Hit: Moving a Library, Part 1

[Kay Weisman <kweisman@NSLSILUS.ORG>]

Thanks to all who responded to my questions about moving a library.  Some
of my responses are included below.

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Kay Weisman
        When I get a little money, I buy books; and, if any is left, I buy
        food and clothes.  --Erasmus--

Hi!  I saw your posting on LM_NET and sympathize.  Just this morning I was
arguing with my principal over the advisability of boxing up my 10,000
volumes over the summer (with no place to store them...), putting them back
on the shelves in August *and* then moving them into my new library the
following August.  I say why move twice???  The construction in my current
building could/should wait until the next summer.
    The reason I am so adament about this is that my library has been moved
before.  Three summers ago when I took this job I began it by putting all
the books back on the shelves after new carpet had been installed.  The
librarian before me had closed the library May 1 and had her aides help her
put all the books in shelf order on carts she borrowed from *all* the
libraries in town.  The carts were stored in the library classroom (which
no longer exists, by the way).  Then in August other librarians helped me
and we put the books back in the course of a morning, believe it or not!
It seems very unfair to me to ask you to keep the library functioning until
the end of school under your unusual circumstances.  You may have to fight
as best you can.  It seems they put masking tape on the shelves to label
what started there to make it easier to put the books back.
     I feel librarians are often taken advantage of; we work so hard
anyway, but they know we don't trust our books to anyone else and will
generally work overtime for no pay.  I'm *not* doing it until I move into
my new library!!
     Good luck to you--if you have other librarians who will donate a
morning to help you, your job is half done.
                                Beverley Buller, LMS


I had to box my collection a couple of years ago because of moving and was
not able to unload them until mid-July.  I collected Milk boxes from the
local grocery.  The type they had held 6 gallons of milk and had strong
handles.  We boxed our fiction and non-fiction separately and numbered the
boxes (Fic-1, Fic-2 etc.)  It took many more boxes then we thought--I don't
remember anymore how many but our collection was only of about 7000 books.
Then we made sure that when they were stacked for storage they were kept in
order with the largest numbers below and ending with the first numbers on
top so they were ready to transport and unload when the time came.  It
didn't take more then a day or two to pack and with the help of my two
aides, it took us about an equal amount of time to unload and read the
shelves to make sure they were in order.  (these are uninterrupted days)  I
boxed the non-book items like videos, filmstrips, machines, etc. several
weeks before school was out, and left the books for the last week of
school.
Is there any way you could cover the bookshelves with heavy plastic instead
of having to unload everything?

Joyce Rodriguez
Media Specialist
Central City Middle School
Central City NE  68826
jrodrig@gilligan.esu7.k12.ne.us


Kay, About 1976 I helped pack up the junior high library where I
worked.  We had to close down the library and we had the students
help us pack. The school system purchased boxes, nothing special,
just plain boxes, all the same size, and we started to pack,
marking each box and placing them in order in the middle of the
libray. I wasn't involved with all the decision making, since I
was a technician, and there were several libraries involved in the
system with additions.  I don't remember how long it took us, but
it took awhile. But the boxes were kept in order, and when a student
said he had returned a book, we were able to find the book, by
removing several boxes and opening the right box.

        About 4 years ago we had to pack everything up in the library
where I am presently employeed.  They told me a week before school
was out that I was to use the students and get everything packed. I
had to find my own boxes -- banana boxes from the grocery store
are ok, but I wouldn't reccomend them.  (We were having new carpeting
laid wall to wall and the walls were being painted.) I had a hodge
podge of boxes and was very frustrated because they weren't all the same
size.  The administration thought it was going to take us one week
to pack the library -- it took us 7 weeks.  We had a couple of
classrooms were we stored all the books and supplies and equipment.
After the first week, just my assistant and I packed the library, no
paid help and no volunteers.  This is a much smaller library than
the junior high library that I mentioned above.
        One thing I did do was throw, throw, throw, throw.  If I didn't
know what it was, if I hadn't used it in the four years that I had
been here, I got rid of it.  I also used this opportunity to make a
data base of all the small items that we had in the media center.
That was the year they required a small inventory list and it was
great being to make sure I had a complete list.  As it went in a box
it went into a data base.
        It took us most of the next year to get all the boxes
unpacked.  I had the books back on the shelves in about three weeks,
basically working by myself.  But a lot of the boxes had items that
we didn't use much or they were books that had been donated and
they could wait.  Each box was numbered and the information was in
the data base so if I did need something I could go to the data base
and do a search, then find the box.  So as we had time we would
unpack.  Equipment was just stored in one of the classrooms.
        Good luck in your construction.  Hope this helps.
                                        Emily Jean
P.S. I also helped my mother unpack her library when she had to move her
library.  A big problem she had was that the custodians thought that they
would help her by unpacking and putting the books on the shelves for her.
They were put out just whereever the box happened to be.  It was a
disaster.  So make it very clear that you want to be the one in charge
of putting the books back on the shelves.

Emily Jean Honaker, Media Specialist            EMILY_H@TRECA.OHIO.GOV
Delaware JVS The Area Career Center
1610 St. Rt. 521, Delaware, Ohio 43015-9001

Good luck with your project!  Seven years ago we had a similar project.
The room holding our books was to be renovated during the summer.  We did
a number of things.

1)  Warned the faculty that after X date, students would not have access
to the collection.  We gave ourselves a month, not knowing how long it
would take us to pack everything up -- our circulating collection was in
the neighborhood of 20,000 volumes.  We finished with time to spare.

2)  Knowing that the shelves the books were coming off were different
sizes than the new ones, we set up an elaborate system of marking the
books on the shelves with range, section, and shelf numbers of the NEW
shelves (we used scrap cards and slipped them between books).  It enabled
us to pack and unpack the books in any order.  (Sometimes the books
shifted in each box, so we had to rearrange books on a particular shelf,
but overall it sped up the packing and unpacking process immensely).

3)  We labeled boxes before we packed them. (i.e. Rg. 4, Sec. 2, Sh. 1)
In other words, the actual time that we spent packing was minimal.  We did
everything we could ahead of time!

4)  I used assistants, but only ones who understood the system.

5)  When we unpacked, we had each range labeled and let unpackers count
sections and shelves.

6)  Our hope was that the boxes brought back in would be near the
appropriate ranges, but it didn't happen that way, so I was *SO* glad that
I had my system in place.

7)  We purchased boxes from a local moving company which I believe was the
cheapest our business office could find.  The boxes were strong enough to
carry books, and having them all the same size made storing, moving, and
even packing easier.

Gosh, this seems like such a distant memory, I hope this helps!

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Linda Huskey
Director of the Library
The Hill School
717 E. High Street
Pottstown, PA  19464

lhuskey@thehill.org
(610) 326-1000 ext. 7235
(610) 327-0283   FAX

Can you hire someone to come in and shrink wrap the shelves?

Cathy

--
Cathy Moore
USouth Carolina, May 97, MLIS
cmoore@clinic.net
Topsham, ME 04086

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