Inventories
Nov 3rd, 2007 by Cathy Nelson
Inventories. Dislike them. Necessary evil. Far too many students are having a hard time locating books on the shelf. We weeded a bunch, well over 2000 copies. But the catalog is still pointing kids to books. So the plan is to do an inventory before Thanksgiving. We will do it section by section.
I also need to do a hardware inventory. In doing the migration from Groupwise to Outlook for our district email client software, I’ve discovered far to many teachers using outdated hardware as their main teacher workstation. I had aked this at the beginning of school, but apparently folks had too much on their plate and chose not to answer me. There were roughly 1/3 of our teachers who could not have Outlook loaded b/c district says it is buggy for anything less than Office 2003. So I have a goal for a hardwre inventory too.
I will create forms and use some of the library workers to go in with me and boot up classroom computers while I get teacher computer information, like brand, serial numbers, assett tag numbers., and even operating system version. Oh yes, and the version of Office it is running. Then maybe I can make heads and tails out of what our school has and doesn’t have.
Today I relocated my biography section, and pulled more obsolete titles (10). I thought I had gotten rid of the worst of the old stuff last year during inventory. I totally believe in inventory as a support system to collection development(one of my strong points). But, as in most aspects of running a school media center, real inventory is never done. I am often running lost and missing lists (for possible replacement evaluation), weeding as needed, and putting off the inevitable – updating my AV inventory. This is just something that I keep putting off as I don’t receive any $ for new AV equipment, teachers just come and get what they want…(I had the locks on the AV closets changed last year, but one of the PE teachers has master keys and helps himself when I am not in attendence, and I just don’t like doing it! Anyway, seeing that you are getting ready to work on it might help in getting me motivated to work on mine as well. We will see! Anyway – I think inventory should be a required tool for all school libraries. I don’t see how some LIS don’t do it every year – and the state annual report….but that is another topic!