the summer – several times a week – and worked on my SLIS program and some other things and also spent some time continuing the inventory. I kept finding mistakes and fixing them and the process was moving along nicely and I felt like I would finish this past week before teachers arrive for work next week.

Our library team had already finished the inventories in all of the sections of the library except for high school non-fiction. Some aides (and my son who I got to work for me) had scanned a few hundred HS-NF books starting at 000 and I uploaded the barcode list to the inventory and then made a printout of the results of what had been scanned/uploaded.

The printout shows the status of every book that was scanned. If the book is in the correct place (both HS-NF and correctly shelved) there is just an entry with no message. If, however, the scanned book has some issue, I’ll see the issue mentioned in a note. Some common issues are that the book is from another area (perhaps elementary NF) or the book was marked as lost (now found-YEA!) or that it is currently checked out (hmmm) or that it simply is mis-shelved relative to the other books on the shelf.

So I took the printout to the stacks and started looking for the first book with an issue – a book that was mis-shelved…

I looked at the shelves for the book and I couldn’t find it because every book on the shelf was incorrect. The books should match the printed report but sometime between the scanning of the barcodes and when I looked at the shelf, someone had rearranged the books on this shelf. My first thought was that someone did it as a prank on the library staff.

But then I looked at the next shelf. Same. Every book is mis-shelved.

Next shelf. Same. Mis-shelved. Are you kidding me?

I run to the next shelf and the next and it is clear that we have a library apocalypse on our hands. Eventually I discover that every book on every shelf in every section of the library is mis-shelved.

The good news was that each book was still on the shelf where it belonged but all the books on each shelf were mixed up.

My mind was spinning trying to think of what could have happened. I started playing back events in my mind and I realized that I had seen our new cleaning lady dusting the books and shelves throughout the library for many many days in a row. I remembered thinking how diligent and committed she was to her job. I even told her how much I appreciated the time she was spending.

I realized that I saw her almost every day for 2 weeks while she was taking books off the shelf, dusting the shelf, and then dusting each book as she reshelved them by height.

YES. OUR BOOKS. ALL OF THEM. WERE NOW SHELVED BY HEIGHT.

I missed the Wimba chat because I lost my mind.

Fortunately, several students, parents, and teachers came to our aid and we have everything shelved correctly again….

By color. ROY G BIV *

 

*not really! :-)