Volunteers make this library work. We list many opportunities on VolunteerMatch.com.

Our latest project is building a library without tax dollars or government support in an unincorporated area with 28,000 residents and only bookmobile service.  This is in Cleveland Township, Johnston County - 1 mile from the Wake County line in Garner.  Here are the tasks where volunteers serve in the life of a new book arriving. (*) marks the tasks with highest skill level and are the hardest to fill.

1.  Currently, we have 70,000 library ID labels that are ready to go on the 15,000 new books sitting in the warehouse and the new ones arriving daily.

2.  20,000 bar codes are on order to put inside the back cover of our new books.  They are due by January 10.

3. The books are reboxed and moved to sorting.

4. Children's books are pulled out and moved to banana boxes in the toy room. Hard cover and paperback trades of cook books, sewing, home repair, and gardening get put on the shelves on the ramp. Traditional paperbacks are pulled out and sorted by genre on the top of spine (mystery, romance, western, non-fiction, and general fiction). Labeled mystery, romance, and western go for shelf labels. Fiction and non-fiction go to lookup. If any have spine and genre labels matching ours from another library, they are shelved. If spine labels, they are sent to genre labeling. If general fiction, they are sent to lookup. Hard cover and trade paperback fiction are separated and stacked in boxes, unless another library has identified them with shelf labels. Hard cover and trade paperbacks are separated and stacked in boxes, unless another library has identified them with shelf labels.

5.  *We need someone to use our seven computers to look books up in the card catalogs of other libraries and get the filing information - fiction genre, like mystery, or Dewey Decimal number for the non-fiction, or age like Easy Read, Juvenile, or Young Adult.  Once found, the appropriate information is printed along with the last name of the author inside the front cover.

 

6.  Then, someone to type the information above into a template to make the spine labels.

 

7.  Then, someone to neatly put the spine label on the book and add an appropriate genre label.

 

8.  Then, someone to tape over the one or two labels to secure them to the books.

9.  *Then someone to place the book in its appropriate place in the collection.

10. *Then build the electronic catalog in Koha.