College and Research Libraries The Planning, Implementation, and Movement of an Academic Library Collection Donna Lee Kurkul Brief reviews of significant literary contributions in library collection movement purport the examination of the means elected by one medium-sized academic library, the William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, to plan, supervise, and imple- ment book relocation of its 682, 810-volume collection throughout library construction and ren- ovation until its completion. Planning the final movement and locations of the total collection fostered the development of mathematical formulas, the application of which proved effective for space and sequence distribution of book collections at Neilson Library. The effectiveness of standardized book collection movement rates and the efficiency of the production operation sys- tem of movement implementation are reinforced by statistics on manpower, time, and cost re- quirements. n a library the movements of a book collection, of book se- quences, or of individual vol- umes within a collection are constant characteristics of stack manage- ment. Besides the normal movement due to book circulation and book returns for reshelving, several factors predetermine the forever-changing configuration of book placement on shelves within sec- tions within ranges. A library's acquisi- tions rate necessitates growth space; with- drawal of obsolete materials and multiple copies creates available space. Collections of infrequently used books can be rele- gated to storage to create space, and con- versely, books in storage may be resur- rected for collection integration, which demands space. In libraries where books exist in two classification systems, books can be reclassified, leaving space vacant in one area and occupying space elsewhere. Then again, construction may be under- taken for additional space or better space utilization. But, for whatever reason books are moved, space is an unpredictable and problematic variable intrinsic to stack management. Many articles offer descriptive accounts about newly constructed libraries and re- cent renovations and/or additions to exist- ing library buildings; such literature pro- vides planning and design alternatives in housing facilities for service points, spatial arrangement of seating, lighting, stack layout, and so forth. A review of Library Literature evidences a paucity of informa- tion on the methodology and logistics planning, implementation, and control of the physical relocation or "shifting" of book collections before, during, and after construction renovation and phasing. Only a few noteworthy contributions have satisfactorily chronologized such an- alytical methods. Yet, comparatively speaking, one Brit- ish librarian, A. E. Lumb, hints to the in- ternational perspective from which Amer- ican literature on moving libraries and their collections may be viewed. "Moving Donna Lee Kurkul is stack supervisor, William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massa- chusetts. 220 Planning, Implementation and Movement 221 a library from one or more buildings to an- other," he says, "is an all-around exercise in librarianship, comprising planning, or- ganization, personnel management, mea- surements and statistics, work study and systems analysis, yet the published litera- ture includes very little written in the United Kingdom, and a predominance of United States contributions. " 1 Lumb "at- tempts to provide a practical guide, in summary form, covering all aspects of a li- brary removal"/ he neglects, however, to give examples of the types of calculations he alludes to. Nevertheless, his sixty-five- item bibliography of literature from 1930 to 1969 does include articles that provide such calculations. Undoubtedly, the most substantial doc- umentation of such efforts is represented by William H. Kurth and Ray W. Grim in their 220-page book Moving a Library. Their text describes in detail the technique and procedural aspects pertaining to Kurth and Grim's planning and direction of the 1962 sixty-day move of the million- plus volumes of the National Library of Medicine to its new location in Bethesda, Maryland. The majority of the collection was moved from I I downtown Washing- ton, fourteen miles away; a smaller but significant part had to be moved from Cleveland.' ' 3 Kurth was also responsible I 1 for the planning and direction of the Li- brary of the University of California at Los Angeles move in June-August 1964, a ma- jor operation involving some 800,000 vol- umes (and the shifting of some 100,000 others in the old building)." 4 Together, Kurth and Grim assess "the factors with which most libraries have to cope" during "their moving operations. " 5 Accounts of the NLM and UCLA libraries' moves dem- onstrate the applicability of Kurth and Grim's principles on moving. Addition- ally, the variety of figures and tables, the statistical appendix, "which provides background and anallsis of the technique of measurement," and the specimen moving contracts constitute the best refer- ence for librarians of libraries on the move. Another equally valuable research proj- ect on collection movement, entitled Mov- ing Library Materials (1965), is by Peter Spyers-Duran. 7 His analysis and study is not limited by library type or collection size, and similar to Lumb, he includes a thirty-one-year-span bibliography (1930- 61). Both the time and costs of movement collected by his survey of twenty-nine li- braries might be of interest to librarians comparing collection movement costs of the late 1950s and early 1960s with those available from the time/cost study of the Smith College Library move. The Spyers- Duran project unquestionably attests that libraries, twenty years agb, did record data on their collection movement. Two other librarians representing the 1960s literature about collection move- ment are Matt Roberts and Donald P. Hammer. Although less thorough than Kurth and Grim and Spyers-Duran, each concisely and comprehensively outlines specific moving operations, and each fur- nishes some calculations for those moves. 8 The research of these librarians is still timely and useful. Its existence may ex- plain the exiguity of literature on collec- tion movement between the early 1970s and the present. · Given the status of collection- movement-related literature, the follow- ing account proffers to share with library communities the methodology, logistics, and time/cost study of the planning, im- plementation, and movement of the Smith College Library collection into its newly constructed and renovated facility. THE WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON LIBRARY COLLECTION MOVEMENT It was known as early as 1973 that future plans for Neilson Library would include a mass construction and renovation project to be initiated within the next six years. In 1975 an analysis of existing shelf-growth- space capacity evidenced that available space was fast diminishing for the annual increase in the number of books on the LC collection's shelves. The growth-space re- quirements for the LC collection had ap- proached the long-term projected capacity intended by the building's expansion in 1962. Shelves of LC books, once two- thirds empty, grew to eleven-twelfths full. It was therefore necessary to plan enough growth space for the LC collection until 222 College & Research Libraries the renovations and new additions be- came reality. The Dewey portion of Neilson's collec- tion then comprised approximately 15,000 shelves of books housed in twelve wings of the library. Many of the 15,000, thirty- five-inch-wide shelves were occupied with only a quarter, a third, or a half of the books they could contain. A shelf count of the closed, nongrowing, Dewey collec- tion, ascertained during summer when most books are on their shelves, indicated that the functional space requirements to house it called for a mass compaction of books to absorb the empty space left by gradual reclassification of Dewey to LC and withdrawals of obsolete materials. The Dewey books were gradually consoli- dated into eight wings by 1977. Then, in 1978, the LC collection of mon- ographs, folios, periodicals, and the docu- ments collection were shifted and ex- panded into the four empty wings to maintain adequate space for projected col- lection growth throughout construction. During this same shifting period, many small collections, e.g., academic depart- ment studies in the library, books in tem- porary library storage, were integrated into the open-stack collection; other small collections, e.g., locked-stack area and the bibliography area, were relocated; and, lastly, several collections, e.g., with- drawals for book sale and books for future cataloging, were boxed in cardboard book-moving cartons (24 inches by 12 inches by 111/4 inches). As books were boxed, shelf by shelf, the boxes were num- bered in order and their contents labeled. Six hundred such book-moving cartons were trucked by Physical Plant personnel to an unused, vacant campus building. An on-site sketch of the numbered box layout and box content made materials accessible to anyone needing them. Simultaneous to the library's vast book movements was the first phase of con- struction, initiated in late 1978; it entailed building two additions to the library, one on either end, south and north. As these additions neared completion, phase two of the building program would begin ren- ovation of the existing library building in- terior. Fall of 1979 set the stage for the July 1983 preparation of plans to vacate the "old Neilson core" of its books; the new south and north additions were in the final stages of being readied for book occu- pancy. To vacate the core for renovation, approximately 10,500 shelves of books were relocated in the summer and fall of 1980 to their temporary locations in the stack areas of the completed south and north additions to the library. These movements affected the shift plans, schedules, floor plans, and directions sub- mitted by the stack supervisor to the col- lege librarian and circulation department librarian in May 1980. These preliminary stages of book move- ment at Neilson Library between 1975 and 1980 satisfied the library's need for interim collection storage until the building in its entirety was ready for both book and peo- ple occupancy in January of 1982. The margin of error in the calculation and pro- jection for the shifts was negligible, and in actuality the shifting proceeded smoothly and efficiently. The removal of books from the building's center was done by ten stu- dent assistants and four Physical Plant personnel; this combination of workers enabled both day and night book shifting. Books were moved on ten metal book trucks (total cost: $1,289), purchased ex- pressly for book moving, and to be desig- nated for shelving purposes after comple- tion of the collection move; the library's standard-length wooden book trucks (30.5 inches long), regularly used for shelving purposes, could not accommo- date a full35-inch shelf of books, as did the new metal trucks used for shifting. Access to the collection throughout these shifts and the final collection move- ment was not impeded; some patrons ac- tually were amazed to be able to retrieve sought-after materials from book trucks in transit. As stack areas of book sequences were relocated into different areas, new patron access routes were continually re- established, and updated directories of book locations were posted daily at the cir- culation and reference desks. Accurate records were maintained for each move; the moving experiences and data of these previous shifts provided copious statistics on manpower, time, and budgetary re- Planning, Implementation and Movement 223 quirements, which were in turn utilized by the stack supervisor to calculate, plan, and implement the project completion for the permanent location of the collection's sequences of 682,810 volumes in the fin- ished Neilson Library. Collection movement at Neilson had al- ways been implemented in a shelf-by- shelf book truck loading and unloading method, and this same method, per- formed by student assistants under the stack supervisor's direction, was chosen for the final movement of the whole collec- tion. Before an entire collection can be moved, certain criteria must be known and several steps must be followed via analysis of the existing collection. A chart should diagram the current call number sequences in each level and area of the building, as well as the number of shelves occupied by each sequence (see table 1); this also provides an accurate total num- ber of shelves to be moved. Next, a chart must be provided, usually by the archi- tects, for the count of available book-stack shelf capacity after construction/renova- tion (see table 2); this chart lists both the level and area counts of available shelves and the total numbers of available shelves at seven per section. The ~chitects can also supply the building floor plans to fa- cilitate the mapping and shelf counting of sequence distribution. The information from the charts and floor plans advanced the application of elementary algebraic principles for mathematical formulas, first, for the call number sequence distri- bution for the library's collection and, sec- ond, for the collection movement phasing to attain the sequence relocations (see ta- ble 3). Calculating and deciding what collec- tion sequences to distribute where is time- consuming and tedious. Optional place- ment of collection types, e.g., Dewey collection, LC monographs, LC periodi- cals, etc., can be qualified or disqualified for spatial accommodation by a feasibility of options study. At Neilson Library, for example, it would have been aesthetically desirable for the closed, older Dewey col- lection to be situated below ground level, and it would have been convenient for the more recent LC collection to be on upper levels. But the feasibility of options stud- ies proposed a more desirable alternative opting a maximum long-range plan for collection placement. Feasibility of options study 1, utilizing formula 1 (see table 4), proved that the combined placements of the Dewey col- lection's 11,989 shelves on the 17,801 available shelves of levels B and A and of the LC monograph collection's 4,334 shelves on the 9,121 available shelves of level 3 would result in the Dewey collec- tion's occupying only 67.35 percent of available space. Applying formula 2, this would mean filling 16.6 inches of space per shelf in all seven-shelf sections for the LC monographs; with only half-shelves available for acquisitions growth-space, the shelves would be filled in about three to four years. An explanation of elemen- tary algebraic principles can be found in appendix A, 9 and an explanation of the ap- plication of algebra in formulas 1 and 2 can be found in appendix B. The second feasibility of options study, which applied formulas 1 and 2 to the combined placements of the Dewey col- lection on levels 3 and 4 and of the LC monographs on levels B and A, resulted in a 93.45 percent space occupation by Dewey, and 24.97 percent space occupa- tion by LC monographs. The remaining 6.55 percent of space, or 840 shelves, for Dewey was distributed to shelving areas and to additional space for some very full shelves. Formula 2 showed that for LC monographs only 8.74 inches per shelf need be filled; this means a more desirable three-quarters-empty shelves for acquisi- tions growth-space. In both studies it was determined that the LC periodicals could be contained for fifteen years in three ar- eas of level 2. The documents collection would remain on level 2 and later be ex- panded. Other smaller collections, e.g., newspapers, folios, Dewey oversize mate- rials, locked stack, and microforms, were commodious to the building's core area. Once establishing the placement of col- lection types, in this case, those preferred in feasibility of options study 2, the next step is determining the number of shelves of each collection's sequences by area Level and Area Level 4, west pavilion Level 4, north pavilion Level3, west pavilion Level3, north pavilion Level3, north addition Level 2, south addition Level 2, north pavilion Level 2, north addition Level A, south addition Level A, north pavilion Level A, north addition Level B, north pavilion Level B, north pavilion In storage TOTAL TABLE 1 CALL NUMBER SEQUENCE LOCATION AND OCCUPIED SHELF-COUNT PRECEDING FINAL COLLECTION MOVEMENT Call Number Sequence 950-999 350-799 880.8-949 301 .15S-349 folio A-Z theses newspapers current periodicals 835H-880.7 000-301.15R documents PR2753-Z 800-835G HD31-PR2752 A-HD30 perDL-PA perPB-Z per A-DK locked stack Occupied Shelves 982 1,774 1,745 1,839 476+ 1,889 1,839 1,108 721 1,925 1,914 1,699 2,085:t: 1,834t 1,918t 154 23,902 Occupied Oversize Shelves* 4 sections or 28 shelves 8 sections or 56 shelves 7 sections or 49 shelves 2.5 sections or 17 shelves 65 sections or 455 shelves 5 sections or 35 shelves 68 sections or 476 shelves 5 sections or 35 shelves 3 sections or 21 shelves 5 sections or 35 shelves 172.5 sections or 1,207 shelves *To facilitate calculations for space relocation requirements, oversize shelves occupying 4-, 5-, or 6-shelf sections were converted to 7-shelf-per-section standard . tAt 9 shelves per section. tThese counts include the minimum of 10 years ' growth space per title. TABLE2 COUNTS OF AVAILABLE BOOK-STACK SHELVES POST-CONSTRUCTION/RENOVATION Level Level Level Level Level Area B A 1 2 3 South addition 0 1,932 (1,320) 0 2,940 1,036 South pavilion 1,701 (1,160)* 0 0 1,295 1,715 West pavilion 2,604 (1,801) 2,282 (1,570) 0 0 2,828 Core pavilion 1,260 (900) 1,260 0 616 0 Nortli pavilion 1,946 (1,390) 1,946 (1,390) 0 1,792 1,946 North addition 1,792 (1,180) 1,792 (1,180) 0 1,792 1,596 Total 9,303 9,212 0 8,435 9,121 *Parenthesized counts are standardized at 5 shelves per section; all other counts are standardized at 7 shelves per section. N N ~ Total Occupied Shelves () 1,010 0 1,830 == tD 1,794 (JQ tD 1,856 ~ 455 35 ~ tD 476 fll tD 476 ~ n 1,924 ~ r-"4 1,860 0: 1,108 ... 721 ~ 1,960 ;· 1,914 fll 1,699 2,085t 1,8341 -= 1,918 -< 154 1-l 25,109 1,0 CJ) ~ Level 4 Total 0 5,908 0 4,711 1,764 9,478 728 3,864 1,946 9,576 0 6,972 4,438 40,509 TABLE 3 COLLECTION-MOVEMENT PHASING OF SEQUENCE DISTRIBUTION Call Number Shifting Shifting Level and Area Sequence Phase No . 1 Phase No. 2 Level 4, core pavilion newspa~ers news~a~ers (c)* Level 4, north pavilion 940-9 9 973.7 - 99 (u) 940-949 (u) Level 4, west pavilion 850-939 850-880.7 (u) Level3, north addition 830-849 830-849 (c) Level 3, north pavilion 600-829 600-799 (u) 800-825F.5 (u) Level 3, west pavilion 330-599 330-334.25 (u) 345.13-599 (u) Level3, south pavilion 190-329 190-329 (c) Level 3, south addition 000-189 000-189 (c) Level3, core pavilion microforms microforms (c) Level3, east Kavilion current periodicals current per (c) Level 2, nort addition documents Level 2, north pavilion LC periodicals P-Z LC per P-Z (c) Level 2, south pavilion LC periodicals HE-N LC per HE-N (c) Level 2, south addition LC periodicals A-HD LC per DS-HD (u) Level 2, core pavilion locked stack locl