ORGANIZATION is a keyword for librarians, and when I arrived to my first class in library school I could see that I was among my people; those of us that meticulously organize our physical notebooks or the documents in our hard drives with color-coding and subfolders – and we enjoy it! For Get Organized Month, here are some highlights of how we are ushering in 2015 in The Scholastic Library & Archive. I tried to tie each of the following activities to one of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science.
The first law is, “books are for use”, and this relates to our new book collection, which we call the “tricolors”. A colored circle on the book’s spine indicates the year that Scholastic published it, and we keep the most recent three years of materials in the library office. Since this is the beginning of 2015, we are weeding 2012’s books from the shelves to fit everything being published this year.
Keeping a circulating copy of each publication allows us to preserve archival copies, and that leads me to another tenet of library science – which is “the library is a growing organism”. We add over a thousand items each year to the archive at Scholastic; and nearly a century of publishing means there are over 150,000 items in the collection. Every square inch of space matters, and our archiving projects keep everything in balance. Over the last year, we reorganized serials and multimedia items, and this January we are having additional shelving installed to accommodate the growing collection. Also, during 2014, Scholastic materials were prepared for offsite storage, so this month we will move several hundred linear feet of books to a climate-controlled warehouse.
The last rule of library science that I will mention is “save the time of the reader”, and, to this end, we have been working on new features for the library’s catalog and databases – organizing our virtual space. So as you can see, library work is both physical and digital!
This gives you a window into what the month of January involves for Scholastic librarians. What do you do to get organized for the New Year at school, work, or home?
