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Moving On, Again – Pic of the Week

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Typical depictions of librarians (on the nicer end of the spectrum) include people who are fastidious and exacting and who keep cats.  In the Law Library, we may have to add “those who are magical” to the list. (Hmm, maybe that explains the whole cat thing.)

Last October I wrote about stage 1 of our move to temporary space in anticipation of new compact shelving being installed in our stacks.

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Our current compact shelving. You can see in the ranges further back that some openings have become smaller over time, precluding the use of ladders to reach the upper shelves. (All photos by the author.)

On to stage 2.

The Collection Services Division is now removing the remaining volumes from our smallest quad into temporary shelving.  The problem is the new shelving area is smaller than our existing space.

Now I did quite a bit of very scientific and exacting measuring to verify this.  What I found is that the old space is 40 paces by 67 paces and the new space is 40 paces by 57 paces – a loss of 15%.  And actually the gulf is quite a bit more than that owing to columns and odd shaped walls throughout the new space and the need to leave about 5% of the shelving empty for growth. When I crunched all the numbers, I estimated that we could have as many as 90,000 volumes more in our stacks than should fit into the new space.

MovinThat’s where the magic may have to come in.

But naturally, being fastidious types, we have contingency plans that will require less magic and more muscle.

I’ll keep you updated.

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