To prepare for the Library addition and renovation project the bottom three floors of the building had to be completely vacated. Portions of the top three floors also had to be cleared to accommodate the addition. This was a huge project involving the relocation of thousands of volumes, shelving, cabinets, furniture, and nearly the entire Library staff.
Needless to say, the Library’s collection has been seriously impacted. It was impossible to keep everything accessible to the community during the project so many difficult decisions had to be made about what to keep on the shelves, what to store, and what to discard. To help guide these decisions the Collection Management Team developed a set of principles:
About 285,000 volumes were sent to storage. Most went to a commercial storage facility. Some volumes are being stored in the Library building in the boxes you see on the 3rd and 4th floors. Materials in storage include:
While we did our best to keep our most current and most heavily used materials available, we know that storing so many volumes has caused inconvenience for many Library users. We can only apologize and ask you to bear with us. Fortunately, you have many alternatives for obtaining the materials you need.
If you’re not already familiar with LINK+ and Document Delivery, please read Get Materials Not At This Library. This webpage also includes information about local libraries where you can use your Bronco ID to check out books. You can also contact your department’s Library Subject Specialist. They may be able to suggest alternatives you can use instead of the materials in storage.
We also undertook a weeding project as we prepared to vacate space for the project. Weeding is library jargon for the process of reviewing the collection and removing irrelevant, outdated, worn-out, or superseded materials. In the ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education weeding is described as necessary for maintaining collection currency and vitality.
To help Librarians identify items to review for weeding, lists were generated of books that had not been checked out in the last 10 years and were available in five or more LINK+ libraries. Librarians then reviewed the lists and the physical items on the shelves and made title-by-title decisions about what to store or discard. In addition to age and circulation activity, other factors considered in weeding decisions are the book’s physical condition, relevance to the curriculum, the currency and accuracy of the content, and the availability of newer editions.
Since we started preparing for the addition/renovation project about 50,000 volumes have been discarded. Examples of discarded materials include:
Nobody likes to discard books, but sadly there is not much of a market for the types of books we discarded. Several libraries were contacted and offered the bound journals we discarded, but they all declined our offer. We hope that when the building project is completed we can reinstitute our used book sales and avoid so much discarding in the future.
