Organization Monkey

hidden treasure found in LMU library

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

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!"

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periodicals in a box

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

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

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i’m a paperless traveler

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

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.

Posted in organization tips, organizational tools | 1 Comment

A: 120,000

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

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.)

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Data.gov launches

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

The purpose of Data.gov is “to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.”

Point 7 of the Data Policy is laudable:

Public Participation
In support of the Transparency and Open Government Initiative, recommendations from individuals, groups and organizations regarding the presentation of data, data types, and metadata will contribute to the evolution of Data.gov.

Go check out the searchable catalog of datasets to see if it’s a useful resource to you!

Posted in gov't relations, metadata, OA | Comments Off

oh, nothin’ much, what’ve you been up to?

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Marie Kennedy

taping project

the project of identifying 150,000 books that will be moving to the basement of our new library has been completed. we put green tape on the spines of books that were deemed “low use” items. when the movers come they’ll pull the green taped books to go to the basement (to be a paged collection) and the rest of the books will go up to the browsable book stacks.

this is what the book stacks look like now, with the tape on the spines.

this is what the book stacks look like now, with the green tape on the spines.