With Din Loc in Loc in Lupeni

Tuesday and Wednesday have been my days to help Brandi Bates with her children's library. Din Loc in Loc means  "from here to there" in Romanian.  Is has the connotation of books taking the reader to another place, a place of wonder and imagination. 

Brandi's home is stuffed with books.  Her entrance hallway houses a metal cabinet with Romanian picture books.  Then there are book crates on the floor, in the basement, books shelved in the play room, really everywhere in the house. 

Yesterday we did essential errands (post office, train seat reservations, lunch),

and got working on the Resource Mate software, but by the time the errands were done we were too tired to make much progress.  

This morning everything was much clearer. We went over the directions again, and they all seemed much easier to understand in the clear light of day. We broke for lunch in the garden after cataloging our first ten books. 

After lunch, with the success of cataloging behind us, Brandi's eyes lit up with a new possibility. Could we catalog the two boxes of books she would bring to be checked out on Friday reading day?  Then she realized that the most important missing piece was entering the library members into the system. 

With patron data as our goal we set to work. She pulled out three sources of information. The first was a three ring binder with names arranged alphabetically and titles entered for each member. The second piece of information was in a stack of index cards with a record of membership dues. Each patron contributes 10 RON ($2.50) per month to belong to Din Loc in Loc. The third important source was her phone which listed numbers for most of the patrons.  

We worked alphabetically until we had entered all 50 patrons. The several sources were combined and ready to use. 

Brandi will carry about 100 books to the reading room where Peter read last Friday. She hopes to enter most of them in her computer catalog before then. There is still a lot of work to do. She has to get her computer working with her printer to print spine labels. And she has to figure out how to initialize the scanner so each book can have a bar code from the printed stickers we brought.  But she has made a great start, and little by little each book in Din Loc in Loc will be catalogued and labeled. 

We have made this possible so that Brandi can continue this important work of bringing families together with her reading program.