OPEN SEZ-ME: Inventory For Dummies

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Inventory.  You have stuff.  You make sure it’s still there.  If the item is encased in something–like, say, a DVD–you open the case to make sure the DVD is still there.  Logical, sensible, and necessary.

But not for everyone, as it turns out.  But at least they tell on themselves.

I’m doing DVD & CD inventory with one of my lending library clerks, ostensibly to help him but primarily to keep a quality check on the process, as last year things got muddled and the DVDs/CDs had to be re-counted.

Today I find out why.

We have several multi-disk books-on-CD.  As the clerk watched me open the case to one of these & count individual disks he says:

“Oh!  There’s what I didn’t do last year!”

DVD case“What’s that?”

“Open the case! I was just counting the cases.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“No!  I’m not!  That’s what I did wrong.  I wasn’t thinking about what was inside them, I just counted the case and moved on.”

“Without checking to see if the CD was there?  In other words, without actually inventorying the case?”

“It just didn’t occur to me, until I saw you do it.”

“No wonder they had to be re-counted.”

“Sorry.”

You can’t even get mad at this stuff, and that’s hard for me, because it’s in my nature.  But we got a good count, solved the problem for posterity and, as the clerk observed, moved on.

BTW — We have 131 DVDs, 13 Blu-Ray, and 187 CDs.

VHSAnd over 650 VHS tapes.  Ugh.  But they are in constant use, because of the prison’s gargantuan video system.  Each month we feed about 22 of these into the gaping maw of a VCP, and it does its thing for 30 days.

long-johnsBecause many of these players have no repeat programming, the inmate responsible for keeping this system running has to insert the tape, push PLAY, then strap a piece of elastic–from an old pair of long-johns–around the tape slot.  When the tape plays to the end & tries to eject, it hits the elastic & returns to the machine, to be played again.  And again.  And again.  Or, as the Brits say– ah-GAIN.

“All’s well that ends” OR, Pith from a naïve genius

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Months ago, I was tempted to mention my attendance of the upcoming Correctional Educational Association’s Region I conference May 27-29 in Mystic, Conneck-Tea-Kit.  I did not give into that temptation, because of certain correctional truisms, one of them being “Don’t Believe It ‘Til You See It.”  But this week I was informed by Fiscal that, I will in fact be there, and this courtesy of the “Skill-Building Techniques for Stress Reduction” grant, now in its final Year 2 death-throes.

This conference idea, BTW, was suggested two years ago by Shelley Quezada, uber-Librarian and Consultant to the Underserved on the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. Shelley attends as many of our DOC librarian’s meetings as she can fit into her busy globe-trotting schedule.

Board of library commissionersShe also is my liaison for this grant and, in many ways, has mentored me throughout this crazyquilt career. She knows I don’t attend conferences and suggested that a good use for some of this grant money would be to get me out & about. So muchas gracias, mi buena amiga.

Everyone in our Dept. approval path was enormously helpful in getting me there, and when that happens I have learned to count my blessings & wing a prayer of thanksgiving heavenward.

It doesn’t always work out, this bureaucracy business.  Even when it does, sometimes it does so at a cost of so many compromises that it seems pointless to have requested anything in the first place. But corrections has helped me practice gratitude, and patience.  I figure another 200 years and I’ll have it down.

CEA logoI plan to participate in several workshops, including:

  • “Teaching in Corrections as an Adjunct Professor”
  • “Social Climate: What it Is and Why It Matters for the Incarcerated”
  • “Disleksia: The Movie”
  • “Changin’ Your Game Plan: How to Use Your Incarceration as a Steppingstone for Success,” and
  • “Embracing Change in Adult Learning”

There will also be a tour of York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only female correctional facility. york

I think I’m looking forward most to that.  It’s interesting, seeing how other States respond to the programming needs of inmates and the security concerns of the institution.  I hope we visit their Library. I want to see how it measures up.

Mystic is kinda close to Niantic, a sleepy harbor that contains within its town limits one of the most jaw-dropping used bookstore empires on the East Coast, the increasingly inaccurately-named Book Barn.

book barnWhat started out as books in a barn has grown throughout the village–almost cancerous-like–into four separate locations, and all within a span of 1.5 measly miles.  One of my favorite places to be and, since the conference is in late May, it should be one of the few times when I get to visit the place in fair weather.

Take a look at their RealityTV Pilot.

“Oops!” Or, FAIL, FAIL AGAIN

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Well, he gets an “A” for sheer inventiveness. He should also get a hearing aid. Either that, or he willfully with malice aforethought ignored my directive to put all books in correct order BEFORE matching the cards to them.

A certain clerk is inventorying the trade fiction wall. Or so I think.

At the end of the day, it’s clear that something’s wrong with the cards in the trade fiction drawer. But he’s gone for the day, so the rest of us have to solve the mystery.
Drawer-Card
My cataloger finally figures it out. “Look at the order the books are in,” he says, pointing to the shelves. We look. The books are NOT in order. The cataloger then says “NOW, look at the order these cards are in!”

Another clerk understands & says “Oh. My. God.”

What happened was, he started inventorying, noticed that the books were in a different order than the cards, believed that the cards were messed up, and matched the card order to the incorrect book order of the shelves.

Solomon the Wise claimed–insisted, actually–that there’s nothing new under the sun. I don’t agree. This beats all six ways to Sunday.
Never-seen-anything-like-it

We wondered why he was stuck on that drawer for over an hour.  That kind of ingenious incompetence takes time.

STYMIED, STULTIFIED, & STUPEFIED: Or, “What’s ‘alpha-numerical’ mean?”

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As a library scientist, occasionally you take for granted a bedrock library science principle. Usually, to your detriment. Well, it can’t be helped.

Today, during inventory, an otherwise bright young man asks me the best approach to our 700-plus collection of Self-help books. “Well, the shelf list drawer for this material’s already in order. All that’s left is to put all the shelves in correct alpha-numerical order, and then match up the cards to the books.”

assume1

And the bright young man–who’s currently pursuing an undergraduate degree–asks: “And ‘alpha-numerical order would be–what, exactly?”

My fault. Of course it is! Assuming & presuming gets you results like this. It’s no way to run a railroad. I apologize to the youngster & define the term, to which he says “Oh! Of course! That was stupid!” I let him know that it was my stupidity of failing to cover basic terminology before inventory began that caused his confusion.

As we can see, even in correctional library management, ASS-U-ME applies.

Sometimes you CAN tell a book by it’s cover

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Our resident bookbinder–or, as he prefers to be called, “bibliopegist”–decides during this years’ inventory to venture forth from the comfort zone and try his hand at matching shelf list cards to book collections. Wearied of me belittling his lack of knowledge of what a spine label is for, especially after he covers a dust jacket with Mylar & doesn’t know how to tell where in the Library it goes, he’s determined to find out how the other half lives.

home_anim_3

Today he’s partnered with a clerk who’s handled the Dewey Wall for years, so he’s in very good hands. They’re doing Literature which, in our collection, is assigned a generic “800” followed by the first three letters of the author’s last name. It’s a bookstore arrangement, but it’s appreciated by the inmates who are actually trying to find a book by, say, Shakespeare but may not know that his country of origin was England. Speaking of Shakespeare, our resident bibliopegist reaches the “S”s on the wall, and cannot seem to locate any of the cards for the Bard.

So all the paperbacks are pulled from the shelf & placed on the No Card table.

A little while later, I pass by, see these books, and say “What the hell? We’ve had these books for a decade. No way these cards are missing.” Further investigation turns up the answer: the bibliopegist, instead of looking for Othello or The Taming of the Shrew instead was looking for “Shakespeare,” in other words, for the Author Card. Since there were no Author Cards reading ‘Shakespeare.’ the bibliopegist naturally presumed that the cards for his books were missing.

shakespeare

Before coming to prison, the bibliopegist was a mechanic. That explains some of it. My cataloger, in addition, made truck deliveries for his living. He can’t spell his way out of a paper bag.

I find it difficult locating ‘book people’ to work in the Library. Come to think of it, it’s hard to find ‘book people’ working in many book stores.

OUT OF THE MOUTH OF CONS: Or, “That’s what Chi said”

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First inventories can be rough.

We have a clerk whose unenviable job it is to keep the Vietnamese- & Chinese-language books in perfect sequence. A tall order, since he is Cambodian. They call him Chi, as in Tai-chi. This is Chi’s first inventory, may God have mercy upon his soul.

One of the stats we keep is book format–hardcover, trade paper, and mass market. Now, some of the paperbacks can be confusing, having either a reinforced cover c/o Brodart, or a Permabound cover. If it’s your first inventory, stuff like this can be tricky.  Not to mention funny.

Soon after Chi diligently begins separating his assigned collection, he discovers one of the reinforced paperbacks, and confusion sets in. So, like any good library clerk, he turns to a fellow clerk and asks a question for clarification. Had this moment had a rewind button attached, he would have pressed it & hastily re-worded the question. As it was, he could do naught but suffer the ensuing slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Holding aloft the puzzling tome, he asks:

“How do you tell when it’s hard?”

Poor Chi. He will never be on the earth long enough to come CLOSE to living this down.  First inventories can be rough.

Counting Them Beans: Or, “Can we PLEASE toss these cassettes out?”

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Today we start inventory. Because Monday was a Massachusetts holiday called “Patriot’s Day, we get beat out of a day. Poor planning by Yours Truly. At least SOME planning was involved.

We use no portable scanners. Kooky, right? Instead, we take our shelf list drawers to each section of the library, the old-fashioned way. Well, it keeps them off the street. It’s the one time in the year when your staff comes together as a team. It’s an interesting dynamic, seeing inmates from different departments (e.g., bookbinding and cataloging) working toward a common goal. It’s not perfect–what human endeavor is?–and sometimes opinions as to how something should be done leads to flaring tempers. We are, after all, talking about cranky old men here.

But by weeks’ end, the beans’ll be counted accurately, diligently, and relatively peaceably. I’ve never lost an inmate in an inventory to death or dismemberment. I’ve never even had anyone quit. These are good things.

inventory-barcode

After bean-counting, I have 30 days in which to submit the inventory report. This report usually constitutes 30 pages, half of which comprise statistics from the population law library. Although we don’t need to tally books which have been replaced by the Lexis system, we still need to account for physical equipment, hundreds of legal forms, and what seems on certain days like millions upon millions of regulations, policies, and procedures.

Once more, into the breach….

WHAT WOULD DEWEY DO?

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Life’s little ironies: you never know when another one’ll spring up to fuddle, astonish, perplex, or annoy.

At present, we organize our Poetry, Drama, & Literature under the generic number ‘800.’ What separates the stuff is genre labels. It’s a book store arrangement, of sorts. But it beats holy hell out of the strict & kinda bizarre Dewey classification of all authors under country of origin. These days, many inmates cannot tell you Shakespeare’s country of origin. I say this because recently I quizzed several dozen men to see what the response would be. Over 60% of those quizzed couldn’t tell me. Many men answered “I have no idea.” So I’m glad for the bookstore approach.

But now my cataloger’s questioning it, because the new clerks don’t always pay close attention to genre labels, shelving stuff where it ain’t s’posed t’go & mixing Shakespeare with Robert Frost or Jane Austen.

knee jerk

So we’re out there, looking at the 800s, and the cataloger says: “We got 18 shelves of Literature, four shelves of Poetry, and four of Drama. Why don’t we just make new numbers for Poetry & Drama? Like 800.01 for the poetry books & 800.02 for the plays.” I told him, in my knee-jerk style, that I am tempted to knee him for being a jerk for proposing a solution that silly. Says I: “Get out the Index, like you normally do, and find the generic numbers for Poetry & Drama. We’ll use those.”

He does. He comes to me, book in hand, and a most aggressive grin on his face. The grin I’ve seen before. It’s one of a species of grins that tells me I need to wipe egg off my face. Sure enough: the generic numbers for Poetry & Drama, respectively, are 800.01 and 800.02.

Of course they are! How silly of me!

I’m still not going to use them.

STORMING THEM LIBRARY GATES: Or: “Why do you have to CLOSE for Inventory?”

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This is June 2013AD, and we’re worrying about a manual inventory of books and CDs and VHS tapes. Welcome to correctional Librarianship.

On Friday, June 7, we worked between 6PM – 8:30 putting all books in correct alpha-numerical order.

Cataloguer assures me that all shelf list cards are where they should be.

Some of these here Library clerks display a disturbing horseshoes/ hand grenade approach to inventory. If card and shelf order is “pretty good” or “close enough,” they’re satisfied. Then they wonder why they have to run around like chickens with their legs cut off trying to find where cards and books are.

Left a signed memo for the officers at the OIC desk to please keep the Lending Library closed for the weekend, in order to preserve the work we’ve just completed, and also to prevent any additional books being taken from the Library without being properly signed out. Amazingly, this actually happens, and the memo is honored. I am grateful.

Today my ILL clerk tells me that over the weekend some inmates from his Unit wanted to use the Library and came back to the Unit “heated.” The way he repeats “Heated” makes me ask:

“So they’re hiding behind the Book Return Box waiting to shank me?”

“I don’t know anything about that. All I know is they were heated!”

I remind him that it only happens once a year, everyone has a different way of processing disappointment. This is the way I convey this: “Think they’ll get over it?”

“I’m just tellin’ ya.”

“I guess for my safety I’ll submit a confidential IPS report.”

“No! No, it ain’t nothing like that. What I’m sayin’ is they were angry they couldn’t get in, that’s all.”

“Gee, that’s…too bad, I guess?”

“Yeah, well….”

A few weeks ago, we posted a memo in each Unit asking everyone to return books that were never checked out. These notices will be ignored. But we feel it’s worth a try.

WHY we feel that way is anyone’s guess.