Shelf Read Week

Posted on September 10, 2019 Updated on September 9, 2019

By Lauren Maddox

Thank you all for your patience during our brief hiatus last month! The AGSL has been preparing for the start of the new school year, which included a collection-wide shelf read. The shelf read will actually be an on-going project; each staff member will spend an hour a week continuing to read their section. But last week we came together as a staff to try and tackle the bulk of the work before students came back to campus for the Fall semester.

Most of my time at the AGSL this summer has been spent at my desk. Before I started writing for the AGSL, I had pretty much no experience working in libraries. Well, I was technically a library assistant at my high school, but that just meant I spent every morning reading in the library. So, I was pretty excited to get on board with the rest of the staff and do some real down-and-dirty library work.

Conclusions: I escaped with 0 paper cuts and the knowledge that it’s very hard for me to count past 64. But I thought that this would be a great opportunity for our readers to get an inside look at some of the behind the scenes work our staff does to make sure our library is as accessible and useful to our patrons as possible!

I was assigned sections 050-b and 200-b through c, which included the entire Carta Topagraphia. This was the point at which I realized I couldn’t count past 64, by the way– almost every map folder in this collection had close to 100 maps in it.

For this shelf-read, there were a few specific tasks we wanted to take care of specifically. First, we counted the maps in each folder; those individual counts were combined into a cumulative total. The shelf-read put into perspective just how many items are in the AGSL’s collections– I counted a couple thousand all by myself! Which was not the highest score. Our cumulative total of maps counted that week was 46, 709. And we’ve only just begun! Then, it was important to make sure that the maps that were in each folder were supposed to be there and in the right order. And we also worked on relabeling folders for ease-of-access for the future. And we stayed on the lookout for interesting maps that hadn’t been scanned yet to add to our digital collection or maps that hadn’t been cataloged officially. To keep spirits bright (because, no matter how necessary, counting map sheets is never going to be anyone’s favorite pastime) we also had a game of Shelf-Read Bingo going all week. I came in second place.

If, when you visit us during the semester, you notice that someone is shelf-reading, know that you’re witnessing a large-scale, on-going project that our whole staff is working on! And maybe let them finish counting– or else they might get stuck at 64 and have to start over.