Books in Odd Places

Occasionally books turn up in the strangest places such as underneath the bookshelf bolted to the floor; stacked neatly in both stairwells, the bathroom, and inside chair/couch cushions and even desk drawers! 

While we don’t usually search regularly in these locations, if you are desperate enough to look in all of the areas of the library, then it might be worthwhile to look in that random chair cushion on the 6^th floor.

Happy Searching!

Random Miss-shelving Woes

Today while I was searching, I found some crazy random miss-shelving errors.       

In our library the call number beginning with S (agricultural history and agricultural sciences) are shelved with the D’s and E’s (World and American history).  Today I found an S in with the E’s.   This further stresses my point of searching all of the different letters on a floor and not just within the beginning letter.  Examples: if  S, U, V, D, E are shelved on a floor and you are looking for a DB don’t just look for it in the wide range of Ds, look in the S’s, U’s, V’s, and E’s too.  Even though a DB would end up in an SB or even an E is a rare occurrence, it has been happening a lot lately.

Further stressing my point of looking in other letters if shelved together on a floor.  See the below picture for the craziness of miss-shelving: 

As you can see there are NA's and PN's mixed in with the LB's.  While the PN's are shelved on another floor (seems as if someone was using them and then just put them back on the shelve...but beginning letters aside, at least they are numerically in order).  NA's and LB's are shelved on the same floor, so it is very important to look in every letter category on a floor.

Happy searching! 

A Random Find

Today while I was searching for some other items, I spotted a few items miss-shelved between the PN3355 and the PN3453 sections. One of those was a long missing PN3448 .A3 G73 1991 shelved with the PN3355 and not even close to the A’s in the cutter. Now, I know I recently posted about a book in this section (see Number Scramble post from March 27^th), but really what is up with this section?! I’m starting to believe that there is something in the air in regards to books on fiction as well as books on the types of fiction!

I’m not sure how exactly this could have been miss-shelved other than a patron randomly placed it on the shelf after deciding s/he didn’t really need it after all. Lately, I have been making such discoveries and only after I’ve given up all hope of finding it by scrambling around letters and numbers and simply starting to peruse the shelves to see if I can spot it. Nine times out of ten, I find such items on the same row where books would be if shelved properly.

So, a lesson for me (especially when training new assistants) and a lesson for you the reader, is to scan the shelves on the row because you never know where you will find that missing book.

Happy Searching folks!