You may notice that I've not really been blogging much this week. It's because I've been spending a lot of time working on the church library. We are in the process of reorganizing it. We basically emptied the library and once we had it emptied for a fresh coat of paint and a little new furniture, we started selecting the books we wanted to keep. Several of us have spent most Saturday mornings this year going through the books. We finally made it through the 7000 or so books that were in there by the end of April or first week of May. I've begun the process of cataloging those that we are keeping on our new automation system. We will eventually mount the catalog for searching on the church's web site. I've trained several of the other volunteers in book processing. (Believe it or not, I'm way ahead of them. At my real library job, I struggle to stay ahead of our student workers who do the processing.) This week has been a bit of a challenge. The church's server crashed last week. While most of the offices are back online (and the server was being replaced today), the church library and things on that side of the building are still offline. I've not been able to import books from the Internet so I've been going through books to see which ones we are keeping lack ISBNs which is the field on which all imports are done on this system. I've listed those books with enough information in Excel spreadsheets that I can go home and do authority work and determine subject headings and call numbers for the items. I then take that back to the library so that I can plug away at it the next day in the church library. While I've made some progress this week, I've been able to do probably 25% of what I could have done if the Internet connection had been live. I've been spending the time I would normally spend blogging or synthesizing and inputting information from my recent New England trip trying to make my next day profitable. I got far enough ahead of myself last night that I didn't have to bring "homework" tonight!
So . . . what are we doing with all those books that we aren't keeping? I'm so glad you asked. We're having a book sale, of course! It's this Saturday at First Baptist Church, Morristown, Tennessee. We will be open for church members only in the morning; however, we are open to the public from noon to 3 p.m. All items are 50 cents. Besides books, there are records, audiocassettes, and videocassettes. Most of the books are duplicates or items that don't fit our new collection scope. (We had a lot of classic children's books but our new collection development policy limits what we are collecting to mostly Christian materials.) In other words, we have some good stuff available. The church is located at 504 W. Main. You may enter the book sale from the Jackson Avenue entrance near 1st North.
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