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(no subject)

Work is depressing. I've been asked to come up with a plan for reducing the library square footage by half, together with an impact statement about what we lose if we follow through. This place is my baby, and I look around and try to identify 1/2 of the collection (at least in linear shelf space terms) to throw away. Would you throw away half your family? Would your choices change if you knew you were going to be second-guessed by Uber-Boss, but Uber hasn't responded to your memo requesting input?

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Maybe you should just offer to cut every book in half. The idea would probably be lost on management though.

Ugh! What a horrible choice to have to make.

I suppose the best place to start would be to see if you can identify areas of redundancy -- so if you've got material in one book that's covered adequately in another (or in parts of several others) then you could get rid of that. Then there's anything that can easily be found on the 'net -- especially government statistics and stuff like that which gets updated regularly.

I'll keep my cow-orkers and the VP of Doom thanks, because most of the time none of them bother me. (But when they do... Oy!)

Can you acquire electronic editions of anything that you haven't already?
Play with shelving and aisle widths?

Dear Sir - if you can predict for me what we'll never need to know, I'll get rid of that part Right Away.

Bleah.

Do you keep records of people checking out books? If you could show that there's a long tail, you could use that to make the case for diversity.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the shelving system my dr's office has: the bookcases are hung on rails almost flush together, and they easily slide them out of the way when they want to get to the files in the hidden cases. Ta da! Reducing square footage without reducing the collection.

The ideas about digital copies of things are great, too, and I like that you have some immediate low-hanging fruit to target.

"Would you throw away half your family?"

Sure.

More than half, actually.

Do you actually throw out half the stuff if they decide to downsize the place? Is it the sort of thing the BPL might take?

Put off getting rid of books (other then the Uber's old textbooks, he should get those in a box on his desk), try to get rid of aisle space.

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