Pardon Our Progress

It’s now high summer.  The campus is mostly quiet, and the geese are taking full advantage of the lull in student population.

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But inside the Ross Pendergraft Library, things are shifting and shuffling around.    Big changes are in store for the upcoming fall semester, and the staff here are hard at work managing the multiple projects going on this summer.

One of those projects involves the migration of the Curriculum Materials Library from Crabaugh Hall to the Ross Pendergraft Library.  Over 6,000 volumes of children’s books, teaching materials, and young adult fiction will be integrated into our existing book collection.

The new addition will also include a die-cutter tool for making bulletin boards, a laminating machine, butcher paper, kits, oversize story-books, and more.  A Young Adult Fiction section will be created, as well as a separate collection for teacher preparatory materials, called the Curriculum Library Collection.

In the fall, this space will be ideal for the future teachers of Arkansas to explore a diverse and modern children’s book collection along with a wealth of resources for classroom preparation.

Right now, however, we have some work to do.

clstuffWhen the migration is complete, a full celebration of the new Curriculum Library will be held later in the semester.  But for now, we want to highlight just some of the people doing the hard work to make all of this possible.

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Circulation workers, Amanda and Mackenzie, trying to avoid paper-cuts.

It takes skilled, dedicated, and resourceful people to merge two library collections together in less than a few weeks.  Boxes have to be moved, sorted, unpacked.  Shelves have to be moved and put together.   Heavy boxes, heaved.

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Cheyenne at the Circulation Desk, undaunted by the unlabeled

Incorporating the new books involves cataloging, barcoding, stamping, labeling, re-labeling, shelving, and shifting.  Ultimately, it involves teamwork, precision, patience, and sometimes band-aids.

Beverly Cooper, probably the best ever.

Beverly Cooper—Reference Desk rock star, keeper of the good band-aids—getting another batch ready for the shelves.

It can be tedious, monotonous, and outright boring work.  But the end result is all worth it:

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If you are looking for children’s books this summer, they are located in the areas directly behind and adjacent to the Periodicals Collection.  As the new books become available, you can find them in our online catalog by refining results on the location, “Youth and Children’s Book Collection.”

Search results for Caldecott in the library collection, limited by Location: Youth and Children's Book Collection.

Kids are always welcome in the library, especially the kid inside us all.  For more information about this new collection, including advice on great children’s books, contact your young-at-heart librarians at askalibrarian@atu.edu.   We’re here all summer to assist you with your research and reading requests, and we’re sure you’ll find a rainbow of materials to inspire and interest you.  But you don’t have to take *my* word for it…