Greetings! How is everybody? This week has been very productive, if I do say so myself. Lots of progress has been made on my project so far. Someof the work took whole days to complete, but it was definitely worth it.
My
first goal of this week was to dig through the rest of my donations in order to
decipher which books could and could not be used. On Tuesday, I recruited my best friend to
come over and help me sort the books. He
was more than happy to help. We tackled
each box together, looking for damage or graffiti. It was obvious that some of the books had
been in the hands of a mischievous toddler because there were Barbie stickers
plastered on every page!
Not only did we
have to worry about the stickers inside the book, but we also needed to tear
off the price stickers that were stuck to the back. Many of those pesky stickers refused to come
off! Even if they did, they left a
sticky residue. Several de-stickered
books became stuck together! Besides
ripping stickers, we had to wipe away the crusty scum that covered the fronts
and backs of most of the books. After
several dirty Wet Wipes, our books were smooth and sparkling. It took nearly five hours to clean and remove
stickers from every book. I think it’s
safe to say that I never want to peel another sticker off of anything ever
again. We were tired, but we finally
finished the job! My friend and I
celebrated our victory with a grilled cheese break. After lunch, we packed the books back up in
their boxes and set them aside for further use.
Later
in the week, on Friday, I decided to take another crack at those books. I grabbed a laptop and parked myself in a
comfy chair. I pulled up an Excel
spreadsheet and began documenting each book.
Book by book, box by box, I recorded the title, author, and ISBN number
of each usable book. It took me two days
to catalog 193 books. With the push of a
button, the list was alphabetized from A to Z by author names. The good news is, over half of my books are
organized and documented on the computer.
There are still one or two boxes left to inventory, but I plan to finish
them all by Tuesday of next week. After
that, I plan to use my spreadsheet as a system of how to organize the books on
the shelves and as a check-out roster for the students.
Remember to use your project resources
whenever to can in order to be efficient.
Some things you create such as lists can come in handy later on. Also, not every task you complete will be
easy. It will take a lot of
determination and motivation. I learned
that some aspects of this project will definitely test my patience, but if I
focus on the outcome, the effort will pay off.