Wednesday, October 14, 2009

New Adventures in Shelf Reading

A week or two ago, we decided to volunteer at our local library. Give something back by putting our spare time to good use. (Plus it gets us off the couch and away from the TV every once in awhile). Truth be told, Marcy came up with the idea and I thought it sounded fun.

Fun? Yes. I worked in a library for a few months in college, so putting books in order kinda takes me back.

When we initially inquired about volunteering, a woman at the information desk became ecstatic and assured us that our services would be most welcome. However, on our first day on the job we learned that our library has quite a few helpers and apparently most of them have shelving pretty well covered. We may not get to push a book cart anytime soon, but we'll have our hands full with shelf reading.

It seems there's a good deal of improper shelving going on! I think most of it happens when patrons innocently return a book to the wrong place, but I'm not ruling out mistakes on the part of fellow volunteers. At times, I wonder if others are using the same alphabet... I'm also pretty sure several books have been misclassified, but before I go making accusations I'd probably better brush up on the ol' Dewey Decimal system. (I became more familiar with Library of Congress classification in my college days).

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