Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Life is Good

Since the earthquake, followed by Hurricane Irene, things have settled down and the project is progressing well.  Over the past two months we have accessioned over 230,000 items.  The AH, BL and BH sizes go the quickest.  The DL and DH sizes kick our butts.  Luckily over half the items have been in the BH category.

Somehow the math isn't working out, though.  We should be at about 1/3 completed based on our preliminary estimate of 750,000 items housed at Ivy Stacks.  This was based on the number of records in our catalog indicating the location as Ivy.  However, we have only gone through about 20% of the boxes holding materials being stored in Orange.  I'm not a cataloger but apparently one catalog record would describe many items.  Now, each item needs a bar code and its own record, so we are getting a clearer picture of what we really own, and I think we own more stuff than we thought.  And I must say, some of it is total junk, but for the most part it is a pretty interesting collection.  If only I could read it (lots of foreign language materials and I took Latin in high school and haven't found much of anything written in Latin).  That said, all in all, except for a dropped tray full of books on rare occasion, life is good.