"And then we came to the end" ~ Last 3 carts of Reference Discards

Today is a monumental Monday! I brought the last 3 carts of Reference titles for discard back to Tech Services today. Undoubtedly I will come across some stragglers as we begin the next phase of the project, the phase where we move all the green-flagged titles to the Stacks, but for now, this is it!

Of note, these carts included Humanities Index, Book Review Index (1965-2008), Book Review Digest (1980-2009), Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature (1890-1982), Collier's Encyclopedia, Academic American Encyclopedia, and Encyclopedia Americana. The old faithful Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is now covered online in Readers' Guide Retrospective 1890-1982. Volume 17 of Book Reviews Index has a cute spine label:

Peeps gotta get a kick out of the Dialog throwback!

Otherwise to note, one mutilated volume of Encyclopedia Americana is lacking  a couple sections, which is something countless menders have had to address by tipping in ILL photocopies of the missing pages. At least you don't have to worry about that with online encyclopedias!

Strip of paper's edge where a section on China has been cut out of the encyclopedia

This is my last blog post for Reference Discards. Throughout this process of blogging each cart, I have come to a high level of acceptance about the project: these titles are better to be discarded and to be replaced with online versions when available. I shed few tears, except for those ageless ones that witnessed beautiful literary criticism sets go straight in the dumpster. Food for the worms!

The next phase of the project, moving tens of thousands of titles from Reference to the Stacks, is too large in scale to blog each cart. (I could try, but it would be pictures only -- maybe a project for Instagram?) Now that we are upon the planning portion of this next phase, I'm really going into a cold sweat: soon the Reference Room will be empty. Soon instead of the charge of stacks maintenance for reference, I will be overburdened with managing 50 or 100 more computers... :'(

Reference Discards: New York Times Index

I started the week off energetically by collecting all 121 volumes of the New York Times Index for discard. I think after this we've got 1 or 2 more carts of discards...

Large empty spot in Ref stacks where the NYT Index used to be... 

Reference Discards in the As

The return of the traditional printed Reference work!

- Did you know that in 1989, Belgium used 361,014 terajoules of natural gas?
- Did you know that 25 x 25 is 625?
- Did you know that Nicholas Cage's birth name is Nicholas Coppola and he was born in Long Beach, CA?
- Did you know that the 1983 winner of the Greyhound Derby was a dog called I'm Slippy?
- Did you know that on 17 Dec 1989, Brazil elected its first president in nearly 30 years, Fernando Collor de Mello?

All these random facts are brought to you by the 1997 edition of The Cambridge Factfinder, a perfect example of a previously extremely useful printed Reference work. We have the internet now, so these are falling out of use. And this particular one is on the Reference Discard Cart -- which is probably the second or third to last cart until the project is done (I discovered today there are many volumes of the NYT index we have to get rid of... this week I tackled the 22 volumes of the NYT personal name index).

We got rid of printed museum directories and subscribed to The Official Museum Directory online (I hope people find it to use it... some of this stuff kept under lock and key languishes since a Google search is easier (but not as comprehensive)).  

Also on this cart are two Book of Lists, which I remember fooling around with back when I did the evaluation and mending project on the Reference collection. A nice fat encyclopedia, and every school child's quintessential  World Book encyclopedia, those familiar blue covers and orange stripes. I know you have a story of discovering something in one of these when you were a kid... share it!

Lastly... I am totally biased when I say these 31 volumes of An Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities should have gone years ago... book reviews... printed indices of book reviews... so 20th century.

I wish to pause now and offer two sides of reflection that keeping this blog has allowed me. One, that we have done a good weeding that may have helped keep our united Reference collection relevant, and it is too bad that the weeding was only prompted by the directive to empty the room--I feel regret over this although it is totally out of my control. Two, I feel much less sad than I anticipated. By keeping this blog, I have worked out my regret, and I offer each entry as a memorial tribute to Reference as a discipline within library science, as well as a memorial tribute to each printed Reference work that has put itself in our service for so many years.

Here's our week in Reference discards!