Weekly Reflection 1

My first week at Eckstein Middle School was mostly learning the various library systems and getting the various paperwork for this DFW filled out. While I spent a couple hours familiarizing myself with the library space and looking through various tutorials created by other school librarians on the Follett/Destiny system on Monday (3/28), the bulk of my work this week was done on Friday, April 1st. I helped Erin add new call number stickers to several new and existing books and add colored genre labels, as well as check whether some of them were in the system yet or not. While most of the stack were already part of the collection, and were simply being moved to new places within the library, there were several new copies that needed to be added to the system, including assigning barcodes, finding replacement costs, and categorizing the book into the appropriate subsection. Another part of this book cataloging process was the process of covering dust jackets with plastic to extend their shelf life, which I was taught how to do this week.

Another task I completed today was to re-shelve the Narrative Nonfiction section. It is a relatively small section in the library; however, it was quite messy due to students not re-shelving books properly and a significant amount of weeding having been done recently, leaving very few books in this section. It took about an hour to re-organize the shelves and re-shelve the significant backlog.

Finally, a small task I took upon myself just after lunchtime was to organize the genre label shelf, since boxes were piled randomly and it was difficult to find the proper genre label in some cases. I made sure that all the stickers were coming out the same side, and that boxes were alphabetical so that it is obvious at a glance whether more colored stickers need to be ordered and which colors are running low. Unfortunately, the shelf is slightly too small for all the existing genres, so two genres are on top of the shelf.

Overall, this week was mostly completing small tasks of organization and learning the systems that I will need to know for the rest of my DFW, but it was productive.