Elizabeth Rennie (foreground), Kathy Gaynor (wearing red and black), and Anita Penner re-shelve books on the second floor of the Main Library as part of a recent renovation project.
Update
The recent renovation in the Main Library involved a lot of re-shelving on the second floor—books with call numbers E through P, with the exception of K. With that in mind, here are some interesting facts around the moving of all that reading material. These factoids are provided by Elizabeth Rennie, Instruction and Outreach Librarian:
We were moving about 2/3 of the book collection (we moved the rest earlier in the summer, along with our entire journal collection).
We needed to shift 3,035 shelves of books—that’s 10,9260 inches…or over 2.75 kilometers! In order to ensure the collection was spread out evenly (to allow room for future growth), library staff and faculty went through the entire collection, measuring and marking 1.7 miles of books at 25″ intervals. This preparation took about 2 weeks.
Over 3.5 days, we worked with movers to move 98,752 books, physically lifting approximately 44 metric tons of information.
Now that the physical move is over, the next step is to shelf-read: go through all 3,035 shelves to ensure that every book is in order.
