telophase | (no subject)

Crossposts: http://telophase.livejournal.com/2171261.html

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A student worker is shelf-reading outside my office, and has been for a couple of days. (For you non-librarians, shelf-reading is doing inventory.) She's got a scanner and is taking each book down, scanning it, and putting it back. So it's beep ... beep ... beep ... beep for her entire shift.

While it is mildly annoying to me, I have great sympathy for her, for the beeps are slightly muffled to me but not for her, she has to do this mind-numblingly boring job for her full shift, and the last time I looked, she was not listening to any sort of mp3 player or other device that would, at least, relieve some of the boredom.

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::grin::

I've never shelf-read in a bar-coded collection!

May she move on to other parts of the collection soon, to save your sanity, if not her own...

I yearn for an RFID future, in which we can just wave a reader at the shelf and record everything. This process would be quicker and quieter! Alas, the cost in labor of redoing every item in the collection means it's going to be a while!

She's almost through the shelf right next to my door, but that means she'll be turning around and doing the other side shortly. At least the beep will be a bit more muffled. I think her shifts are at least reasonably short - only a couple of hours at a time.

Shelf reading is tedious enough even without having to scan each thing!

Could be worse: she could be doing GovDocs and fishing tiny little pamphlets out from overstuffed shelves and putting them back!

Augh, GovDocs. Followed by shelves and shelves of periodicals. Floppy, floppy periodicals that never stay in their stupid metal holders. :P

This year's staff award went to the person who went through six floors of GovDocs stacks, deaccessioned quite a lot, and condensed them down to two or three floors' worth. Almost entirely by herself. She earned every bit of recognition and every penny of that award!

*twitches at the thought of that many govdocs, and going through six floors of them.*

*twitchtwitch*

I think that would be very close to my idea of hell.

I could technically say three floors, except that the section of the building holding the GovDocs, which is the area where the stacks were kept in the original 1920s building, is in two sections which are only connected by a workroom on the third floor. So it's not six floor of the full building, but it's more square footage of stacks than, say, my house. :)

Yes, but I hate govdocs on principle. At least when it comes to dealing with the professionally. I don't even like trying to look them up unless they're online. (Actually, online searching for them can get pretty frustrating too...)

I had to edit the script that produces the location map for items in the catalog to account for the new GovDocs locations. As a number of pieces had, at some point in the past, changed or been assigned different all numbers it confused the hell out of me why some of these things were showing up in the wrong location until it was explained to me! Luckily it only happened when you were looking things up by call number, and as the only people likely to do that are people who know what they're dealing with (and me, testing), we could leave it alone.

I didn't have a scanner in my days of shelf-reading. I'm a little jealous. :)

I screwed up my wrist during one of the inventories of the slide collection I used to curate. Remove slide, check both sides, smush down the corners of the plastic mount if they were popping apart, replace. Over and over again for six weeks. I still have problems with my wrists from that, and it was a decade ago!

OMG. At my library, we spent all summer shelf reading. I stopped hearing the beep after a while. Also, I don't think ours beeped quite so loud.

My coworkers (who incidentally were more media guys than book guys, since our library is a community college and so we are the library/media center - they were nice enough to help out) devised a system of rigging a barcode scanner to their heads by zip tying one to a pair of headphones. That way, they could just take a book off of the shelf, open it, and hold it up to their foreheads to scan it. It was pretty hilarious.

Also, whyohwhy our barcodes were inside the books I don't know. But then again, the woman who processes books doesn't have to ever check them out or shelf read, so there you go. The previous college library I worked at had them on the front cover.

I shelf-read in our reference section one semester of workstudy... but no one was directly supervising me, and I had a disgustingly long time to do it, which meant I beep-beep-beep'ed thirty times, then sat down with whatever book had looked interesting enough to make me stop for half an hour. Which made it a lot more tolerable!

She's been pretty consistent with it! I didn't check yesterday, so she might have brought in something to listen to. I hope so, for her sanity. (Unless she's overwhelmed enough with her studies that she enjoys the chance to not think about them for a couple of hours!)

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