Book Donations

From the first week of my internship, I have gotten more opportunities to work with many donated books from several different donations. The NSLM takes in donated books to see if these gracious people have books that the NSLM does not have in their collection, or if they already do, they put them towards their annual donated book sale, which helps to raise money for items the library needs.

The steps required to prepare them for the donation book sale are to individually go through each book by logging them in a document with the person who donated the books with the title, author, and date. Then I go to the NSLM online catalog to then search to see if we already have the book in their collection. If we do, we put them in a separate pile to be a part of the book donation sale, or if they do not have the book already in their collection, they go into a pile to be cataloged. This was a very long and tirades process. My supervisor developed a better system than having one person do both steps simultaneously. One of us logged in to each book while she used the NSLM online catalog to search for each book. This made the process go a lot faster since the donated book sale is coming up very soon, and there are still many books to go through.

The next step that I did was to go through all of the donated books that we are going to use in the donated book sale and put them into categories based on the already established system that the library uses to shelve their books (equestrian, hunting/Fox-holds, fiction, art, & bibliographies). Some books were put into a different category based on their publication, Derrydale Press, which no longer publishes books and first editions. There will also be a separate table with books that are very brittle and falling apart, with the lowest price. Once I did that, I had to devise a money system with different colored post-its representing different prices for the books with the help of my supervisor. How I decide what I make each price book is I use online booksellers to gauge the price those books sell for. I found it very difficult to come up with book prices because I had to figure out the appropriate amount to sell a book while still making sure that the library would gain a profit. However, using the internet to see what the same book is going for is very helpful. We still have a lot to do in a week to prepare for this event, which I will focus on for most of next week to prepare.