Week 1

During the first week of my field study, I began to understand what a monumental task is at hand in moving the library's entire collection and operations back into the newly renovated building from the various temporary facilities.

On the first day of my field study, I attended a meeting that the moving committee had with Bill Overton of Overton & Associates.  Bill is a library moving consultant who has moved over 500 libraries throughout his career.  Throughout the day, we toured the temporary library in the Ganser building, the temporary archives and special collections department in the Franklin building, the temporary storage facility in the Hobbs building, the offsite storage facility on Greenfield Road where the bulk of the collection is currently housed, as well as the "new" library where workers were busy completing the final stage of the renovation project.

Stepping into the warehouse of the Greenfield facility is a breathtaking experience: imagine a room roughly the size of a football field nearly filled with books.  Toward the front of the warehouse there are several rows of shelving that span the length of the building, where books are temporarily shelved.  The library is completing a re-classification of their collection, converting the call numbers from the Dewey decimal system to the Library of Congress system.  The re-classification project began over fifteen years ago.  While the materials have been in storage, the librarians at the Greenfield facility have been able to re-classify the remainder of the collection that had not previously been re-classified.  When you move toward the back of the warehouse, you see several rows of storage racks that hold shrink-wrapped pallets full of boxes of books.  Archival and special collections materials are stored a large room off of the main warehouse.  While this room is smaller than the main warehouse, the space houses an equally astonishing amount of materials.

As Bill asked questions about how the materials were boxed, labeled, palleted, moved and then unloaded and racked at the Greenfield facility, and the group discussed how this process would be reversed for the move back into the renovated library, I began to see the library in an entirely different way.  While we often think of libraries, particularly academic libraries, as repositories of human knowledge, they are also physical spaces containing thousands, sometimes millions, of discreet units of various kinds of materials, all of which need to be received, handled and displayed by librarians so that patrons can use them.  The shear amount of manpower that will go into taking the boxes back to the renovated library and putting the materials back on the shelves is astounding.  Moreover, as Bill discussed strategies for measuring how much space the materials take up on shelves and calculating how much shelf space is available in each section of the library to ensure that the materials can quickly and efficiently be moved back into the reconfigured space, I began to appreciate how much work lies ahead for all of us who will work on planning this move.

Later in the week I was back at the Greenfield facility taking an inventory of the office furniture so that the furniture can be sold to a used furniture dealer.  After completing the inventory, I chatted with the librarians at the Greenfield facility about the reclassification project.  The project was completed in three runs.  For each run, a batch of labeling stickers were printed, the corresponding pallets of books were taken off the storage racks, unpacked and placed onto the bookshelves, library staff took books from the shelves and put them on carts, and the books were relabeled one cart at a time.  After the entire batch of books were relabeled, the books were then re-boxed, put back on pallets and the pallets were put back on the racks.  While that process alone seems like a huge amount of work, my discussions with the librarians revealed that even more work went into updating and correcting cataloging records, although the librarians were happy that this process allowed them to correct cataloging errors that had previously gone unnoticed.

The meeting with Bill and my discussion with the librarians at the Greenfield facility helped me to start understanding everything that needs to come together to move the library back into the renovated library, and what a challenging task lies ahead for my field study!