"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... :'(