Organization Monkey

in about two months the print periodicals section of our library will be packed up and moved over to our new library. we’ll be getting display shelving instead of keeping our cantilevered shelving, so the print periodical section will evoke borders bookstore instead of home depot. the bummer is that there will be less actual shelf space to put those periodicals, and as a result some of our current subscriptions will immediately go to the basement storage area after being received. we’re currently deciding which 200 of our 1900 subscriptions will be sent to the basement.  our decision criteria in deciding which print subscriptions get sent to the basement: there must be a stable online version with access to the current issues or it is available through multiple aggregators delivering access to the current issues.  we’re sensitive to departmental cultures in our decision-making, choosing to keep upstairs the titles that don’t have a fair online counterpart.

one of the funny (both ha-ha and weird) things we’ve discovered is that our current periodicals section isn’t exactly “current.”  there are many more years in that section than 2008 and 2009.  we’re in the middle of pulling them out to process them or set them aside so that when the movers come in june they will know to put them in storage rather than trying to put them on the current periodicals list.

then there’s the discovery from last week, where we realized that though many print subscriptions were canceled at the end of 2008 they were never actually pulled from the shelves.  we’re working on that now too.

you can look at these things and think to yourself, “this has gone completely off the rails,” meaning that all hope is lost, or you can think, “this train seems a bit unsteady,” acknowledging potential peril but not giving up hope.  as of today i think we’re leaning away from the train wreck viewpoint, toward the simple wild ride.

image by bredgur