Moving through the Ps

Today I began the discards on PN 1998.2 R34 1992 vol. 1-2 and ended at PE 1689 I3 1983 vol. 1-3.

I had to skip over many of our multivolume literary criticism sets in order to make a cart of singles... the next few weeks will just be truck loads of volumes from these series... A truck load of Poetry Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Contemporary Authors, Nineteenth Century literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800...

I didn't feel as nostalgic and emotional today as I have in past weeks, although these huge sets mentioned above, often in their brown covers, are such a staple title in what I conceive of this Reference Collection... those rows of ranges totally blocked full with these sets... the new crisp ones that would come every so often... compared to the first few volumes in the series, which have loose binding and fraying corners.

This week we're getting rid of a dictionary and other literature reference works, nothing too sharp to jab, and some film and performing arts directories and lists, all of which has probably been superseded and we're keeping seminal works in the topic, with updates.

Two weeks ago, starting on the Ps (literature) was very emotional for me.

Reference Print Collection: I am the most sentimental of all

We had a heated Reference Department meeting a couple weeks ago about how to utilize the holistic way in which of the Reference print collection was developed over the past 60 years. This heated discussion came about in the wake of the Dean's directive to downsize the collection to one range of shelving at the most. (Previously we had been told we would have more space to keep printed works in Reference, although the librarians had flagged the majority of items to be moved to the stacks anyway.)

Some at the department meeting insisted there was no use for the print collection and to get it all out of there (the more junior librarians were the most brutal). Others recognized varying degrees of usefulness and sentimentality attached to it. I felt deeply emotional, and consequently, completely stupid over the prospect.

In a delayed manner germane to self-deprecators, I realized that I, the lowly library assistant to the MLIS-holding professionals of the department, had had the most hands-on interaction with the print reference collection out of everyone working for the library.

From 2001-2005 as a student assistant I shelf read the collection, moved sections of books back and forth, configured and reconfigured the roving Reference Annex, filed the loose leafs, replaced updated volumes of yearlies, tallied the growth of the collection, and helped students find books in the Reference stacks. I have a particularly fun memory of showing some of my English Major cohorts how to use the index to Twentieth Century Literary Criticism to find sources for our upcoming papers back in undergrad.

In 2006, once I had become a full time permanent library assistant, I did part of a preservation assessment inspecting and rating each item for its repair status; I mended 80% of the most damaged books in Reference in the following couple years: lots of hinge gluing, spine repair, and text block reattachments. It was one of my most prized library skills, learning to mend books.

A few years later I supervised an inventory project of the print Reference Collection. I consulted with the Systems Librarian to make a list of everything in Reference. I organized the work so that the student workers and I compared the shelf list to what was on the shelf. We searched for the missing books over ten times over the course of a couple months. We had Cataloging make records for books that were on the shelf but not in the catalog.

Over the past 12 years I have fiddled with the black book ends that nicely hook onto the edge of the shelf and have gone searching for the large ones that are free standing, for the bottom shelves since they don't have edges on which to latch. I have found letters, notes, missing keys, missing books, and other goodies (and garbage) hidden between the books. I have managed shifts. I have re-designed all the call number range signs at the end of the shelving. Hundreds of times I have experienced the unique pleasure of rubbing an orange Chicopee Stretch'nDust cloth over the glossy, black shelves, picking up thick trails of grey dust. And I know the shelves by the computers grow dustier the quickest.

The books are like family, or friends, or in the very least, I've come to somewhat regard the collection as mine. (I guess that's pretty common for librarians.) You can ask me for a Spanish dictionary and I will take you right there. You can ask me for a bible and I can take you right there. You can ask me for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and I can take you right there. Oh, looking for nursing drug handbooks? Let me show you this shelf, two over from the end and near the windows, facing West.

I guess the best part is that this collection was as instrumental in educating me as any other part of college. That's the beauty of a Reference Collection: in a pretty manageable space--not too big and not too small--you can physically run the gamut of human knowledge, easily retrieving overviews and introductions to all topics known to man. Often taking care of the collection physically meant I lost 20 or 30 minutes to the content--the San Francisco books in the F section were fun to read and remembering reading them gives me a specific flavor of my first era in San Francisco as an adult. The style and world view of some of the older psychiatry encyclopedias are captivating without even delving into the denotation of their entries. Thumbing through a world atlas in the Reference Folio would unleash emotional wanderlust. The most rewarding and startling discoveries are the ones you wouldn't have found the words to describe if you searched for them in the catalog: books of quotes by women; statistics on injuries; Irish surname meanings.

This is how they used to make reference librarians, you might be thinking. In that case, I may be of the very last generation of reference librarians made by books and online databases.

So anyway, I went away on a one year educational leave and I came back and the books had been flagged in the weeding process. Yellow, green, pink, and blue slips of paper stick out of the books, making the stacks look vaguely celebratory. The UV light of the fluorescents are fading the colored strips already, so sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between green and blue.

Now I've been back for nearly a year and a half and as I trudge through the library with a heavy cart of books for discard, I often think that I came back to dispose of the thing I love. That may be the only reason I came back, to lovingly dismantle one of my best friends.

The empty spot in the Reference stacks from whence Short Story Criticism was discarded

Likewise, the empty spot left by the discarded series Shakespearean Criticism

Some Discards

On the day before Thanksgiving, I took 139 pretty red hardback volumes of Short Story Criticism off the shelf of the P's in Reference, pushed the heavy cart back to Technical Services, and left it there for discard. I think my boss hoped these literary criticism sets would find good homes at other libraries or collections, because I felt selfish when I made a comment to him about wishing I could take them all home some months earlier.

Yesterday I came back from my lunch break to discover two student workers throwing all 139 pretty red hardback volumes into the dumpster on the side of the library.

It was a visceral shock, and I sure wish I had taken a picture, although I would never want to make the students feel uncomfortable or reticent in that way. Pretty red volumes of Short Story Criticism dotting the grey concrete, the beige bookcart, the shitty dumpster. They had good binding.

I know why we often have to do that: we don't have space to shelve the discarded titles while we wait for interested parties to claim them. It takes a lot of resources to arrange such a thing, including time, patience, and packing materials. It is more productive--more efficient--to put it in the dumpster. When we're talking pragmatism, this is it. But where does the pragmatism of the librarian end and the idealistic shaman begin?

Some Notes on the Discards

My library is cleaning itself out.

The shelves let more light through each week.

Today I walked into a room full of completely empty shelving.

The empty Government Documents Room

My library is expunging out dated volumes, unpopular titles, materials that are available online or otherwise take up valuable space. I say "my library," but really a bunch of separated ant workers are scurrying about, disassembling a holistic collection piecemeal, with no holistic vision of what will take its place.

In the past year or two, we have discarded thousands of Government Documents, emptying out an entire room. The few Government Documents we have kept are being given LC call numbers and are being integrated into the stacks. The room formerly known as the Government Documents room will be turned into silent study space for students.

We have also discarded many periodicals holdings, mostly on microfiche/microfilm, and have trimmed down the holdings of our daily newspapers. (Last Christmas a large Periodicals work area and service desk were abruptly demolished to make room for conversation study area.)

What issues does any of this raise except for being a tough pill to swallow for the sentimental? New batches of students resupply the University completely every 4 or 5 years, and the students are happy with appearances and comfortable spaces--they love the new study area where the Periodicals desk used to be. I am sure the new silent study space slated for construction in 2015 will be a big hit as well.

Many of us library workers and professors have been here for 5, 10, even 30 or 40 years. Some of us have lent quite a hand in developing these holistic collections.

I can be a sentimental person, which has me cagey about losing these print materials. But what other issues for the profession does this raise?

Baker Nicholson's 2000 New Yorker essay about newspapers and microfilm brings up valid preservation issues and access issues that are rarely sentimental. I summarized the article to a friend and he made a nice joke: "It's old news anyway" -- yes, a cultural decision (a cultural valuation made ad-hoc) that what we don't know doesn't hurt us; that we don't need historic local newspapers.

It's weighing on me like a stone. My gut insists paper will still outlive digital archives, will outlive microfilm. HathiTrust -- a trusted digital repository certified by TRAC in 2011 and OAIS compliant, following all standards for the field -- factors in planned obsolescence by replacing the hard drives of its storage nodes every 3-4 years. Which do you think is more probable in 500 years? That someone replaced HathiTrust's hard drives every four years or that a bunch of paper kept cool and dry is still in good, usable condition?

On the other hand, we need to bring students in, we need to remain relevant in the age of Google. How do we even define library anymore?