Internship Journal, Week 3: September 11 & 13
16 September 2024
Wednesday afternoons are generally seem to be the "touching base" part of a given week: the Prince and I sit down and go over what few curiosities or concerns I might have, and then we dive into whatever task that'll probably take up a good portion of Friday. I've yet to have few of either that haven't been conveniently been addressed within an hour, but I did find it very strange that I hadn't seen a single tankōbon of manga over like 3 different high interest release calendars from Title Source 360, my primary selection resource for cart-making at this point. The Prince quickly pointed out that manga is indeed included on lists from Ingram and Publisher's Weekly, which somehow ended up with me introducing him to a resource that he hadn't used before (Manga in Libraries), to my minor gratification. After that, the tasks of the day were running reports in Horizon (the system's ILS) and an introduction to some (specialized?) collection tasks.
Alas, as the universe's profound indifference occasionally has it, we had to skip over Horizon reports due to some unmentioned barrier. (Presumably because my lowly clerk account was never given the permission to run those reports?) Ironically enough, some idle curiosity spurred on by past coursework has already familiarized me with some of the circulation reports my branch supervisors use alongside a few others, though perhaps not the higher, system-scale processes that centralized collections work involves. Collection tasks were still a go, and by "tasks" I mean one offhandedly-mentioned task in particular: weeding 1,300 dead juvenile books from the system. Books sitting on a branch shelf that haven't been checked out in two years are considered dead, shipped off to the LAC to sit in storage, but after a few more (two? four?) years without any holds to retrieve them, they are deemed well and truly dead and in need of burial. I'm not sure why or how this particular load piled up so high, but I'd wager the 2-year time limit is more pressing to remedy quickly simply because shelf space in a branch can be quite limited.
1,300 seems to be the around the number of items that are checked in and out on a big branch's average day, but not all the in-branch staff have workloads that can ebb with foot traffic, so the load had to be divided up between the Prince, me, and a few other folks who have yet to give me their pseudonyms. Pulling a cart and going down a list of books to get is nothing new, if perpetually cumbersome, while the actual act of weeding a book is pretty simple. You pull up the item record in Horizon, edit the specific entry with the dead book's barcode, and change its status to one of the discard designations: "weed" if there are other copies of the item remaining, and "lastdsc" for the final copy, probably to flag it to appear in a report or something. Once that's done, it gets a couple discard stamps, and its condition is evaluated to determine its final destination: pristine books are held for the used book sale in an attempt to put that money back in CRRL's coffers, items in good shape are sent off to ThriftBooks. Anything else is deposited into the black bin of discards for a unknown, presumably pulpy fate.
Of course, just because one copy of an item is gathering dust in the vault doesn't mean its counterparts at a branch aren't. Some books that were soon to be weeded had only a handful of circs while other copies had made plenty of rounds. It'd be an objective waste to toss out possible replacements that are sitting relatively pretty as others are weathering more and more checkouts—so that disparity had to be rectified. If an item in storage has less than 10 checkouts, then it would be marked to check for a copy in a branch that has more than 10 circs; if so, those items would be swapped around. Still a relatively simple process—find the specific item being sent back, copy that barcode and put it on hold for that purpose, hen copy the barcode of the item being sent out to a branch into the proper place on the spreadsheet.
That little bit of extra effort to double check the barcodes every step, piled atop the constant deliberation for a bunch of books straddling the line between what I think is good condition and what the someone else might think is good, is what turned this task into a bit of an ordeal. It took some time, but I did eventually manage to fall into a rhythm like any other task. If anything, I'm glad I can finally grasp some small agency in deciding whether or not a book can stay or go, instead of just giving it to someone else.1
Regardless of what could have been done at the LAC, Friday was completely written in for something happening 50-something miles away: a MACDC meeting. Or MACDAC? It's definitely better pronounced as "macdac." I actually never managed to learn what the acronym means this entire time, though it's not like anyone except a very specific set of people would know for sure. MACDC is an informal organization run entirely through a listserv (mailing list) sent to lead collection librarians at public libraries throughout the collective Washington-Baltimore metro area. If the Prince hadn't idly mentioned it at our very first meeting for this internship, I would not have had the curiosity to ask for an in.
Given the confidentiality of everything, doubly so with the fact that nobody not employed by CRRL in attendance even knows that I'm semi-publicly writing about it, I'll refrain from spilling the beans with a massive pile of text about the proceedings as I do. Suffice to say that a even more arresting picture of the library materials landscape was painted, with inflating eMaterial demand and budget margins getting even more stringent than I described in my last journal. I will indulge everyone with a single relevant factoid, though: at one of the larger systems in the region, 27% of all borrowers in the last three to six months checked out only eMaterials. So if you ever find yourself frustrated that your Libby loans and/or holds are disappearing after an adjustment, know that there is a very good reason for that.
1 ^Anyone who has ever gotten sick of digging out another damaged book that interrupts their rhythm of checking in stuff will undoubtedly find this to be a paradoxical statement.