Because of an upcoming construction project, a lot of the books in my secondary fieldwork library are going to have to move. One room, that currently houses half the fiction collection, will be used as office space during construction. My supervisor is trying to anticipate this and rearrange things as she can ahead of time.
It is interesting to see how she navigates the political world that is a school. This is a real strength of hers and something I will need to work on. She's good at anticipating how people will react and planning her actions so that negative reactions are minimized. One thing I know from this experience is how valuable it is to run things past another person before you do them. Often, she will think of things about my suggestions that I would not have considered, and I'm sure the reverse is true. In my career, it will be important to find another person, whether it is another TL or another teacher, etc., to be my sounding board.
In the best circumstances, she would be able to wait a year before making any major changes (or at least that's what I was told in 202). However, the construction has kind of forced her hand. The entire fiction section will be moved to space currently occupied by biographies and "supplemental" novels. The good news is that the supplemental novels didn't belong there anyhow, so this is a good excuse to move them with minimal pushback from others. In addition, the need to create more space makes it easier for some people to accept the serious weeding we have been doing. Some people truly do hate to see any book discarded, even if it is outdated and has been sitting uncirculated for 20+ years. I am probably a little too eager to get rid of outdated materials, so it's nice to have another perspective to temper my enthusiasm.
On Wednesday during school we had student aids removing items from one area to prepare for the move that evening. One student found an entire section of books that were infested with termites (blech), so 30 books (the same title, these were supplemental novels) got discarded immediately and the shelves then got emptied and cleaned. While of course bugs in books is never good, it did give us an "excuse" to take everything off those shelves. And of course I'm glad we caught it before more books were infested.
I spent Wednesday after school helping student volunteers rearrange items in the library. We moved the entire fiction collection and a big section of the reference section. While moving the reference section, we realized that a lot of the books in that section actually belong in the nonfiction collection. I will likely spend my day Tuesday and Wednesday weeding reference, with some titles getting discarded and others being moved to nonfiction. Then I'm going to need to spend some time weeding the 800s to make space for all the literary criticism that was, for reasons I do not understand, shelved with reference. I'm 99% sure they were there because of lack of space on the shelves, which is hysterical since so much of the nonfiction collection is seriously 40-50 years old and could be discarded. It will be difficult to get everything finished, but I'm going to try to leave the collection in as good of shape as possible before my fieldwork ends. I'll probably end up a bit "over," but I don't mind. I really feel like I've contributed something at this school that will result in a better (and better organized) collection.
I am NOT looking forward to the reaction of one of the paraprofessionals who likely will not be happy with all the changes. Kind of glad I won't be there when she arrives Tuesday. . .
I was planning to include some "before" shots here, but apparently my iPhone didn't upload them during my last photo import, so I'll have to do that another time.
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