Oooh I forgot all about the book fairs when I was a kid - I'm surprised they still have them. I used to be such a little nerd for books. :0)

Our blizzard is actual snow... it was interesting getting around town today.

All this Blizzard talk, now I'm craving for a Dairy Queen Blizzard and it's nearly 2 in the morning and the closest DQ is one hour away! ;)

My turn for a book fair, Marcia. At least we don't have a blizzard, just wind. Tomorrow night's our parent-teacher interviews, so we work late. I always look forward to book fair, but I'm always glad when it's done.
Connie

My next one is at the end of this month. The theme of this one is the Scholastic birthday thing - can't blame it for any blizzards then! LOL Usually i have my second fair in May but it's hard to schedule an evening event then because there's not always something going on. This year i'm getting it over with early. :)

Do you get the cases? They won't send them this far into Ontario so mine is set up on the library tables. At least they send those attractive tablecloths now! LOL

I'm always glad when it's over too.

We do get the cases, but we also got lots of boxes - tons of stuff. Our tablecloths are purple this time - festive, eh - plus one black one (don't ask me why). We had some yellow one's we'd saved, so the tables are very Easterish. (Is that a word?) We used all our tables, and stacked the chairs, so kids have to sit on the floor. That's okay - unless they're doing school work, they prefer that anyhow. There are also 25 different posters. Now you know what you have to look forward to.
Connie

How large is your school, Connie? Ours is only 140 kids. I'm sure we won't get 25 posters! They haven't been selling really well lately, but if there are fancy car ones, those usually go fast.

I have both purple and yellow tablecloths saved and i'm hoping there'll be enough of the same colours to cover all the tables. I'm lousy at decorating, so the tablecloths help.

How did you do, anyway? Big sales?

We have about 550 kids, K-12, about 300 of them in K-6. It's been one of our best book fairs in a while - over $1500 in sales so far. We had a Panorama one in November, and barely sold $500.00. I've pretty much decided we're going to go with just a spring fair from now on. Scholastic is just too hard for us to book for the fall, because we never know the exact date of interviews far enough in advance. Then when I go to try and adjust bookfair dates, they tell me no go - and I have no bookfair. Joan, my library partner, and I, figure we've put on close to 40 bookfairs over the years, and they've become more chore than fun. It's 9:00 PM and I'm sitting here at work waiting to see if I get a few more customers before I head for home.
Connie

There have been times when we've had about $1200 in sales in our little school - pretty good, eh? Doesn't always happen, though we usually break $1000. People are really supportive. A lot of my library consists of books that i've gotten through Book Fairs and the Book Club orders.

Can you not schedule a tentative date for the fall Fair, i.e. "around the end of November"? Sometimes i haven't had a specific date but just said that and they've gone with it. Maybe it doesn't work for you because it's a case fair.

I've never stayed that late - i think 8:00 was the latest. But i get time in lieu of that so it's nice at a later date. And i totally agree about it being more chore than fun, but it's now expected of us.

Well, book fair is done. $2400 in sales, so that's one of our best ever. $1200 for your little school is pretty amazing. A big chunk of our books for the younger readers have come from book fairs. I'm glad it's done, one more thing off the list for this year. Now we just have to process and catalogue all those books we got.
Connie

That's the fun part, Connie! I love new books! What system do you use for cataloguing? We have L4U. It's a lot better than the old Librarian's Helper that we used to use, but boy do i have issues with it anyway!! I guess i'm not as patient with it as i should be. :)

We use something called Insignia, from out of Edmonton. It's okay - fairly reliable, but there are some things I would like to do that it won't let me do, like tidy up my subject headings. We used to use a program called LIRS, (Library Information Retrieval System) which somehow managed to build its own errors into the system. It was a major headache, but we went with what the other schools in our system were using. We have hopes that someday we'll be linked in a wide-area network, and the librarians can borrow from other schools more easily. I'll tell you one thing - I sure don't miss filing catalogue cards that I typed on a non-correcting typewriter, which is where I started.

Connie

Oh yes, that's where i started too, many moons ago. Filing was NOT one of my favourite jobs!

In L4U, i just learned a way to merge your subject headings, or series headings and authors. You know, when you import your cataloguing data, some of it comes differently from different sources and you end up with "Munsch, Robert", "Munsch, Robert N." or "Munsch, Robert, 19whatever-" - you know? You can go into to each authority file, select the things that should be the same and merge them into just one. That's what i've been working on in the past few weeks, when i get a chance. Subjects are next - should be fun since some things get imported from Amazon and they have their own set of subject headings!

The libraries in our area trade back and forth all the time. We have couriers that go from school to school so we can send books to other schools with them. I set up each school as a separate client and sign the books out to them.

Working in a library is so different from when i first started in 1973. The course that i took i so obsolete it isn't funny! LOL

As near as I can tell on this program, I can change authors, subject headings, and series, which means I can merge, but I'd really like to delete some of our old headings, like the ones we put in so teachers can find all the books in a certain reading program. So far the only course they've offered us locally is introduction to the basics, and after using this program for 2 years we're pretty much past that. I'll have to play with the changing and merging, and maybe I can tidy things up a bit. Maybe I can change unwanted subject headings to a blank?
We have the couriers going between schools, but the only way to find a book you want is to start phoning from school to school, which takes a fair bit of time, something we never have enough of. Things were looking good, we were getting caught up, and then we had a book fair & got in a big order of books - you know how that goes. We never import our records because we usually end up changing a few things on each file, and it's gotten so we're faster at just entering our own stuff, and having it match the first time. We completely ripped apart the non-fiction sections this year and got everything consistent from one end to the other, and wrote a lot of notes in our Abridged DDC 14. Now we're up to date for once - we were 2 editions behind.
I started in the library in 1985, and things have really changed since then too - an awful lot in the research end of things with the older kids since the school went to high-speed internet.
Connie

I work at our local public library, we're still using the old card catalogue system, according to our librarian (who is new) we'll hopefully be going automated within a year. Right now her and the assistant librarian are weeding all the books. Then, I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to pull the cards from the card catalogue. Just to give you an idea as to the age of some of our books (this has never been done since the library opened), one set of cards that I pulled was for a book called "How to Buy Your First Computer, Copyright 1983". There were lots of books that were 30 years old that were donations from other libraries. Who needs their junk?

Syreeta

Syreeta, since you're the "lucky" person who gets to pull the cards, make sure you're also the lucky person who gets to "file" all the cards when automation is done. That's FUN, and it feels really really good. When I moved to this school 17 years ago, one of the first things we did was a big weeding. We saved a couple of prime examples, that hadn't been checked out in over 25 years. Throwing out about 1/3 of the library horrified the principal and teachers, and we got a nice increase the the library budget because our shelves were so empty. But who needs shelves full of stuff nobody ever reads? All it does is make the good stuff hard to find.
Connie

That is exactly why we are doing this big weed. There is so much old and damaged 'junk' in our library that you can't find the new good stuff. Some sections are completely gone, others there is only a couple of books left. What we are going to do is have a big book sale when this is all done. I've picked up a few things that I wanted that were going to the dumpster or the book sale. One was a copy of 'Merks', a veterinary book, the other is a book about gardening by Des Kennedy. I think it is "Ecology of Enchantment", it's downstairs and I don't feel like getting up right now. It was a good read anyway.

Syreeta

I've done major weedings at all the schools i've worked at, and it's amazing what's on the shelves! My favourite is one called something like "The World of the Future" which has a good description of what a fax machine would be like. You'd write your letter on special paper and put it in a special envelope and bring it to the post office. There they'd put it into the fax machine, which would take it out of the envelope and send it to a fax machine at the post office at the other end. That machine would put your letter into an evelope and the post office would deliver it to the recipient!

Several years ago, i had weeded so much that people commented on how empty the shelves were, but i knew that somewhere down the line we'd be getting the books from another school that was going to close. That happened a couple of years ago and now my shelves are full again.

One of the difficult parts of automation was sending all those catalogue cards away to the automation company. Thirty years of work getting put into the mail! Ack!! I really sweated over the first batch that went, but it got easier after that. Another thing that happened was that three schools in Dryden closed and merged into one brand new one. I was working in one of the schools that closed and we - the three library techs - had to coordinate our cataloguing so that the cards would all match well enough and be easier to be put into the automated programme. I never realized how absolutely anal i could be about some things and there were a lot of emails flying back and forth about how things should be done! LOL Some things i refused to change! Awful, eh? Fortunately the three of us are still friends. We set up the new library too and had to put the barcodes on all the books. It was quite the job, especially as the new school was still under construction and we had to wear hardhats into and out of the school and if we went anywhere else in the school - like to find which washroom was functional that particular day. And no electricity for quite a few weeks too! What an adventure!

Connie, we have links to all the school libraries on the Board's website, so we can see who has a book that we want. And we just email back and forth - "A teacher needs x number of copies of such-and-such book. Anyone have it?" I'd tell you to check my library out but my public catalogue has been down for several days - i screwed something up doing an update and the tech hasn't been able to come out and fix it. :D

Syreeta, we've always had give-aways after a major weeding. Kids love free books - books they'd never take off the shelves otherwise! LOL

Our teachers generally get to pick through our discards, and there isn't much left by the time they're done. This time around, a lot of our old non-fiction went to a new Hutterite colony school just out of town. The teacher there is married to one of our teachers, so she had an inside track.
Connie

Just wanted to let you know that we made $1489 at the Book Fair, so the profit was over $800 - wow! :)

And yes, i'm glad it's over!

Sounds like a great book fair! There never seems to be enough money or enough books when you're a librarian. It's kind of like being a gardener.
Connie

You're absolutely right - i do need someone to give me a plant budget (someone besides myself, i mean! LOL).