Monday, 24th June 2013

On the sixth day of my internship, I was guided to the book collection shelves in Lee Wee Nam Library along with one BSD staff and one Student Assistant. According to them, we were there to change the call number label. The reason why we need to carry out the label alteration is to avoid the duplication of the call number. Basically, an alphabet will be added behind the cutter to make each of the call numbers unique. For example, when there are two books with the same call number of TK5105.15.H236, one of them will be added an alphabet “h” behind of it and becomes TK5105.15.H236h. This makes it a unique call number which only belongs to that particular book. It is not easy to carry out the label changing process as a lot of steps are involved.

Before Changed After Changed



 

As I do not have any experience in doing the label changing, a student assistant from BSD was assigned to partner with me. Since it was my very first time, she demonstrated the label changing process while explaining to me so that I am able to get a better picture. First of all, by referring to a paper which listed out all the books that required label alteration, we were asked to find the book based on its previous call number. This is especially important and thus confirmation step must be done by checking the item ID of the book. The next step would be removing the label off the book spine. To avoid any damage caused, we must do it carefully with full attention. For the case we could not do so, we were advised to cross out the previous label by using pen and paste the new one on top of it. Last but not least, the previous call number written on the book must be erased and changed accordingly. When the whole process is done, we need to arrange the books onto the shelves based on the new call number.