Daily Thoughts 8/10/2009

"Where next?" Edward Frederick Brewtnall (1846-1902) . I liked the image.

Daily Thoughts 8/10/2009

Today has been another steady day. I finished weeding the 700s on the main floor and am going to start weeding the 800s. 800s is literature and poetry. It is used a lot in our library. It is probably the closest part of our collection to an academic collection. There are a lot of university press titles in this part of the collection. We buy a lot of books on writing, poetry, and literary criticism.

We are slowly clearing out the storage area for technical services. There are a lot of gift books that need to be processed as well as books which either need to be rebound or replaced. I like sorting through gift books. I find it relaxing.

I've been also keeping up the current events display. I added a few books on stem cells to the display today. I also pulled out some books from the "new arrivals" section to put in the main collection.

I read a little bit more of Keeping Customers on the train here. The authors are writing about how sales is increasingly being combined with technology. This means items that are being sold are being customized for the user. This leads to more consultative selling and longer relationships between the seller and the buyer because of increasingly longer service and maintenance contracts.

I also picked up two more books to read; Halo The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund and The Management Myth Why Experts Keep Getting It Wrong by Matthew Stewart.

I tried to read a bit of Halo Fall of Reach but could not get into it. The opening exactly matched what it was like playing an arcade game when I was a teenager. Because I don't play Halo, I must not get the book very well. It seems like the kind of book where you finish playing the game and when you are the subway, you can't play the game so you read the book instead because you are so totally sucked into the game you might have a hard time thinking of anything else. For me, it did not click. I am sure that it would click for Halo players though. It reminds me a bit of the kind of book which a hardcore Star Trek or Buck Rogers fan would read after watching five hours of television reruns.