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Hello and welcome to Stacking Up, a blog for the "modern" librarian! The great thing about today's librarians is that we are so diverse: different ages, backgrounds, personalities, looks... this blog is here to share this diversity with ideas, insights, stories, experiences and opinions for anything and everything having to do with being a librarian!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Library Reclassification = A Pain in the You-Know-What

Doesn't this look like fun???

So you know what is seriously not enjoyable? Having to reclassify your entire library collection from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress. Yep. Not much fun at all.

I found this out over the past week, as all the books in my college's library have now been changed to Library of Congress (I didn't even realize that some smaller academic and research libraries still use Dewey... interesting...) Anyways, talk about tedious and time-consuming. Now, the collection at the library that I oversee only has around 1,200 books-- which is enough for our campus since we are a satellite branch of a larger college--and that was definitely plenty for me!

Last Wednesday the Library Director visited with a couple other librarians and we re-labeled every single book with new LC classifying stickers. However, I had to leave early for another job that day and the project couldn't be finished by the time campus closed at 5pm, so guess what I got to do for 5 hours yesterday and 3 hours today? Re-shelve 1,000+ books that were stacked-up (out-of-order) on all the library tables! I am proud to say that I finished, but am now slightly cross-eyed from looking at all those freaking LC decimals (ex. HG 2551.S38.2009-- ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?)

The only slight problem is that I misjudged the amount of shelf space I would need and now I'll have to go back and shift everything to fill the 4 empty shelves I have left...

But you know what? That can wait for another day :)