The last few steps to the end.

For the most part, selection, reference, and classes for University City Public continue as they always have.  On Saturday, I picked up a class advising Intro to Excel; of course, the obligatory GoogleDocs presentation is here.  It isn’t as finished as I would like, because I largely had to throw it together during a busy few hours at the Reference desk.  I wonder if all librarians work in a similar manner, or if my mastery of multitasking is special.

The shelf scanning portion of the deselection project is done; all that’s left to do is suggest more deselected items based upon age and lack of use.  True, religion isn’t one of those subjects that needs to be updated every five years or so, like medicine, but as new developments on the social landscape surface, the collection does need to change to reflect those new questions.  Most Christian apologia, for example, is written concerning Atheism, or with Atheists and Agnostics in mind.  Newer texts, however, focus upon dialogue between Christians and members of other faiths– Judaism, Buddhism, or Islam, mostly.

For now, I’m finishing up with a list of necessary names for 700s review (emphasis on visual arts) as well as recommendations for minority religions– and selection which minority religions to represent has been hard.  Mostly I’ve been working from which texts have been popular in the past (thanks to again, help from lists collated by the Sirsi/Dynix techs), but I’ve also had to make approximations based upon my knowledge of St. Louis’s religious breakdown.

The 200s project should be done within the next couple of weeks; I look forward to posting it here.