Friday, April 27, 2012

It’s getting to be that time of year!

The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!

Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.

Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.

Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.

First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.

If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.

Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.

So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.

So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …

The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.

A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.

The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.

It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.

The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.

So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.

Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.

Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …

Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.

And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!