Heading Down the Stretch

You know how, when you move your household to a new home, you know it will be a lot of work  so you get off to a good start with energy and enthusiasm.  You move the couch, the dressers, the tables and chairs, the beds and all the big stuff.  You move all the boxes you have packed up and you begin to think you are about to finish up.  Maybe you need to pack up the kitchen, a few clothes, the pet, etc...and you find that the final 5% of stuff you need to move seems to take up about 95% of your effort.  I'm feeling a little like that now.  We've moved a mountain, then moved it back, and all we have is a few things to put back in place but it seems like it is never ending.  For the past several months I have been telling my staff to put off to the side those boxes or items that will be out of the routine and we will get to them later.  Well, now is later and I am surrounded by loose journals, rivers of government documents, microforms in various formats, oversized materials, and all the stuff I said we would get to 'later.' 

But it's all good.  The crew remains dedicated to seeing the project to the end and there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is getting brighter.  The guys at Ivy Stacks are managing to process a lot of different types of materials and get them onto the shelves and that requires a lot of attention to detail and focus on the task at hand which is no longer nearly as routine as it was when all we had were books (aka 'bound volumes').  We are able to fill our retrieval requests for items that are supposed to be in Ivy much more reliably now that there is so much back in the facility and we are getting good at putting items back where they belong after they have been returned. 

Now for the numbers as of May 7, 2012--

Item accessioned:  826,379
Number of trays:  53,632
Number of shelves used:  4,281
Total number of shelves:  12,160
Percentage of shelves used:  35%

Not all shelves are created equal so I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that we are just over 1/3 capacity, but this is looking pretty dang cool from a collection management perspective.  Now I just need to pack up the kitchen, get the cat ready to go, sweep the floor, turn out the lights (did anyone tell the electric company we were moving?), lock the door, and, wait a minute, what is all this stuff in the yard?  Really?

Peace, everyone, and thanks for your continued good thoughts and positive waves.  Keep it up for just a little while longer.

New Photos

Check out the photos page and scroll to the bottom to see some recent images of items newly shelved at Ivy (they are filling up) and also of our gloriously empty warehouse facility in Orange.

Thanks to Sam German for the photos of Ivy and Scott Shisler for the pix from Orange.

750,000!

Some time on the morning of Thursday March 29, 2012 we accessioned the 750,000th item onto a shelf in Ivy Stacks.  This is milestone because that is the number of items we thought we were starting out with.  But we still have a lot of materials to go through before we get to the point where we have returned all the stuff we took out.  It is really hard to estimate how much more needs to be returned and one lesson I have learned is that past activity does not necessarily predict the future.   So, with that said, I think we have about 100,000 more items to accession (that includes a lot of materials from the Law Library).  Still plenty of work to be done.

There are a couple of pictures on page 3 of our Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivystacks/page3/) that show the ocean of boxes of books we stored in a facility in Orange, VA.  1040 pallets of boxes, each pallet holding 36 boxes.  That's 37,440 boxes of stuff.  This Thursday, April 5, 2012, we will be transporting the last of those boxes back up to Charlottesville.  I thought I would never see the day.  Anyone who ever saw all those boxes thought they would never see this day.   Me and a couple of the crew who have been managing the deliveries are going to go to Orange and find a way to celebrate, probably with a couple of chili dogs and soda.  This isn't peace on Earth, but it is a step in that direction for me.  Life is good!

It's been a while

It has been a few weeks since I last posted and the reason for the delay is pretty simple--things are going well and very much in a routine that is successfully getting materials back on the shelves at Ivy Stacks.  We have nearly cleared out all of the 36,000 boxes of stuff we were storing in Orange--only about 2500 more to bring up to C'ville.  We have received all of the Special Collections from Richmond and are currently processing that material and shelving it quickly.  I am especially happy that all of the archival copies of theses and dissertations--24,066 in all--are in this group and now available for use in the Special Collections Library.  One of my priorities is to get the circulating copies back in and made available for check out by our patrons.

The numbers--as of March 14, 2012 we have accessioned 729,058 items back onto the shelves, freshly bar coded and sorted by size into 44,470 acid free trays.  This includes 767 Hollinger boxes that we count as trays.

So, once again, so far so good.  Life is good.  All is well.  I see a light and I don't know if it is the end of the tunnel or the Lord's final destination for me, but I see a light and I am moving toward it.

Mild Winter

I had anticipated that winter weather would throw a wrench into my delivery schedules and thus my hopes for accessioning as much as possible as quickly as possible.  Not so far.  We have had no snow and, better yet, none of the dreaded winter mix of ice, sleet, snow and rain.  Therefore, things are going along well.  Actually better than in the past.  I don't know if it is because we are getting really good at this or what, but for the past few weeks we have been arranging for two deliveries/week instead of one.  We are quickly removing boxes from both Orange and Richmond.  I would estimate we are maybe 70% finished at this point.

Which translates into 622,278 items placed in 37,384 trays over the past 6 months.  This falls short of my fantasy goal of 120,000 items/month (6000/day) but is still a very respectable 100,000+/month (5000/day). 

Also to my delight is our ability to retrieve materials from Ivy Stacks.  When the project started we were not able to retrieve anything formerly housed at Ivy.  We sent those requests to ILL Borrowing.  Now we are routing those requests to Ivy staff (mostly me because I want to see the fill rate and learn the whole retrieval process using the Library Archival System from GFA).  I'm happy to report we are able to fill the vast majority of requests--probably > 80%.  It is still hit and miss, but I think we are doing pretty good.

Well, I have said it with my fingers crossed many times over the past several months and I will do so again now--so far so good.  Even the weather is cooperating.  I hope I haven't jinxed it completely now.

Happy New Year!

2011 was a heck of a year.  In 2010 we moved about a million library items, sometimes 3 or 4 times, accommodating the Google project and emptying the Ivy Stacks facility to allow for the renovation.  In early 2011 we started to bring the stuff back up to Charlottesville from the storage sites in Orange, VA and Richmond.  We initially moved as much as we could to processing stations in Alderman Library and a rented space on Linden Ave. in C'ville.  We bar coded at least 300,000 items after searching the catalog and replacing the item ID with the bar code number.  We then sorted by size, put the materials in appropriate boxes, and waited for construction to be completed.  Spacesaver completed the project in late June, 2011, on time and on budget.  (Gasps of relief from yours truly.)  In mid-July we had Chris Brennan from GFA train us on the Library Archival System (LAS) used to track the placement of materials on the shelves (thanks, Chris.  Great job!) and then we just 'had at it.'  We established a pipeline of stuff coming from Orange/Richmond, going to Alderman/Linden, then moved again to Ivy Stacks for final shelving.  A few tweaks along the way and the status is so far so good.  The current count is 534,704 items on the shelves at Ivy, tucked away by size in 31,890 acid free trays.  That's some pretty good work.

All this good work was treated to a taste of success just in the past few weeks.  Before Christmas, and then earlier today, I was perusing the requests in ILLiad, looking for requested items that normally would have been at Ivy.  Each time I found one such request.  I then looked to see if we had accessioned that item back onto a shelf at Ivy.  Lo and behold, both times the item was on a shelf and, praise <insert deity here>, we were actually able to retrieve it and deliver it to the patron.  So, it's all coming together.

Still lots of work in handling materials and integrating our catalog with the ILLiad request modules with the LAS.  But I am very hopeful that this project can transition from a massive mobilization of time, staff and money into a manageable workflow that lives up to the high standards of the UVa Library.  So, to everyone who has helped with project and to all of you who have an interest, here is to a good New Year in 2012 that will result in something good that continues many, many years into the future.

Paul

Vocabulary

While I am pleased with the press coverage the Ivy Stacks project has received over the past several weeks, the media continues to use words that I (unsuccessfully) discourage.  Tops on this list is the word 'storage' as in 'Ivy Stacks is a remote storage facility.'  In the library world we prefer the term 'shelving' facility.  It's much more librarian-ish.  Wal-Mart stores stuff for distribution.  Libraries shelve stuff for circulation.  Ivy Stacks is definitely part of the UVa Library system, not a place to simply stash stuff to get it out of sight.

Notice I use the word facility to describe the building.  Many people, including our friends in the media, often also use the word warehouse.  Ouch.  Warehouse has such a static, dormant, kind of a sense of 19th Century abandonment feel to it.  The Ivy Stacks facility is a working, active place.  Who wants to put money into a warehouse, especially in an academic setting with tight budgets?  A facility on the other hand implies a credible, worthwhile investment, which is much more appropriate to describe what Ivy Stacks is.  So I never use the word warehouse to describe Ivy Stacks but let's face it--it looks a lot like a warehouse so that's the word people use. 

All that said, thanks go out to the UVa Alumni magazine for their coverage of the Ivy Stacks retrofit.  Despite some of the their choice of vocabulary (however they often got it right), they were kind and accurate in their story, and they have a really good photographer.  Check it out at http://uvamagazine.org/university_digest/article/stacked_up/ .

Quick update--we will have accessioned item number 500,000 by the end of the week.  Not bad for 4 months work.  I can kind of see what might be something like a light at the end of the tunnel. Wait, it just went out due to the holidays.