If you’ve noticed a little change in your textbooks this year, there’s a good reason for it.

Paly’s department chairs and administrators have been citing a need for a more effective way to keep track of textbooks, according to Business Law teacher Pat O’Hara.

“The school was losing thousands of dollars per year due to missing books and unpaid fines,” O’Hara said.

Consequently, the Education Council, comprised of Paly administrators, instructional supervisors and teachers, looked into possible alternatives to manually recording students’ textbook numbers. O’Hara suggested using barcodes and headed the school-wide effort for its implementation.

“Lots of schools have been barcoding their textbooks for decades, so we’re really quite behind on this front,” he said.

The technical setup was fairly simple: “we were already using a program called Tracks by Bluebear Software in the auditor’s office to monitor student transactions, and that had a textbook record option attached to it,” O’Hara said. “After that, it was mainly just a matter of sticking the barcodes on the textbooks.”

It turned out that barcoding every textbook required much more effort than anyone had anticipated.

“We really didn’t know how many books were on campus before beginning this project,” O’Hara admitted. “Without the parent and especially the student volunteers, there’s no way we could have gotten 27,000 textbooks barcoded by the start of school.”

Over the summer, he held two periods of 10 volunteers every day, with a three-hour morning shift and a two-hour afternoon shift.

“We placed barcode stickers in the textbooks and stuck a transparent piece of tape over the one on the back cover to keep it from falling off,” junior Chris Liu said. “The new system will definitely be an improvement over our previous one because it will prevent human error in reading textbook numbers.”

Teachers are similarly optimistic about the benefits of barcodes.

“In the past, it was very easy to switch textbook numbers by mistake or mark something as not checked in when it was, so not relying on just writing things down will help keep track of textbooks better,” English teacher Kevin Sharp said.

Although the change went relatively smoothly, O’Hara noted that there were a few technical glitches with incorrect student roster sheets and dysfunctional barcodes.

“I couldn’t get the student barcode sheet to work,” physics teacher Shawn Leonard said. “Apparently, there was some issue with the [image] resolution, so I reprinted the sheet but it still didn’t work. I ended up just recording the textbook numbers by hand and manually entering them into the computer.”

Chinese teacher Janet Shyr and AP Environmental Science teacher Kenyon Scott noticed a problem with the lack of scanners.

“I think there are about 10 scanners in the whole school, and those get rotated between the departments,” Shyr said. “The World Languages department had to wait until the middle of the second week of school before it got the scanners, and that forced a lot of teachers to either photocopy textbook pages or come up with new lesson plans altogether.”

Conversely, Scott had the scanners on the first day of school, but he didn’t want to check out textbooks then because students drop and add classes frequently.

“I ended up waiting till the beginning of the second week of school before passing out the books,” he said. “Even so, the streamlined cataloging makes it worth the wait and I’m overall very pleased with the system.”

O’Hara agreed that teachers have generally been cooperative through this process, though they pointed out that scanning the books themselves and passing them out took up a lot of class time. In fact, Shyr decided to scan the books before class and stack them in alphabetical order to cut down on class time used to distribute them. Although this worked well for most of her classes, a discrepancy between the AP Chinese student roster sheet and the actual class forced her to re-scan half of her students’ textbooks.

A better solution to the inefficiency issue would be modeling after other schools, which have a place where students can come in and pick up their textbooks for every class, according to O’Hara.

“The only reason we couldn’t do that this year was lack of space, but we’re hoping to claim a section of the soon-to-be renovated library for a centralized book room,” O’Hara said. These renovations, part of a bond measure passed by Palo Altan voters in June 2008, are scheduled to be completed by 2017.