Lisa Kern

Librarian

The Facility Director: It’s time. This carpet is 27 years old. It has to be replaced. No more putting it off.

The Librarian: NOOO! It’s not that bad. We can live with some threadbare spots and loose strings. I just can’t imagine how this can be done. Every book and shelf will have to be moved! It’s too big. I just can’t!

Well as most of you know, the librarian (Me) finally lost the debate with the facility director (Howard, my husband) after several years of winning it, and in June of 2019, almost every single book and every single shelf was moved. Twice. First the west side of the room’s furniture—the missions shelf, the water cooler, the patron computer table and computers, the media cart and the furniture were moved to the east side, and the 12-foot-wide carpet rolls were installed. Then, every book and shelf (except fiction) had to be moved to the west side so another 12-foot-wide roll could be installed there. The books and shelves never left the room because the shelves were installed in the room 27 years ago and are bigger than the double doors!

Because of the task involved touching every book at least twice, we took the time to do some much needed weeding, eliminating books that haven’t been checked out in years. And that required every one of our librarians throughout the days and evenings, too, for about seven days. Those eliminated books (several hundred of them) were shared with the congregation over the summer in room 210, the room adjoining the library. It took about eight six-foot tables to display all the weeded books. What the congregation did not take was shared with other local church libraries.

The moving of all that furniture revealed two things. One, the east side (not counting the missions shelf) opened the room, making it look brighter and less crowded, and two, there was room to keep the missions shelf on that side after all. So, we left it that way and filtered all the missions books into the shelves as their Dewey numbers called for.

Our custodians helped get the books back to where they belonged…well mostly. It did take a month or so to finally say that all the books were back in the order they should be. Yes, some stacks of books got mixed up. What would you expect when you put five high school- and college-age boys together to move stacks and stacks of numbered things? Over the course of many days? I’ll tell you what you could expect. An amazing amount of muscle and stamina all of us AARP-qualified librarians with 9 to 5 jobs could never have pulled off. It couldn’t have been done without them. I would have buckled under the strain if those boys didn’t help. Howard and Dave Carlburg’s amazing ideas of just how this could actually work allowed me to sleep at night.

And with a fresh coat of paint, the whole place became much brighter. It is amazing, and I’m so glad the facility director, God bless him, finally won the carpet debate.

Oh, and then there’s the rest of the story. Many books checked out, many new patrons added, many many prizes purchased in the reading program prize store and many happy crowds every Sunday in the library. I’m happy to be able to serve here.