Internship Journal, Week 6: October 2 & 4
08 October 2024
In an amusing twist, this week emphasized that the selectors usually aren't actually the ones actually buying the carts they create. (At least here at CRRL?) Due to the myriad million possible errors, compounded with the certainty required with handling what's basically 360,000's people money at once, both the Prince and CDM have a figure following in their wake, scrutinizing their selections, making sure each and every item is the right format and price, lest a single cent of the system's precious dollars be squandered... The actual Acquisitions department, where the Prince and CDM are shadowed by Miss Major and Eagle Eye, respectively.
Flippancy aside, as I've already documented in a past journal, every physical item that gets added to the system has some preparation to be taken care of beforehand. In Acquisitions case, these things are done not just before they've been shipped out from a vendor, but prior to clicking a purchase button. Once they've combed through and made sure all the books are the actual items in the right formats, they need to get put into Horizon and primed for processing.
First, Eagle Eye or Miss Major will open the spreadsheet of every single purchase Collection Services has made or will make for the fiscal year, then find an unused purchase order (PO) number delegated to them. That PO number will group together all the purchased items under a single, conveniently retrievable listing—though Horizon's archaically precise design forces initially formats them as if every item were the same kind and age group. Next, acquisitions will download the cart in MARC format, then import the items into that PO, usually without error, yet with supposedly differing reception to said errors. Those will be corrected as they go through every item one by one, changing them to their proper classification, adding the right quantity of each item and cost, then noting the street date and the usual details for catalogers and processors.
Price, of course, is the almighty crucible—so they'll go through and make sure the price of the items in Horizon matches the cost that's listed on the cart page. If so, acquisitions will record that price in the fiscal spreadsheet, then do one final check—if everything's straight, the purchase button will be pressed, and those items will be sent CRRL's way. The delivery time of those books almost never line up with the street date of course, but since they're already in the system, patrons will be able to see the items and put holds on them after a short delay.
This, at least, is Acquisitions' eponymous job, and the duty with the highest priority over all other tasks. The full slate, though, is a lot more varied, one of these including what's essentially chasing down books. An annoyingly common example: money only moves from CRRL's coffers whenever a book is actually sent out, and since these can come from different warehouses in different states, books bought in a single order can be shipped at different times or run into different troubles. So, it is very possible for things to disappear in transport and their respective invoice to stay open for months at a time, as Eagle Eye showed from her section of the spreadsheet. Patrons still want their new books, though, so things keep chugging along even without reconciling every single invoice, but all those disappearances makes it nigh-impossible to have an accurate estimate of how much money is being spent from month to month.1
I don't recall or otherwise didn't catch Eagle Eye's full suite of duties other than "making sure the numbers are in the right place," but in Miss Major's case, there's an excess of chasing things down: managing dozens of newspaper and magazine subscriptions in order for every single branch2, finding out whether a weeded book can be acquired again from the usual sources, purchasing and returning individual library of things components deemed insufficient, and more. There's also a noticeable amount of getting rid of stuff for a position with "acquisitions" in the name: not only deleting OverDrive records like I mentioned in a previous journal, but records of items that have been weeded yet still linger from Horizon.
Speaking of weeding, on Friday, the Prince demonstrated one last essential task before embarking upon the major effort of the entire internship. Items are marked for removal by being set to "weed" status, but the final remaining copy of something gets a more specific status: "lastdsc." Presumably a contraction of "last discarded," all lastdsc items are logged in a specific Horizon report run every two weeks. This is the selfsame report Miss Major needs to hunt down the aforementioned items and figure out whether they'll be easy to repurchase or not. Once finished, this list sent off to the Prince; who, as always, must do his due diligence in seeing if it's worth getting what's easily available or not. This surprised me a little, since I figured that the majority of items on lastdsc would be too old for any more than a few patrons to miss them—but this thought process is only really relevant for fiction books, not to mention it's very possible for recent items to have all their copies run through by an unlucky glut of careless patrons or something.
Anyway, this week would turn out to have an absolute deluge of books for the Prince to wade through, which is exactly what would result once you've weeded 1000+ dead books from your collection. Thanks again to the Crafter for finishing up the hundreds of books in my share that I might have finished by the time my internship was over at a glacially piecemeal pace.
Though gaining all the glimpses and practical experience I've described in these journals is essential to my internship, there is one big capstone that has to slot into everything: the impact project. As one can probably guess, in order to demonstrate competency and/or expertise in institutional standards for planning and assessment, this endeavor involves identifying and assessing a problem, proposing a way to solve said problem backed up with data, then implementing this solution and recording the results, all of which will be compiled into a big report. After a year of almost nothing but applying abstract theories to hypothetical scenarios, this would be the first time I get to apply them in a living, breathing context, something I hadn't realized would make things stick 'till recently.
Since anywhere from 2011 to 2014, depending how you classify them, CRRL has offered a series of adventure packs themed around historical topics or nature exploration, with books and tools that kids go on a real-life adventure. That's anywhere from 10 to 13 *years* of natural wear and tear compounded by the grubbiness of little children, quite a bit of children given their checkout numbers—so even before the Prince began taking them all out of circulation they had been dropping out from damage and evaluation status one by one, to the point that I can't even remember the last time one passed through my hands at work. At some point, CRRL applied for and received the Duff McDuff Green Jr. grant from the local Community Foundation specifically to address this—so my project, then, will be facilitating this refresh by helping build brand-new, updated kits.
So, as the problem was probably known long before I came aboard, this project was started a year or more ago, meaning that a good quarter or more of the stipulated steps have already taken care of. From what I can tell, the Prince and anyone else involved didn't gather much data in the first place, likely because there wasn't much of a need for it—demand for a Library of Things was growing even before CRRL's population began to balloon, and since all the nature packs are a decade old and falling apart, this posed a problem with a very obvious solution: build some updated packs. At the very least, I would like to paint a clear picture of what Library of Things collection they're being added to and the requisite impact that these new kits will have. Assuming the data I need can be gathered, I'll be trying to compare the budding Library of Things collection from the early 2010s to the sizable library of now.
That's the paper that'll be turned in, anyway. The content of that report will also include a record of my direct efforts of developing supplemental materials and determining storage logistics and other minutia, which...may or may not have an unexpectedly long if obscure tail of influence in proportion to how long I'll be at the system for? Assuming any obvious indicators of my contributions remain intact through proofreading and revision and everything.
On Friday, the Prince and I got started with the first kit, alliteratively (and thus correctly) titled Investigating Insects. All the kits already have all of their books and baubles sitting and ready to be organized in their backpacks whenever, which leaves the activities and extra information that will guide the kids' adventures—which, even if their content will likely hew close to their predecessors, will probably end up making most of the workload. As with almost all juvenile-focused anything in public libraries, these kits need to be designed to adhere Virginia's educational standards for schools. I'll have been out of public school for a decade next summer, and akin to the greater strategy that got me through undergrad, what puddles of stagnant facts that weren't individually flushed out of my head after the hundreds of tests are little more than vapor now. Portions of these materials probably can be developed without a baseline understanding of elementary-level science, but for the majority of their content I'll somehow have to cram brushing up on the curriculum into something easily readable.
Very fortunately, though, outside of an educational system structured around turning you into a receptacle that rotely dispenses information when prompted for, it turns out that learning these facts is actually pretty interesting. Who'd have thought? Since the Prince was an actual educator, he'll probably still end up laying a lot of the groundwork, but I am very much hoping I can improve enough to cement my own copy the further things go along.
1 ^Irritating as it might be for Collection Services, I'm loath to imagine how overlarge of a migraine this perpetually poses for Accounting...
2 ^Actually, I do remember Eagle Eye saying she does the same for database and research resource subscriptions.