Counting Shelves in My Sleep

I spent most of September counting the number and type of shelving units we'd need so the shelving could be ordered. To do this, of course, I needed to allocate shelving for each section of the collection. To do that, I needed to know how much new material would be bought for each section and then add our current collection size to those numbers. I had done some preliminary shelving allocations, but then found out that the library would be buying 66" high shelving instead of 84" high shelving. This didn't affect my nonfiction calculations since I had only planned on having 5 shelves in nonfiction. However, I had planned on 6 shelves in all fiction collections. The lower height meant that I could only have 5 shelves in fiction as well, except for romance paperbacks, westerns, & maybe audio books.

Our Collection Development department gave me the figures for new materials they plan to buy. I used our monthly circulation report and my own Shelf Space Collection Size spreadsheet to determine how much space to allocate to each section. At first, our Collection Development department planned on us weeding 10% of our collection before we moved it. However, since BCPL began full floating in January 2008, branch staff have been unable to get the collection size below 54,000 due to the volume of material that naturally floats into the branch. It was agreed that branch staff would weed aggressively for age, circulation, and condition up to the time we box the collection for the move, not worrying about hitting a target collection size.

There was discussion by our administration of taking Perry Hall out of "float mode" a month or so before we move so that material checked out when we open in the new building would have to be returned to us. Instead, we need to remain a floating branch. We're hoping that people DON'T return the material to us because we won't have enough room to unbox everything when we open anyway.