Blog post by Chelsea Fritz, Library Assistant, Scholastic Corporate Library and Archive
I am one of the librarians here at Scholastic and one of my main jobs is to catalog all the new Scholastic titles. Cataloging each Scholastic book is a process that creates a very large amount of items that need to be shelved. And like every library knows well, more books means more space!
We receive 3 copies of each book that is published. Each copy is cataloged and sorted into archival storage (ARC), into the permanent collection (SCH), and into the tricolor collection (TRI). The tricolor collection represents all the most recent Scholastic titles from the past 3 years, identifiable from their color sticker.
In our library stacks, the permanent collection is grouped by their ISBN. 9780545791342 is the ISBN of the best Harry Potter book, for example. Change my mind. The ISBNs in our collection are grouped in 590, 439, 338, 516, to name a few.
Like true New Yorkers, space is an issue that we constantly find ways to deal with. To better attack the backlog of books that needed to be shelved, we devised a plan to group the ISBNs of books together, sort them onto their new to-be-shelved carts, and make life quick and easy for the shelver!
As the collection grows, we are prepared in the library to grow with it. There are many different steps that a book goes through before it finds its way into the permanent collection. Each step is important. Our faster ISBN sorting of un-cataloged books has become a great success. The faster books are shelved, the faster we can find them for a researcher in the building. Plus, it doesn’t hurt having more room in the Archive too.
Chelsea Fritz
