My Domain

In February I will have been overseeing the Grace Village library for 3 years. I started out on the library committee of 5 people in August 2011, then my husband and I were asked 6 months later if we would supervise the library as the person doing that wanted to step down. My husband has decided he doesn’t want to be actively

involved so for the past year it has been mostly me. I have a 92-year-old lady who helps to shelve books and infrequently I ask her 

       to type labels for the new books.

 We are situated at a main passageway that residents pass by often on the way to the dining room or front lobby and mail boxes. The library gets a fair amount of use from the apartment residents and the condo residents. A few assisted-living residents and nursing facility residents have relatives who take books to them or wheel them over to select books. Staff also take books to nursing facility residents who are interested.

The previous librarian had moved some of the non-fiction books into categories with shelf labels ignoring what it said on the spine label. It concerned him that books on prayer, for example, did not sit together on the shelf. This was the result of the Dewey Decimal schedule making a major change at one point, creating a new number for prayer leaving earlier books behind in the old number. This is always a problem in libraries that have existed a long time and do not have the manpower and time to relabel books. Dewey Decimal Classification is not static.

When we first served on the committee, it was decided that a computer listing/inventory program would be helpful. What we ended up with is more than that as we went with LibraryThing. This would not only provided a record of books owned but suggested a Dewey number and provided subject headings often. It had keyword searching which meant one could try to find a book by author, title, subject, series even only knowing a few words of the title for example. Now one could search for the books on prayer and find all of them even though they did not sit next to each other. It was internet-based so one could search it on any computer anywhere with internet access.

Before inputting books into LibraryThing, the committee decided to shelve the non-fiction by the Dewey number again. 4 committee people started adding books to the online system, but that fizzled out, leaving me and my husband. The end is in sight, but it has taken over 3 years of inputting data. Sometime in the first half of 2015 the project will be complete. There are approximately 4000 books in the library. The titles on the Kindle e-readers are also represented in the data base.

The previous librarian had been campaigning to get more room by knocking out a wall and taking over the vacant apartment next to the library. That had been vetoed by the administration.

Fiction section as of January 14th, 2015

 When I became librarian with my husband, the fiction shelves of the library were totally full. To add a book, one had to discard a book. The library committee had done a survey of the residents. The main “want” was for large-print books. There were 3 shelves at the end of the fiction where some large-print books sat. We set about weeding the fiction of duplicates and older books we thought people were not reading. The library is totally dependent on donated books (and more recently funds) so we did not know how fast it would fill up.

 When we received a donation of over 100 large-print fiction books, and the lady who had started donating her large-print Love Inspired books was bringing in 6-8 books a month, we knew there would have to be some changes. We hurriedly finished weeding the fiction, removed the large-print books from the hard-to-access corner next to the wall and behind the typing desk, shifted all of the fiction toward the windows, and then processed the donated books and shelved all of the large-print books next to the door. Several of the people needing large print also had mobility impairments and used canes, walkers, wheelchairs.

Those reading the Love Inspired books asked that they be shelved by date, not by author as the other fiction was. They wanted to be able to locate the new books quickly. We did that and put them near the bottom of the large-print fiction. One day my husband came into the library and found a lady sitting on the floor. She had bent down to get a Love Inspired book and found she could not get back up so sat down. He helped her up; she had not been there long. Because the Love Inspired books were multiplying like rabbits, we had been discussing moving them to the counter space. This incident was an impetus to do that quickly. However, these books continue to grow in number and have taken over the counter and the shelves above which had Reader’s Digest condensed books which nobody seemed to use so we got rid of them.

I would love to discard the older Love Inspired books to make more room, but I find the older ones read as much as the new ones. They are the most-circulated items in the library.

We have made many changes besides trying to keep up with the space crisis. In the photo above, you will see under the counter pull-out drawers full of paperback books. The tight quarters and the fact that the chairs because of arms will not scoot under the table meant that people had to maneuver around open cupboard doors to access these books if they could even remember they existed. By removing the doors, people can get to them more easily and the books are fully visible.

People rarely stayed in the library to read because the wooden chairs were not comfortable. Despite the limited space, we did add 2 armchairs to the library. They were cast-offs from the lobby. They are sat in often, sometimes by people using the library as a meeting point or as a resting spot during the long walk to their apartments or by readers. I would like a smaller table and different chairs around them; that probably isn’t going to happen. The room is used for meetings, was used for a reading group though that has ended, by people with projects or for playing games when the usual game playing spots are busy.

We discovered the library had a wireless connection to the internet that nobody used because nobody thought one was there. We posted that information and the password at the end of the desk; now family and visitors often bring in laptops and tablets.

I posted earlier about the free Telikin computer we received after I applied with Telkin Cares. I wish more people would use it, but maybe when the library “catalog” is done, I can push accessing it on the touch-screen computer more.

The library is my bailiwick. I sort through donations, weed and shift to make space, troubleshoot the computers, answer questions about the resources, continue to create the data base, advocate for more space or equipment (right now compatible printer for Telkin), try to round up money for purchasing books, go to library booksales and Half Price Books to use the limited funds I have to the most purpose, search for free books for the Kindles (which are not really part of the library but I inherited when the activities director retired), monitor supplies, process the new books, update and print the existing list of fiction, and decorate the bulletin board.

 A lot of unanticipated duties so to speak but it is a place for me to serve and to be a good steward. For the most part, I enjoy it and people are very appreciative.