Work is driving me nuts. In order for the students to check out books, I have to write every title on a piece of paper. That is 14 classes, of 15-25 kids each. In other words, a lot of books. Doing this takes a good bit of time. During this time, the kids have too much "social" time. This is not a good thing, but what can I do? I can't have them writing everything down themselves. Most of them can't or won't do it correctly and that will take even longer.
I can't look up a book. "Do you have any ghost stories?" I don't know. "Where are the math books?" I thought we had one, but is it checked out? Actually, I have exactly the one you asked for, but it is in a box in my office because I can't enter the data into the computer and I don't want the book checked out without the data entered.
The IT people come once a month. Last week the guy spent 30 minutes (not all day as one admin claimed) trying to remove the crashed hard drive from the computer so it could be shipped to a place that will try to recover the data. He couldn't get it out because he needed some tool. So the computer sits in the library, useless. My new computer with new updated hardware sits next to it, also useless. I will have to wait until November now just to have the hard drive removed for mailing. I am ready to drive the computer to its destination myself. I have over 1000 books to process. I need to work on the collection, weed the unwanted, order new, get the library to a place where it can be used by the middle schoolers. It is an impossible task because the existing catalog is on the computer which crashed. I am at a stand still. I can teach, sort of, but I am not as effective because I don't know what we have in the library. So, that said, I was in the office today and said "I need to come up with a better way to do this- the kids are having too much wasted time while I check out books and I don't like it". Mrs. X said "You need to take care of that. When I was a girl, there were cards in the backs of the books and we'd fill out the card, blah blah blah". Well, yeah, instead of fixing the problem and utilizing the expensive new system I have already, let me spend time creating forking cards for every book. Maybe while I am at it I can recreate the paper card catalog, too. And most of the books don't even have that archaic card and envelope set up anymore. There are these fancy little thingers called bar codes. That is it, nothing more, in the back of the book. Here's a thought, why don't we get more proactive about fixing what is broken instead of creating a new system????????! I seriously felt like quitting today, dang it. I need to get volunteers in the library, but I don't want to get hem in there not knowing what to do. I guess that really is the best way, though. Get volunteers in there and let them see first hand how difficult it is. Maybe then I can get a volunteer to write everything down so I can manage crowd and help the kids find what they need. I swear, if the computer used to track who has paid tuition went up, it would get fixed PRONTO.
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