The following is a guest post by Margaret Wood, Legal Reference Specialist in our Public Services Division. She has previously posted on Law Day, the start of a new Congress, the debt ceiling legislation, and the relocation of state collections.
Since our posts in March on the relocation of some general and state collections, we have completed additional work in anticipation of our Reading Room remodeling. The plan is to reduce the Law Library Reading Room’s collection of approximately 64,000 by half. To date we have removed about 79% of the designated material. The Public Services staff, along with Law Library managers, collaborated on what material should be removed using various criteria, including the availability of material in microfiche or online. But this review is not a one way process. Broadly speaking, the entire Reading Room collection is a reference collection and our review is allowing for a systematic assessment of the collection to make sure the most important as well as the most recent editions of the reference materials for state, federal, comparative and intern