Mired in CIPFA statistics. For those of you who don't have to suffer this: once a year in the evening of March 31st we have to check the status of all our stock for a report we have to send to central government. The really unlucky of us also have to physically count the stock in our libraries and fill in daft little forms and tick-sheets. There's more to it than that but there's enough misery in the world as it is.
Misery is the word: I'm having another "why do I bother" session. I've collated the figures for half of our libraries so far and we've got more lending stock in boxes than on loan. Catty and Epiphany are closed for repairs, but even so...
5 comments:
I share your pain. (-:
I'm two-thirds of the way through ours and we've only 2,000 more items on the shelves than in boxes!
And only 8% of our children's non-fiction on loan, too. So much for buying yards of bloody Dorling Kindersleys and no books on football, pop music or movies.
Sigh...
I can beat the 8% of CNF on loan figure. Only 6.7% of its' stock is on loan. And this is a place we have been, allegedly, putting a great deal of effort in to as it is a "failing branch".
How bad if we hadn't put any effort in?
As well as finding the CIPFA process tedious and frustrating, I also find it very depressing, more so as no one seems to care about the bad news the figures bring.
Each year I produce a nice spreadsheet with everything on it, yearly issues, stock totals etc, send it to everybody, and then wait for everybody to ring me asking whether the issue totals have gone up or down!
Everyone ought to know they are going down without asking!
Somebody at MLA asked me how I'd describe the state of public libraries in England and I said: "denial."
It is a bit like the quote from First World War about "Lions led by Donkeys". We have some good, hard working staff lead by a lot of folk who basically haven't a clue.
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