Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2018
We just finished our annual stocktake. You can see last year’s post here. Last year we bought a lot of duplicate sets of YL3-5 books to accommodate our larger classes of junior high school first years.
I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the books that were missing in the last stocktake were back this time, meaning that someone had just forgotten to return them during stocktake week or had been absent. This is the third year of doing stocktakes, and despite not tracking book lending at all, we seem to have only lost a negligible number of books (and they may come back at some point too).
We didn’t quite reach 10,000 books, but we’re close and should cross that line within the next month or so.
The lower levels (YL1-10) mainly consist of multiple copies of books (up to ten copies of each book/set), while the higher levels are mostly individual titles. I would like to expand our range for YL11-80. Our highest level students (reading at YL50 or so) have just graduated, so the highest students from April will be YL40-ish.
Looking at our usage patterns from the last couple of years, new students tend to start YL1 together, go on to YL2 together, then start diverging. Our current first years (soon to be second years) are reading YL3-6, with most of them on YL3-4, a few on YL5, and one on YL6. This means we need the most books at YL1-5, as that is where the faster first years and the slower second years are going to bump into each other. I think students reading above YL5 will probably remain spread out, although we might have to shore up YL6-10 a bit once our larger cohorts get there in the next year or two.
This library will serve 90-some students next year. The current maximum capacity of the Academy is something like 144. If we beef up the upper levels a bit our current books should be adequate for that. Ultimately I would like to rent a third classroom, which would give us a capacity of just over 200. Having said that, I was hoping to have 100 students by the second year 😉
We’ll see how things go.
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