Collection Culling: No need for panic. Yet.

This is a warning that intelligent, well educated and cynical (sorry, realistic) folk such as librarians will not need. Not all media reports are accurate. One example relates to the report that the University of Sydney's Fisher Library "disposing" of more than half a million books. (See also Media Reports such as http://tinyurl.com/5t4h6va )


The Fisher Library Librarian was on Sydney radio this morning (2UE?). The books are going into closed stack. They have about 60 retrievals a day from there. Students will still be able to borrow the books, but they won't be taking up the space needed for the one lineal kilometre of shelving needed for new acquisitions each year.

Those items being "disposed" are duplicate copies; unsuitable and unused donations; older editions that have been replaced by current editions; and journals where these is a digital copy available. There is *** no need to panic***.

Incidentally, the reports of protesters who intend to borrow en masse leave the library staff absolutely thrilled with the free publicity. I'd venture to suggest that records would show those registered as "protesters" haven't actually borrowed anything since their enrollment.

Personally, I have fond memories of the library, particularly of the vending machine "eatery" beneath the main building, immediately adjacent to the Edgeworth David (geosciences) building, where I spent 4 years of my life. (E.D., not the eatery).

[Pictured here outside the Great Hall with my "baby" sister, who is now one of two barristers in the family.]


As to the loss of 30 staff members ... that wasn't actually mentioned by The Fisher Librarian.

And so it continues ...

Yesterday finished up the stock take of Classics; not a huge collection, but with more than half of the books requiring catalogue corrections, the "clean up" took more time than the actual inventory process.

Today was Professional Development day; ditto for tomorrow. Then it's 5 weeks annual holiday, where I plan to once again to bring order to the chaos currently known as the Home Office. Do notice particularly the word "plan".

I'm at the stage where I'm almost prepared to "do a deal" with a Teacher Librarian Colleague whereby I will go do their stock take for them at their library, in return for them coming and doing a heavy "weed" of the Home Office.

Only problem is, of course, that they're likely to throw away all my useless little treasures, souvenirs, miscellaneous documents ... and all that realia that is currently clogging up a whole room. Wait a minute! If I didn't have that stuff, I wouldn't have the problem. Hmmm ...

Welcome to my nightmare?

So, here it is almost exactly half-way through the term break holidays. And what have I actually achieved? Well, in terms of time spent moving stuff, quite a bit. You can see that the Green Room - which we originally called the Homework Room in the hope that the name might drop a bit of a hint to the Household Teenagers - has had an enormous amount of 'rubbish' removed, the desking consolidated, and about 5 years worth of candy wrappers swept up.

The childhood experts will tell you that it's "beneficial" to give teenagers responsibility, but I don't' think they'd considered the hygiene perspective. Anyways, The Supervisor seems happy with the progress, although does point out that this part of the garden needs a little work.


Someone really wise (or possibly very good at hiding their source) once said "in order for something to become clean, something else has to become dirty". Which goes part way to explaining why the dining room now resembles something along the lines of a yard sale - but with less order and aesthetics.

There's absolutely no point in telling me that if I didn't try to keep every bit of junk under the pretense of 'archiving realia', I wouldn't be having this problem now. But the good news is that the Home Weeding Project has now build up a staggering tower of boxed culls. Conservative replacement value? Several million dollars. Yard sale value? Maybe ten bucks. Contribution to learning to read in third world school libraries? Priceless.

OK, so what about the Home Office Makeover of the Century? Otherwise known as Yeah, Right ... it's getting less chaotic. Really. A few boxes-full (box-fulls?) of paper have been filed. Unfortunately though, a whole lot more new paper-based documentation has been arriving together with substantial relocation of stuff from the Green Room.

So I guess it would make sense to stop blogging here at this point, and go put some more stuff away - or throw it out. But I've just got to log into Facebook first; I've got stuff cooking in Cafe World, some OCD has probably beaten the cr@p out of me again in Mafia Wars, I'm pretty sure my crop of tomatoes is ready for harvesting over at my Karma Farm ...

Home Library Weeding

There's few things more spontaneous at Warrior Librarian Central than the sound of the scarpering footsteps of rapidly disappearing family members whenever I say "Hey! Let's move the ....". This of course is my own fault, having devoted years of Pavlovian-type training to conditioning these folk to associate the word "move" with many days of carting books between rooms.

This holiday period, the decision has been made that at least some of them have to go. Books, that is, not family members. And of course, the placement of storage/display furniture has to be rationalised. Luckily, with the Day Job Library (DJL) budget being just AUD$1,000 for the year (that's books, stationery, freight, hardware, software, everything), many of the near-pristine tomes will be donated to the DJL. Others will head off to third world country's school libraries, with the DJL weeds. Others will get some exposure via the Library Office.

Luckily for me, there's one family member who didn't abandon me. OK, their contribution was mainly supervisory, apart from the duality of their role - as a furry bookend.