Seeing the Finish Line

I apologize for not posting last week. I completely forgot and then didn't realize I forgot until today! I think this speaks for how busy I am this semester. I titled this entry seeing the finish line because I am finally seeing the end of the cataloging portion of this practicum project and I am seeing my graduation date just around the corner as well!

D. The past two weeks have again been spent mostly cataloging. I have officially finished all of the books and videos at the Child Developmental Services office and now only have the brochures at the CDSA and the remaining resources at the Family Support Network office in Huntersville. Also I was informed this week that there are two more filing drawers full of brochures to sort through as well. As I look at the resources I am not weeding out books or videos that are too old, because I feel that that would not be a good judgement call for me to make, however I am making decisions about the brochures, which is often harder because many lack publication dates so it is hard to tell if they are current or now. Many of the older brochures (especially the ones with newer versions) I have permission to toss. By the end of next week hopefully I will have all the cataloging done and a very large pile to take to be recycled.

This week I also had a meeting with my site supervisors about the physical space of the resource room. Although my supervisors want to create a larger resource area by appropriating part of the lobby space the county has nixed that idea and the library will be housed in its current location which is a room about 10ft by 10ft. I told my supervisors that I would need at least an additional bookshelf (bringing the total to 4) some bookends and shelf labels to complete a bared-bones library set up. They already moved in the extra bookshelf and bought the bookends, however I still need to look up a company to buy shelf labels from.

E. Overall these past two weeks have been very much "business as usual." I spend much of my actual hours cataloging materials, which I will admit can get boring after doing it for 3 hours straight. I am looking forward to being done with the cataloging and moving on to the organizing and creating the instruction manual. I am a little worried about being done by the end of April. I know Dr. Bird said just to do my best, and that giving FSN a list of their materials was better than nothing, but I am not good at leaving projects half finished so I hope to work my butt off to get this all done in the next month.

AL. It is hard to say what I learned these past couple of weeks. I am still learning just how long it takes to catalog things. And I am learning that a lot of good information is missing a lot of metadata about it. For example I found a video today called "Today's Child" And that was it. No other information on the label. I don't have a VHS player to even play it to see what it is, and I don't think I have time to watch it either. So I just cataloged it with the title. But this experience is making me want to label all of my resources at home a lot better. It is making me thankful that my husband created a great labeling system for our pictures and files that we have stored on our computers so I have a lot of metadata about each picture, just by its location and file name.