February 9, 2024: So. . .Many. . .Spreadsheets

Supervisor:  Renee Kirchner

Friday:  9am-2pm

Today was spent working with Tech Services (which is NOT IT).  Charissa Stewart is the Tech Services Supreme Goddess.  She keeps track of the budget, licensing requirements, accounts payable, City of Lewisville budgeting and reporting, ordering books, making sure the librarians are on target with spending their budget, and anything else that can be visualized, organized, or recorded in an Excel Spreadsheet.  She also generates reports that help the librarians manage their collections, including usage reports and age of collection.  She has so many spreadsheets, linked spreadsheets, and shared spreadsheets that my eyes were glazing over by hour 2!  I was amazed that she had created EVERY spreadsheet herself.  She figured out what was needed, the easiest organization for librarians to use, and how to keep track or budgeting information in a format that made yearly budgeting and reporting easy.  The “figure it out” creation of many of the spreadsheets was surprising for me.  Charissa doesn’t have a bookkeeping background, has never worked directly for the City of Lewisville Accounting Department, and yet, she has created such a comprehensive and functional system of recording data and monitoring the budget, that I am in awe.  She really just figured out what was needed, decided how best to keep track of it, and implemented the system.  This freedom to create and implement seems to be an intrinsic feature of the Lewisville Public Library, although it may simply be a necessary feature of small libraries.    

After a morning of spreadsheets, I spent time with Rachel in Tech Services and Christina in Acquisitions.  Rachel deals with cataloging, record creation and maintenance, and book repair although everyone in Tech Services is trained for the same tasks.  Most of the books purchased by the library come shelf ready with relatively few adjustments needed to clean up the MARC records.  Tech Services also repairs damaged books.  It was interesting to see the physical repair process as well as the decision making process involved in repairing a book.  For example, children’s books may have a shorter life span due to wear and tear but the relative amount of damage tolerated is a bit higher than other books.  Factors such as circulation, replaceability, and relevance are considerations for any book repair although no book will be repaired more than 3 times before being discarded or replaced.  

Christina is in charge of Acquisitions and Accounts Payable.  Much like Charissa, Christina must reconcile the ordering and budgetary realities of the library with the City of Lewisville’s AP protocol.  This is also an area where training is difficult as there are so many intricate details requiring a “learn on the job” sort of mentality.  And that is what Christina has done.  She had to learn the AP protocol, decide how to best reconcile that with the library protocol, and then make the system work for the day to day realities of a working library.  In this regard, having the right tools makes a huge difference.  For example, the city requires a copy of the invoice to be in the possession of the AP department.  In the past, that meant that invoices had to be processed daily to ensure that vendors were paid timely.  Currently, Christina uses a Laserfiche to scan an image of the purchase order that is sent immediately to the city’s AP department.  This allows for faster payment turnaround and reduces the time involved in processing invoices so that Christina can deal with all invoices on a once a week schedule rather than daily.  I found all the moving parts of Tech Services to be very interesting!  It seems like a giant puzzle being put together by many different people who all have a different view of the finished product.  Complicated by interesting.