Scanning and Inducting

Every Wednesday morning  you can find me  "scanning and inducting" at our local public library.  If you look inside your own borrowed books, you will see a little white patch-- an amazing gadget that gets read by a scanner.  It recognizes that your book is returned and checked in and sorts it into bins for fiction, non-fiction, juvenile picture books, and several other categories.

My job is pretty mindless.  I get the books and audio-visual materials from the outdoor check-ins, place the item on the reader and then wait for the monitor to say "Please scan" and then "Please induct."  l push the item forward to the conveyer belt.  Sometimes I lose my rhythm and get ahead of myself and get an error message.  Sometimes the book or CD is not from our library and I get another error message.  And sometimes I get distracted by an appealing book jacket and the machine has to stop and wait for me.

But that is my reward for my work.  This morning I came home with five books from the library. Two of them were previous requests; the other three were serendiptious finds as they passed through my hands through the process after which I quickly retrieved them from the bins.

I did pull out a few books that I decided to leave for others.  I resisted A Child's First Book of Trump but did photograph it to share.  I loved the four blurbs all stated by Trump himself on the back of Trump Revealed.  I decided I'd wait for some other time to check out a Danielle Steel book and see why she is so amazingly popular.

Our library has been a source of much enjoyment in reading for me.  I request books that are newly published or at other branches and there they are with my name on them waiting for me within a few days.  Scanning and inducting is an opportunity for me to give back.  Plus I get 2000 steps on my Fitbit walking back and forth--and I come home with some great finds.