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.
Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017
Even more stocktake
Our new reading classroom is slowly taking shape
So I finished our annual stocktake today. It’s always interesting to go through and get some numbers. You can see last year’s post here.
This year we have lost some books, but not many , and still not enough to make me want to look for any kind of tracking system for lending. If we started losing a lot more books, or if we got bigger I might consider it, but for now things seem to be okay.
We’ve also bought quite a few books this year. The main acquisitions were intermediate books as more of our students moved into that range, and beginner books to get ready for our 30-odd new JHS1 students who will start next week.
We have also modified how we write yomiyasusa level. Instead of 0.1-9.9, we have changed it to 1-99. Laura M. suggested this to me years ago, and I wish we’d switched earlier 🙂
We’re not going to bother relabelling books, so for a long time we’re likely to have both. I put a section in the student manual to explain so hopefully it won’t be an issue.
Beginner Books (YL1-10)
Big increases in YL1-2 books
You can see the general increase at all levels, and the large increase in the first two levels. I think we’ll have to make similar purchases this year as this cohort moves up, so by next year we should be seeing more robust YL3-5 as well.
Intermediate Books (YL11+)
Still a long way to go!
We’ve made some progress, but our library is still a bit thin at the higher levels. We’ve got a handful of students at YL30 or so, so I predict we’ll be making constant purchases of individual books at these levels this year.
Total Numbers
Just over a 60% increase
Based on this and our needs going forwards, I reckon the library will be over 10,000Â books this time next year. Our maximum intake is going to remain 30 students a year for the output classes (looks like we’ll have at least that many next year), so we shouldn’t need to expand the beginner levels for a while after we finish boosting to enough books for 30 students in each year.
Classes start on Saturday, so we are spending a lot of time making new files, replacing the checklist (we’re on version 2.3 now), and I’m trying to finish the student class manual. Wish me luck!