Library Gazette

At 2pm this afternoon I placed the last of the Current Periodicals on the shelf with its shelf tag — and there was room to spare. There is still a lot of clean up and many loose ends to tie up, but at least they all have a home.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this merger a success! Mary Scanlon for being right there with me throughout the entire project; Laura for her planning help; Chris Burris and his team of Linda Z. and Jane for coordinating the new labeling process (thanks goes to Erik on that as well) and for fielding my numerous questions about the intricacies of serials; Mary Lib for lending her book trucks; all the liaisons for being willing to relocate and weed in the Reference collection; Carol for signing off on the weeds (and for keeping me honest!); Judy and Brigett for the countless relocations and weeds they processed; Charles, Scott and their students for the off-sites and recycling they did; our amazing group of student assistants who did lots of very mundane work like filling out the purple and green slips ad infinitum, dusting shelves and shifting for endless hours; and all the rest of the library for your support!

I think this will really be a good thing for our users one all the dust has settled.

Come visit!

Just to update everyone on the merger of Reference and Current Periodicals. Over Spring Break I started to shift the Reference collection to take advantage of the space we have made with relocations and weeding. We are consolidating our collection much more than in the past and are not leaving an enormous amount of room for growth. It is my hope that as new titles arrive in print, there will older titles that can then be relocated or weeded. I’m also banking (pun intended) on the purchase of some electronic databases over the next few years that will allow us to weed some print titles (let’s hear it for Reader’s Guide Retrospective!!) .

So with help from our students Heather and Dan I made it up through the Es. This has cleared out about an entire range of books - come see!! This coming week is perhaps my busiest of all time, so I probably won’t get back to shifting until next week, but I am hoping then to do it for an hour or two in the mornings and have the shifting complete by mid-April. This will let us do the quieter parts of the project (like filling our 2000 label holders with the labels for each title that is coming over) during the heaviest study times at the end of the semester.

Our goal is to begin moving the journals out of Current Periodicals on the Friday after exams end (May 9th) and have the shelves moved over the week of May 12th. I’ll keep you posted!! My thanks go out to everyone who has helped on this project — Brigett for doing our relocations; Judy and Charles for taking care of the weeds; Carol for signing umpteen green slips; All the liaisons for taking a good hard look at our collections and making some good, if sometimes hard, decisions (and signing umpteen green slips); Laura for helping me think through the best ways to handle the actual transfer of materials…..and the list goes on and on and on…..here’s hoping that by May the 23rd or so the project is complete!!