Following my last post, a number of people expressed concern about the type and amount - especially the amount - of material that has been leaving the building, so I think it's time for me to talk a little bit more about that.
When we first began sending material to be housed at the Clancy-Cullen Moving & Storage Company 7 years ago, in the spring of 2003, the first category of books to go were "single-part, single-copy" monographs from the circulating collection that had not circulated in 5 years or more. That is: any monograph was fair game if was not part of a larger set, was not one of multiple copies, and had not been checked out in 5 years or more according to our computer records.
Subject specialists were given a chance to exclude from consideration any specific books meeting these criteria, but which they wanted to keep here in Bobst anyway. But few subject specialists took advantage of this chance, and everyone was in agreement that all this little-used material was fair game. This policy was decided in the year before a single book left the building.
Since that 2003, we have also sent out archival boxes, microfilms, LPs, multivolume sets, and tens of thousands of bound Serials, but the crux of our activity still remains the low-use monographs.
A few years ago, after we had done at least one pass through almost every call number range, our collection was still growing faster than we could send low-use materials out, and so we needed to look for ways to help us make even more space. We changed the criteria slightly, and the only difference was as follows: "any monograph was fair game if was not part of a larger set, was not one of multiple copies, and had not been checked out fewer than two times in 5 years or more according to our computer records. That is, if it's been checked out only once it can go off-site, but twice or more and it must stay here.
Surprisingly, this gave us a larger list of books but not nearly as many more as we had anticipated! It is as if most books get checked out either a lot, or not at all, and few fall in between.
With our recent ramp-up to send at least 400k in one year, as opposed to our usual average of under 100k per year, there has been a lot of concern over how empty the 4th and 5th floor stacks are looking, but I can promise that this is only because of the speed at which we are working - NOT because the selection criteria have changed.
And we would not be able to do this if it wasn't for Aleph.
This has been hinted at in All-Staff and All-Access Staff meetings in the past, but with our old Advance system, we were usually unable to generate accurate reports of books fitting the established criteria. Many books would appear on these reports that were not, in fact, eligible, due to their circulation history or due to their being one of many copies of a book (of a title that was circulating heavily, even if that particular copy was not). Conversely, thousands of books that were eligible were not appearing at all.
Now with Aleph, we've been able to fix these problems and generate accurate lists. It's been quite a revelation, and on a personal level, I have felt satisfied to have my frequent suspicions about our old system validated.
Of course, now that we've sent Clancy-Cullen more material, they need to find someplace to put it! That will be a topic for another day, but for now I'll leave you with a few images from their website, where you can go to learn a bit more about them.
Clancy-Cullen Moving & Storage Company, Inc.
Or, just check out the Library Relocation section of the site.
Some pictures from Clancy:
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