Checking Inventory

Today, I helped Mrs. Deep to check her book inventory.This is something that has to be done each year. They have fallen a little behind this year, but Mrs. Deep said they would be fine as long as they completed the inventory by December. Now, previously, I have never really thought about how a media specialist would take inventory. This morning, Mrs. Deep told me what we would be doing today, and I thought that we would be walking around with a pen and a paper checking off the books that she had in the inventory. Then, go through the Renaissance Book Reports to take inventory of the books that are currently checked out. Thank goodness I was wrong! This technique would have taken us close to a year to finish. The current method for checking inventory, which takes them a few months to do, is pen and paper free. Mrs. Deep, or her para-pro, Mrs. Dickerson, takes a laptop that sits on top of a rolling cart (pictured below) and scans in each book that is on the shelves. They work one section at a time to ensure that they do not get confused and forget their place. Now, this does take some time; especially since they have to take each book off the shelf and scan them. However, it saves so much more time by scanning them in instead of marking them off with a paper and pen. To check inventory, you must go into Destiny, select the "Back Office" tab, select "Invetory", and then select the section of the library that you are working on. When you scan the bar code for the book, it will pop up on the screen in the section of the library that you are working on. When the book pops up on the screen, you must check to see that the title, author, and the t-number are correct. If it is incorrect, they place the book on the bottom part of the rolling cart so that they can fix it later on that afternoon. If it is correct, they place the book back in a stack on the floor until they are ready to shelve the inventoried books in that section of the library. If you scan a book that is not supposed to be in that section of the library, it pops up a red note on the laptop that says it's in the wrong section and tells you which section of the library it needs to be in.