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