Sometimes, working with modern collections in an old library necessitates fitting a round peg into a square hole.
Yesterday, the 2nd hottest day of the year, we reconfigured two rooms on the main floor of the library, moving heavy furniture and several collections. Our 101-year old Carnegie building was never constructed to hold our ever-growing collections of DVDs, music CDs, and audiobooks in various formats. In 1905, the library opened with sturdy oak built-in bookshelves, only bookshelves. Who could have imagined anything else? Well, 100 years later, we had pretty much stuffed our Browse Room, the "happenin'" place for new books, with all kinds of multimedia and the storage units that hold them. Patrons could hardly move around in there without bumping into free-standing shelving units or other people!
Alternately, our bigger Reference Room was growing smaller, print-wise. So many reference sources are now accessed online that our physical collection of non-circulating books was growing smaller. Hence, the move!
We consolidated and shifted and were able to empty almost 1/4 of the reference shelves. Yesterday, the DVDs, the music CDs, and the movies on video took their new place in the front left of the Reference Room. (By the way, feel free to ask our adjacent reference librarians about any of these items: the librarians there can answer all questions about all collections, not just ones that strictly use reference books!)
Back in the now-spacious Browse Room, we moved the "New Mysteries" and "Fast Reads" sections, the "New Biographies", the audio books, and positioned a table for six in the middle.
New signage is our next project, but in the meantime, just ask!
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