It's over. The Ivy Stacks Retrofit Project is complete. It's hard to believe.
Over the past two years we moved about 850,000 items housed in 55,000 boxes at least three times, barcoded almost 400,000 of those items, scanned everything twice into the GFA inventory management system, and shelved them onto 15 carriages of our new Spacesaver Xtend mobile shelving contraption (with three static units). We were also able to move almost 60,000 books, LPs, gov docs, and bound journals out of our closed stacks in Alderman Library into Ivy to help free up some space there.
Final numbers (as of June 29, 2012):
Items accessioned: 909,084
Trays used: 61,969
Shelves filled: 5107
Percentage of shelves used: 42%
We began shelving at Ivy on July 20, 2011 so that is 82,644 items/month. Not a bad effort.
I should probably list all the people who made contributions to this project. There are many, many people on that list so I won't even try. I would no doubt neglect to mention someone and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I will mention one name, though. Steve Bartlett has worked on this enterprise since Day One begining with moving the materials out of Ivy, then bringing the stuff back, processing the materials to ensure properly located bar codes and then sorting by size, and finally working at Ivy to accession materials onto the shelves. His effort was magnificent, determined and he would do just about anything to contribute to the success of the project. Thanks, Steve. This would not have been done without you.
Now we need to go into operational mode. It won't be the same as before but I think we will be able to work it out. To everyone who folded a tray, scanned a bar code, moved a heavy box of books, tied up with string a volume that was falling apart, managed the budget (thanks, Taryn), or simply had a good thought for our success--thank you very much. As proud as I am of our effort I don't want to do this again.
Paul
