Chuka-chuka (inside joke)

Last week I spent two days in Kedgwick inventorying their library. Inventory usually brings to mind the act of “counting” but this is much more involved, annoying and difficult. It’s more of an analysis, really.

We start out by scanning every item in the library and entering all the barcodes into the computer. Then I generate a report to match all the barcodes with item notices in the catalogue. Usually about four or five things go wrong during this process. Sometimes entire sections have to be scanned again. Luckily we have these nifty chuka-chuka Star Trek tricoder portable scanning devices, so we don’t have to be carting books back and forth to the scanner at the desk. At least that's one step out of about 500 that has been eliminated.

Once the scanning is complete and the first batch of reports is done you realize that two days have gone by and the inventory process isn’t even half over. Back at the regional office I begin the next set of reports that tells me all of the items that, for whatever reason, weren’t scanned. This time around there are 400. FOUR HUNDRED! Somehow that's four hundred books (mostly non-fiction for some mysterious reason) that were missed in our two days of scanning. Yes, sometimes reports lie. That’s why I ran this one several times, in several different ways, and always came up with the same number.

After much tearing out of the hair I decided that it’s going to take a trip back to Kedgwick (1.5 hours in the library-mobile) to pass this hurdle. If I don’t figure out where the 400 books are, and scan them, they will be identified as “missing” when I run the next batch of reports; *shudder* the notorious “Set item to missing" reports.

Ah the life of Technical Services! Some time ago I semi-idolized the Head of Cataloguing and Technical Services woman in the Provincial Office. Now I am realizing that much of her job is running reports, scheduling reports, helping schmucks like me sort out reports that aren’t working, creating new-fangled reports to streamline the collection and basically tearing her hair out all the time, instead of once a week or so, like I do.

On the other hand, I must be some kind of masochist because I get a big geeky thrill out of running a well-oiled report. The report that runs perfectly with all of it's appropriate tags ticked and fields filled makes me leap up and high-five unsuspecting and suprised librarians who are helping me with the inventory (true story). I don't want my readers to get the impression that I dislike my job. It's just that sometimes it's complicated, and really it's the complications that make for interesting posts right? Just like my car. Stay tuned.