Organization Monkey

Monkey Kick Off Kick the ball as far as you can!

Play this free game now!!

(link to the game on the miniclip site: http://www.miniclip.com/games/monkey-kick-off/en/) thanks for pointing me to the good stuff, neatorama!

if you’ve ever moved a household with a professional moving company you’ve been swept into a very specific organizational scheme.  it’s the job of the professional mover to keep track of your inventory as well as relocating objects from your old house to your new house.  the mover tracks objects with numbered, colored stickers as well as maps.  it’s your job to tell the movers where you want the objects to go, and they make notations to put them in the correct place.  i don’t know why this surprised me, but it works the same with library movers.

inserted here is a picture of a periodical box with the american anthropologist inside.  see the sticker on the box?  that’s both an inventory sticker as well as a locating sticker.  it’s purple, which means it is going to the second floor of the new library.  all the items going to the second floor are marked with purple stickers.  the number on the sticker means it goes in a particular place on the second floor, on a specific shelf even.

periodical marked with inventory sticker

when this periodical is brought over to the new library it will be placed on a shelf in a space reserved for it.  inserted here is a picture to show you where inventory item #5146 is to be placed.

the row where item #5146 will be placed

we figured out where specifically we wanted this periodical to go on the new shelf by making a shelf list prior to the move.  inserted here is a mockup of what the shelf will look like, title by title.  the blue titles mean that the spines of the periodicals will be laid in a different position, for spacing purposes.

shelf list

i’ll post a picture of the periodical, american anthropologist, in its new home once the move takes place.

there was a loose shelf at the bottom of a range of bookshelves in the periodicals area of the lmu library.  i instructed my student worker not to put any periodicals on it since it didn’t quite seem sturdy.  he took it upon himself to see if he could fix it.  this was the problem: someone had tucked away a little treasure for us to find and the box was keeping the shelf from sitting flush.  here’s what the student worker found.

Altoids box! Here's the lid

"Congratulations you found me"

"(June 26, 1999) Now put me to good use and Luck will be rewarded to you!"

over the last few months the serials team has been laboriously boxing up the loose issues of journals from our suprisingly large backlog.  instead of binding old issues of journals the lmu library boxes them for storage. all of the old journal volumes are in a paged collection, so having them inside boxes doesn’t hinder browsing. with the amount of dust that we create in the library, boxing the volumes is a pretty good preservation technique as well.  also -and this was probably the driving force for the decision- boxing a volume of a periodical is much cheaper than binding.  a single box can be around $4, compared to a single bound volume at around $11.

we just got a shipment of boxes the other day. i thought you might like to see what a box of boxes looks like. inside those giant boxes are 20 standard letter sized hollinger document boxes or 40 slim letter sized document boxes. we get ours from hollinger metal edge. this last shipment was for 1000 standard and 300 slim boxes.  that’s a lot of giant boxes showing up on our loading dock, but meghan (on the left) and molly (on the right) make moving them all upstairs to the second floor look like fun.

Meghan, Molly, and the Hollinger boxes

read how to travel without paper printouts of hotel confirmations, maps, or driving directions by reading my “paperless traveler” profile on the evernote blog.  they even included a picture of me with the profile!  the write-up includes instructions on how i used evernote, my iphone and dell mini on a recent driving trip from l.a. to napa.

Q: How many loose journal issues have you moved over the last couple months?

We have about 2000 journal subscriptions in our library.  Let’s say that one of our average journals comes twelve times a year.  That’s 24,000 loose issues that we check in, theft strip, label and shelve EVERY YEAR.  Ideally, that’s the number of loose issues we would box for storage in one year also, removing the older issues from the shelves as the newer ones are received.

Removing the older issues of journals hasn’t happened in our library for a number of years so we are dealing with pulling those issues now, to be boxed and ready for the move to the new library.  On our shelves was about five years of old issues mixed in with the current journals.  That means we’ve pulled about 120,000 loose issues from the shelves recently, leaving behind only the current year.  We have many, many shelves of loose issues as a result.  Here’s what they look like, ready to be boxed:

(please send chocolate. we are all tired of looking at journals.)