"No Room for Books"

A few months ago, an article appeared by one Kevin Kiley on Inside Higher Ed entitled "No Room for Books". It's about the University of Denver's plans to move a whopping 4/5 of the Penrose Library’s holdings into offsite storage and change the building into an '"Academic Commons," much like we have been doing here at Bobst.

A friend sent me this article, wondering what I thought of it in light of my job as Offsite Storage Supervisor. You can read the full article here, but here's an excerpt:

The proposed change has raised the ire of some arts, humanities, and social science professors who say that, while impressive, technology hasn’t yet replaced a good old-fashioned trip through the stacks. They argue that the administration dropped the changes in their laps without consulting them and that it will harm their main mode of research.

"You would never ask a scientist to get rid of his or her laboratory," said Annabeth Headrick, an art history professor. "But that’s exactly what’s being done to us."


Although I remain sensitive to faculty concerns and appreciate a good old-fashioned browsing session as much as anyone - and I must stress that I don't know whether there is truth the the assertion that faculty at Denver were never consulted - I must admit that my first reaction to the above is basically, *Sigh*, here we go again.

At NYU, as with other large libraries utlizing offsite storage space, we've been grappling with these concerns for years, and have had little choice but to get with the times in order to keep our library alive and vibrant.

At Denver, however, the plot thickens:

Once the renovations are complete, the university will bring back some books and leave others at the storage facility. The original plans -- which did not cause alarm -- called for 80 percent of the materials to return to the renovated library, leaving behind seldom-accessed journals and those with digital replacements, government documents, and little-used books.

But the university announced to faculty members last week that the renovated library would now only hold 20 percent of its current collection, much to the surprise of professors.

20%?!!! Holy swiss cheese, Batman! I don't know what the Penrose Library's spacial situation is, but it seems shockingly drastic to me to reduce a collection by that much in one fell swoop.

As I've said before, in my very first post on this blog, "As more of our older material goes upstate to the warehouse... we will eventually reach a tipping point where we have more books Off-Site than we have here."

But to the remaining nay-sayers, we can say that this happened organically, and over enough time that most people have gotten used to it, and have reported that they are at least relatively satisfied with the new methods of research that they've developed as a result.

Communication, Transparency, and Holistic Service

As supervisor of Offsite Storage, a department that works regularly with so many different part of the library, I’ve always had to do a lot of communicating across the divides. Since becoming a part of Access Services, this aspect of my job has become even more pronounced.

I think this is largely due to Offsite Storage becoming more high-profile during the planning of the 2010 Renovation and its resultant need to coordinate related workflows with a larger number of faculty and staff members than ever before.

But I have also come to see it as part of a larger context: the push toward a new “Holistic Service Model” as discussed at the last Division of Libraries meeting a few months ago.

One of the themes that comes up a lot when discussing the “Holistic Service Model” - and which also came up a lot during Access Services' year-long Service Excellence Initiative - is transparency.

Personally, I find that good communication goes hand-in-hand with transparency. Good communication should be as clear as possible in its aims and in the information it is providing. However, this is much easier said than done!

What seems clear to one person might be totally confusing to another. It can be hard to step outside yourself and your own experience, especially when you’re deeply entrenched in the nitty-gritty. This is something that most of us have probably struggled with at one point or another, either at work, at home or in the outside world. It's also something that can always be improved upon. Sometimes all it takes is just that little extra bit of self-awareness and kindness.

Also, making it known that information is out there for all to find - on the Wiki, for example - is easier... done than done? What I mean is, no matter how well-organized and accurate a Wiki page may be, you can never be sure that its intended audience will take the time to consult it. Sometimes this sort of knowledge-gap can be fixed by a simple private e-mail or phone call, too.


I guess I'm taking the long way 'round to saying this:

The “Holistic Service Model” isn't just about making things better for library users, but for ourselves as well. I like to think of Offsite Storage as a good testing ground for this philosophy, since we don't usually deal directly with users but are nonetheless always interested in ways to provide better service - via coordination, communication, transparecy, and plain old friendliness! - to coworkers and colleagues. And I like to think that by doing so, we are indirectly improving upon service to all users anyway!


Now if only I could succeed in setting up simple and transparent mini-workflows during my upcoming maternity leave... :)

Another year, another post about the current state of our scaled-up Off-Site Storage output!

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:

Off-Site Storage, and What Lies Ahead

For my first post here, I'd like to stick close to what I've been working on the most: Off-Site Storage!

Bobst Library is but one of many large research libraries that houses portions of its collections Off-Site. In this day and age, space is a huge issue for the future of libraries that wish to expand or even just to remain viable. This is especially true of cities like New York where real estate is gold.

As you all know, the 4th and 5th floors of Bobst are due to be renovated next year. In order to prepare for this, we will need to shift at least 400,000 items out of the building between 1 April 2009 and 1 April 2010. This is far more than our usual output.

Some of this will be accomplished by deaccessioning duplicate materials and a few bound journals, but most of these 400k books will be sent Off-Site.

Here is the current snapshot:



We're getting closer - nearly 80% of our goal completed before the Winter Break!

This has been a huge juggling act for everyone, with every department that you can think of getting involved.

Most of what goes Off-Site is deemed 'Low Use', but as Off-Site holdings have increased over the past year, there has also been a 50% increase in patron requests for Off-Site material.

This could be because Bobcat has become more transparent and user-friendly, or it could be because word has spread that our turnaround time is lightening-fast. It could also be the start of a change in user culture: a new acceptance of the fact that Off-Site Storage is here to stay.

As more of our older material goes upstate to the warehouse, and a not-insignificant number of new acquisitions go directly Off-Site from the Cataloging Department without ever seeing shelving in Bobst at all, we will eventually reach a tipping point where we have more books Off-Site than we have here.

What will Bobst Library look like then?

Is a library with most of its books Off-Site still a library as we know it?

One Desk? One Department.

On Tuesday our candidate mentioned some future trends for Access Services and suggested that we were considering merging the Circulation and Reference desks here at Bobst. Although I don't disagree with the utility of this, and certainly think it makes sense in some organizations, we have no plans for merging Circ and Reference here at Bobst. She must have been thinking about our plans to merge the Business & Documents Center with the Science Reference Center, or perhaps she was thinking about another library altogether.

I have been spending a lot of time writing the 2008-2009 annual report lately and I'm struck by how much crossover we have between Access Services units. I'm very proud that it is now impossible to list our accomplishments in terms of individual units as so much of what we have done crosses the boundaries of our units. Great examples of this include:

• Stacks now pulls material for both Reserve and ILL
• Eileen has leadership responsibility for 3 Circ, Reserve and LP in the evenings
• Collaborations between Stacks and Offsite Prep, (setting priorities and reballancing)
• Quick Check machines, which were investigated by Pat, implemented by Sydney and operationalized by Eric.
• LP uses circulation data to determine patron eligibility for lockers and carrels
  

Over the past 5 years we have worked really hard to unify Access Services and this year's annual report is the first opportunity I have had to pause and notice how far we have come. Together we share our successes and together we learn from our mistakes.

So, while we aren't planning to merge Circ and Reference any time soon, we have successfully merged Circ, Reserves, ILL, LP, Stacks and Offsite Prep into an interrelated group of units collectively known as Access Services.