#french library

[porcelainerose]

☆ petits achats

[saunne]

December in Libraries SUCKS (or a quick lesson about what's going on inside your libraries)

And I say that as a librarian that love their job but dear fucking lords above, December sucks. Because besides holidays and Christmas and things, it mostly means : BUDGET ENDS.

So that all of our commissions in charge of buying are trying to empty their enveloppe. And that following the logical course of things....

ALL THE ORDERS ARE COMING AT THE SAME TIME.

So I just finished equipping 37 mangas for the kid's section and 10 comics for the adult section.

I still have 34 mangas for the adult section in the waiting shelf because the commission needs to create and import the general notices under which the "copy" notices will be created.

(To put it simply : One Piece Volume 1 will be a general notice with author, summary and inside this notice, each copy of the "One Piece Volume One" manga existing in the library network will have it's own notice with its barcode and localisation. General Notice is to find thing in the catalog while copy notice is to loan and put on hold a document.)

Anyways, still 34 of those waiting (and 20 additional I didn't count because they are stuck in a notice limbo problem and taken care of by the commission rather than little me).

But then, the end-of-budget orders arrived all at once (and I'm pretty sure there will be at least 2-3 more) and now I have, in addition to those 34 in waiting :

77 mangas, divided into 46 for the adult section and 31 for the kid section

37 comics for the adult section

And to give an idea of what "equipping" means, i.e what I do :

Receive the order

Verify that everything is alright between the purchase order and the delivery note (number of copies, list of titles, price)

Validate the reception in the order software (for the commissions) AND in the traking table (for the managers and finance department)

Slap a barcode on each document. If the commissions already did the general and copy notice, link each document to its own notice (searching the document on our software with its EAN to find the general notice linked to said EAN which gives you the list of the copy notice under said general notice, find the one corresponding to your library and input the barcode in the copy notice to attribute the document to its notice). If no notices yet, directly to the next steps.

Once the barcode is here, you can also smack down the RFID chip and link it to the barcode so when you put the document on the loan machine, it reads the RFID which pull the barcode number which links to the notice which make the machine recogniae what you're trying to loan.

After that, outside equipment means creating the tags/labels. Each tag on a book is basically its adress when you're searching for it in the physical shelves of your library. For non-fiction and documentaries we usually use the Dewey Decimal Classification. Example : a travel guide to Italy will be under 914.5 (900 is History/Geography class, 910-919 is travel, 4 should be Europe (continent) and .5 is Italy iirc my classes date a bit). For comics we use the letter B (comics are bande-dessinées in French) and then either 3 first letter of the author/illustrator if it's a serie or the first letter of the last name of the author/illustrator if it's a one-shot. So you usually have to manually fill label sheets and the style changes depending on the public (white for adult, pink line for toddlers (0-5), purple line for kids (5-12) and green lines for teenagers).

Once all the tags are smacked on their copy, you have two solutions also depending on your collection and type of document. Either you completly cover the book OR you only cover the tag and barcode and you fix the cover jacket so they don't get lose and call it a day.

When that is done, inside equipment : you stamp the first page with the library stamp + report the label (adress) aaaand you also note the month/year it was put into shelves so you can track down it's age for weeding purpose.

And when all that is done, you change the status of your document on the software from "Currently in Equipment" to "Available", sort out the ones that where asked to be put on hold for patrons in hour library (print ticket, put in hold shelf) or another library (put it in transit status and deposit in one of the transit crate going to the library in question).

And you do that. for each document.

And I have a whooping 148 (+20 in limbo) of those on my desk.

If someone ever call librarians lazy again and that we just read all day, I will commit murder and my weapon will be a book.

[onarangel]

French Library “Chez Albertine",New York

That magnificent ceiling

[rickinmar]

when I was a kid my grandmother would take me to the French Library. Now it is the French Cultural Center.

[manleycollins]

Attended the French Library / Alliance Française of Boston and Cambridge Member's Party. I am proud to be a member. In the picture, the Director Barbara Bouquegneau, Allison and her husband Josef, another Barbara aka Barb, and me. @frenchlibrary

[manleycollins]

Attending the French Library Alliance Française Marché de Noël

[abysmalblue]

[reine-sigyn]