i began my work as a volunteer on a project to revamp a catholic school library today, and it was very interesting and productive. the school’s collection has not been evaluated or maintained in some time, not since the librarian was hired to be a 6th grade teacher. since then, parent volunteers have been working on organizing and shelving, which is better than nothing, but at this point, it needs a full overhaul by qualified professionals. we barely made a dent today, but the plan is to beef up the reference stuff for the preK-6ers in the building, since the school has an excellent relationship with a branch of the public library is across the street, which will be their most excellent resource for more in-depth research.
today 4 of us spent 2 hours making heads or tails of the reference items in the collection. there were 2 copies of world book, one from the 50’s, the other from 1986, i believe, plus an old funk & wagnall’s and an old encyclopedia americana, with an assortment of old atlases, dictionaries, quotations books, and other items, including their very own copy of the encyclopedia of catholicism which we deemed salvageable because it included stuff from vatican II. the more stuff we pulled off the shelves, the more we found. shelving hasn’t really been done in a while, and for the books which are shelved, most of them are shelved 3 deep. it’s a huge project.
the plan going forward is to figure out what in the reference pile we want to keep or replace with newer copies, and figure out if any of the older stuff is worth anything to collectors or someone, in order to make some money instead of throwing them away. there’s no budget for this project, so we’re doing what we can to recycle what we have however possible. since the library still has a card catalog, we figured the best way to deal with the rest of the stuff was to create a MARC-friendly spreadsheet to store really simple info like the title, author, publisher, date, and ISBN/ISSN, if we can get it, and enter the data from the cards. that way, as we pull books off the shelves, we can check them against the list, and be able to keep track of what we keep and what we weed. with that portion of the data entry done, i’ll be able to easily import that data into a digital catalog of our choosing. using OCLC we can look up more info on the books, and figure out shelf numbers, and perhaps hand off the fleshing out of the records to a gslis student.
yes, we have lots of plans for this. it’s nifty. in the meantime, we breath in dust and suffer for our art to help kids have a happy library resource. erin brought up the idea of getting read posters and the like on the walls, and jen seconded the notion. so yeah, we’re “rebuilding” a collection, collection development policy and all, and trying to make the library a happy, inviting place to be.
now on to my excel spreadsheet and price research madness. 
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