Finally

Today was a day for the history books.

I officially felt like a librarian. (Finally.)

It wasn't just my awesome new outfit. It wasn't just the cardigan I wore. It wasn't just that I had taken the time to brush my hair.

No, today I felt like a librarian because I weeded the shit out of our audiobook collection.

I have a lot of responsibilities at work, but since I am administration I miss out on some of the very basic elements of public librarianship. I often feel very inadequate about the work I've done so far and quite often confused by concepts I haven't learned yet and have probably bypassed. (And then I remember I haven't even been on the job two months.)

Today I utilized our (awful) library system, ran a report, manipulated it in Excel, printed it off, then weeded our entire adult audiobook collection! I started with the fiction, then the non-fiction, and in between I re-organized our cassettes (don't even get me started) and Great Courses section. I also added shelving units and dusted.

My criteria for weeding was fairly simple (which almost made me doubt myself). I looked at items older than 2008 and that hadn't circulated in a year OR hadn't gone out more than three times in the past two years. If there were double copies I kept the one in best shape and got rid of the beat up one. Now all our shelves have about 25% free space and everything has been shelf-read!

I was shvitzing all over the place, but had such a feeling of accomplishment after. The only thing left for me to do is run some numbers about the size of the collection before and after and put a report in our collection development manual.

I'm a grown-up! I'm a librarian! Hear me roar!