Daily Thoughts 5/14/2009

Jack London The Sea Wolf

Daily Thoughts 5/14/2009

Part of this morning was spent shifting books in the 700s, specifically the art books. I still have quite a bit of shifting to do. I also did some roaming reference where I am assigned to seek people out on the floor who are looking for answers. I also weeded some fiction titles with very low circulation. There were a few other miscellaneous tasks to complete throughout the day, starting to file some looseleafs for the law collection.

This afternoon, I spent some time talking to our representative about large print books. We need them to provide us with more African American titles as well as more of the New York Times Bestsellers in large print. I sent them some lists of suggested authors to see if they could customize the standing order to better meet our needs.

Tomorrow, I think I am going to go in the technical service area and check to see if we can order new copies of some books instead of sending them to the bindery. There are quite a few titles that need to be rebound. New copies may be cheaper than rebinding in some cases.

There are a couple of new benches in front of the new books area. They add a nice touch to the area.

Web Bits

Amazon is selling ebooks as a loss leader on Kindle. http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/13/amazon-losing-money-on-999-e-books/

A few profiles on independent bookstores in New York from the Bookweb blog. http://ibnyc.wordpress.com/category/indiebound-spotlights/

Daily Thoughts

Statue of Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) at the entrance staircase of the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Sculpted in Italian white marble by José Alcoverro y Amorós (1835–1910) in 1892.

Daily Thoughts

Today was another steady day. I put together a list of family oriented films which we might show on Sunday afternoons. A lot of them are cartoons, Shrek, The Incredibles, classic Popeye cartoons, or musicals The Wizard of OZ, High School The Musical, and Annie. Now that I have a short list, I am supposed to meet in committee to select what we are going to show. I have volunteers for the first three committee members.

I also spent some time filing looseleafs for the New York Code of Rules and Regulations and Bender's Forms for the Civil Practice.

This is the first day in a while where I have not done any specific weeding. I selected some books to be sent to the bindery, mostly older material that was in the storage area. Also, I reviewed a few older titles for discard. Some of them were classic works by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I decided these had literary merit and were worth keeping. I also kept some of Ian Fleming's early James Bond novels.

I finisehd reading Building Hope Leadership In The Nonprofit World by John Bateson. It was a very interesting book about running a busy crisis center for preventing suicide. The book was a combination of a memoir and a management guide for nonprofits. I will be writing a review of it soon.

Immediately after finishing Building Hope, I started reading How To Manage An Effective Nonprofit Organization by Michael A. Sand. I am trying to get a better understanding of the process of management in the nonprofit versus the for profit world. Hopefully this will give me a better sense of what is happening at my job.