Sherbet dabs

It's starting to look a bit dicey for our meeting the national stock additions and stock expenditure performance targets and our stock health target's looking iffy because we've enough money to buy hardbacks and so don't buy "enough" paperbacks for the Nabobs' liking.

Despite this, we'll be meeting the stock replenishment targets because we've so many libraries closed with their stock boxed up in storage that there's a significant dent in the "available stock" figure within the calculation.

Ideally the dent would have been unnecessary because there'd been a programme of stock-editing throughout the year. As it is, the Group Librarians are desperately trying to catch up with decades' worth of anti-stock-editing and can't whip the tatty, broken-down and stagnant stock off the shelves fast enough. One of the reasons being that T.Aldous has instructed that stock that's been edited has to be transferred to other libraries and not put into booksale. (eh?) The reason for that being that boxes of booksale books have been skittering around the borough for the past umpteen years and have collected enough Air Miles to travel first class to Wollameroo. Rather than chalk up more mileage, T.Aldous has decided to stem the flow of "new" old books, to improve our chances of hitting the booksale income targets. (you may need a cold flannel on your neck at this stage) One of the other reasons why the stock-editing can't progress is that most places are full of boxes of stock to be transferred to other libraries from libraries that have moved into smaller premises or, in the case of Helminthdale Lending, slung out a pile of children's library shelving without buying anything to replace it. Dutch Bend is so full of transfers to closed libraries that the stock to be transferred from the branch libraries in the Dutch Bend and Catty townships has all been sent to Helminthdale to deal with, together with the stock from the Helminthdale, Milkbeck and Spadespit townships which are stock-edited from there anyway. When stock-editing's being done, of course.

So we're doing very well, really.