Our school has been finishing up the fall semester the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are half days for secondary final exams. My graphic design course is an elective and my students turned in their portfolios on Tuesday, so I was able to knock out a lot of grading early.

Because I had a couple of extra free periods and the half days, I was finally able to tackle the duplicate book storage in the library. Since the middle of last year, I’ve been checking to see if the books in storage are duplicates and if their shelf copies needed to be replaced. This week, I took everything down and had the cleaners wash the curtain that hides the extra books. It was super nasty and dusty. I started by sorting the books by author last name.

Some of my elementary library helpers grouped the series books. (Geronimo Stilton, Magic Tree House, American Girl, Boxcar Children, Junie B. Jones, etc.) It is such a relief to finally have them all in the same area!

I sorted the books by fiction, non-fiction, step leveled readers, and series categories. I also had a couple of DVD duplicates.

I assigned each partitioned shelving area a number and put up a quick reference label:

Today, the cleaners brought the curtain and put it back up. (It looks like a completely different color now that it’s clean!) I’m so very Type A and weirdly excited this task is done.

Next, my TA and I will start a spreadsheet catalogue of the duplicate books and their location. Already this year I’ve purchased one or two books we already had a copy of in storage. Soon, I will have a reference file so that won’t happen! It can be difficult and expensive to find certain books in Turkey. (Online shipping is costly as well.) Most of the books were brought or mailed from the States and that’s why keeping so many duplicates is important for our school.

Since this post wasn’t all that exciting, I thought I’d share a photo of something that’s been rather exciting in my life the past couple of weeks… Milka now makes a chocolate bar with Oreo. It’s oh so delicious: