Thomas' Work Space

AKA books, shiny disks, VHS and – oh my! – cassette tapes. All come with shelves. Yuck! Where is Google Books, when you need it?

The media library I had to work with had, as I found it, a content specific labeling system and a language specific sort order on the shelves. This seems an anti-pattern in many modern languages departments: try to avoid complexity by isolating yourself. 1st degree: each language program on its own; 2nd degree: each instructor on his/her own. Atomization leads to idiosyncrasies and duplication of efforts (which must result in lowering of standards, despite, no doubt, individual toiling).

Trying to find an easy answer for complexity: I am afraid I quickly had to throw overboard the suggestion to implement the Library of Congress labeling scheme. I also abandoned trying to represent in one physical order what has to be viewed under multiple perspectives. I introduced a unique id labeling scheme based on a a simple numerical counter, where each new item would be added to the end of the stacks with a label equaling max(counter) + 1, and as a new row at the bottom of an Excel spreadsheet, which supported all discovery and lending with sort, filter, search.

And here is a partial screenshot of the offline_resources.xls:

Way too much complexity still remained: too many fields, all types of resources had to be coerced into records of the same format (hand-coded an access database for records to avoid this requirement – don’t go there!). Should have relied more on full text search, even with the simple regular expressions that come with Excel.

However, the sheet was open all day on the lab assistant’s computer behind the reference desk and worked pretty well, or was at least a major improvement. Remaining issues: speed of spreadsheet (too many complex ISBN validating formulas), lab staff training, more so instructor training (if they did not want to rely on lab staff entirely or on trying to browse the physical stacks looking for a physical order where there was no such system any more: change management problems).