Hey everyone. This is moderately big news. Effectively immediately, Circ supervisors will be taking over the role of checking in all equipment which contains more than one piece. As you all know, there’s one barcode per item of equipment, but an item may have multiple pieces (e.g. power adapters and firewire cables with the firewire drives). What does this mean for you? Read on.
for students: when equipment gets returned to the Circ Desk and has more than one piece to it (e.g. a camcorder but not a digital voice recorder), bring the equipment over to the media drawers, to the right of Steve’s desk. Leave the equipment piled on top of the drawers. That’s it. For things with one piece, like the digital voice recorders, check them in and put them away as usual.
for supervisors: periodically, at least twice during your shift at Main, go to the media drawers and use the PC there to check-in the equipment. If it’s something that runs on rechargeable batteries, plug in the recharger. Pack it away at the end of your shift – don’t leave charging batteries for the next supervisor. A handy collection of laminated green cards will show you how many pieces belong to each item of equipment. If an item doesn’t include all the pieces that should be there, don’t check it in, but email the patron who didn’t return all the pieces (copy Lib Circ) and leave the equipment on Steve’s desk with a note of what’s missing. For camcorders, digital cameras, firewire drives, and Mac faculty/staff laptops, remember to access and delete all data before reshelving.
Why are we doing this? 1, there are concerns about our error rate at checking in equipment. 2, it’s unlikely that in this economic climate we’ll be able to increase our equipment or replace everything that goes missing, so we need to take better care of the equipment we have. 3, our committment to patrons’ privacy means that we need to make sure personal files are getting deleted from our equipment. Our track record so far is spotty at best.
Any questions, post a comment or talk with me directly. Thanks for your help with this.