Organization Monkey

Q: How many loose journal issues have you moved over the last couple months?

We have about 2000 journal subscriptions in our library.  Let’s say that one of our average journals comes twelve times a year.  That’s 24,000 loose issues that we check in, theft strip, label and shelve EVERY YEAR.  Ideally, that’s the number of loose issues we would box for storage in one year also, removing the older issues from the shelves as the newer ones are received.

Removing the older issues of journals hasn’t happened in our library for a number of years so we are dealing with pulling those issues now, to be boxed and ready for the move to the new library.  On our shelves was about five years of old issues mixed in with the current journals.  That means we’ve pulled about 120,000 loose issues from the shelves recently, leaving behind only the current year.  We have many, many shelves of loose issues as a result.  Here’s what they look like, ready to be boxed:

(please send chocolate. we are all tired of looking at journals.)

the project of identifying 150,000 books that will be moving to the basement of our new library has been completed. we put green tape on the spines of books that were deemed “low use” items. when the movers come they’ll pull the green taped books to go to the basement (to be a paged collection) and the rest of the books will go up to the browsable book stacks.

this is what the book stacks look like now, with the green tape on the spines.