So last spring one of the teachers and I start working on the textbook inventory. This would be our school's second attempt at barcoding the whole lot of them and tracking them electronically. Ironically, there were three years between the first and the second attempts, and we're still the first school in the district to fully implement the technology. I spent the entire summer with this guy, and all we did was locate, sort, and barcode textbooks. After the last shipment arrives, we will have barcoded nearly 12,000 books. (Note: when we emptied and sorted the textbook storage room--the largest closet I've ever seen--we must've thrown out close to twice that number.) If I never see another textbook for the rest of the school year, I'll be a happy man.

In an earlier blog entry, I was opposed to this entire project. I may have venting some anger, I may have had a point . . . I dunno. What I do know now that I'm on the other side of this thing is that it's not all that bad, it will probably make textbook tracking a lot easier, and I get to hand the project off completely to the Library staff once I've solved the database errors. I even got to "talk" to two students today: on Friday I found their brand new 11th grade Literature books in the lunch area--literally lain in the dirt. One quick scan of each book and I had my culprits; it was too fast even to be like "CSI."