- By Lyle H. Wadell
- Around Town
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JuneIt isn’t what you might think. Every Tuesday a group of women meet at the Lansing Library and prepare books for shelving. All items on the library shelves are the result of a purchase or donation. Holly selects the books we are going to buy. She also goes through all the donations deciding which ones have potential for our shelves and the rest are boxed and held for our once a year book sale.June and Nancy complete the first step in the processing of books for our shelves. June is seen here getting ready to fill out a form for the new Janet Evanovich book. Nancy was helping at the Friends book sale on this day. They fill out forms for each book recording author, title, publisher, cost, book type, etc.
SusanSusan uses this form to enter information into a computer program to generate labels for the book cards, labels for the book-card-jacket, and spine labels. The same form is passed on to Barbara who enters the information into another computer program generating an update disk that will be used to update our master catalog database. Barbara works at home and was unavailable for a photo.
HollieOnce the labels are prepared Holly applies the labels to the book, book-card-jacket, and spine. The book-card-jacket is placed in the book and the book is placed on a cart for the next stage of processing. Connie and Dorothea cover all books before they are placed on the shelves for circulation. Soft cover books are laminated and hard cover books are covered with a plastic cover.
 Connie |  Dorothea |
Videos, DVDs and audio books follow a similar series of steps in preparation for shelving. Special verification steps are taken at several points in the processing to ensure that the information on the labels and in the database is correct.
At this point special colored labels are placed on some books to help identify the section of the library where they are to be shelved. Books with a 2005 copyright will have a “NEW” sticker placed on the spine to help patrons locate the latest releases as they are added to our shelves. The books are then taken upstairs and placed on the shelves ready for the patrons to check out. On an average it takes 30 minutes of volunteer labor to put each book on a shelf in the Lansing Library. We have almost 12,000 items on our shelves. This is possible thanks to our ladies’ day at the Lansing Library.
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