On 5/14 the front doors will close to everyone except the construction crew until August. But the library will remain open for busy, so how will you get in?
The main entrance will be around the back, through the loading dock and the Circulation and Reference Desks will be on the 1st floor as you come in. The entrance to IT and the Help Desk will be via a repurposed emergency stairwell to the right of the loading dock.
And yes, there will be lots of signs to get you where you want to go. Let’s hope it all works!

Credit goes to Dorothy Mays for the title of this post. The reference shelves will be dismantled on Monday 4/30. It will get kinda noisy in here — sorry.

We have begun moving the reference books downstairs. The A’s and most of the B’s are already downstairs, so if you get confused looking for a reference book, staff are prepared to take you downstairs and show you where they are.

In an interesting twist on 21st Century librarianship we were unable to sell the shelving to another library, but only for their scrap metal value. It seems a lot of libraries are removing shelving at the moment.

In preparation for the upcoming remodeling our DVD (and a few remaining VHS tapes) are moving from the main floor to a temporary location on the 1st floor. We are still not entirely sure where their permanent home will be. The non-fiction titles (think documentaries) are all shelved by LC call number and it makes a lot of sense to interfile those with the circulating books on the 3rd and 4th floor. The fiction titles (think movies) are shelved by title and would end up clumped in the PN1992′s which would not make much sense to anyone but a cataloger, so we will probably maintain that as a separate collection. Perhaps those will go back to the main floor after the renovation, maybe outside the cafe — browse for a movie while you sip your latte. What do you think?

Of course, permanent is a long time. In all likelihood we will not have video  content on physical media for too much longer. In much the same way you use YouTube, NetFlix or Hulu today, you will access such content via the network. In fact we already have some streaming video content, but for the moment we still have a lot of DVD’s that our students and faculty need to use.

Roger installed the banners advertising the upcoming remodeling this week. Now we have to do it, right? Actually the absolute go/no go moment will come in mid April when we have final budget numbers and we complete the necessary permitting with the City of Winter Park. So keep your fingers crossed.

The Olin remodeling is mentioned in this article on the various construction projects underway on campus.

During the renovation over the summer the main entrance will be closed and users and staff will enter via the loading dock on the first floor, west side. We have begun the process of cleaning up the workroom by removing the shelving installed in that area. The workroom looks surprisingly large.

That is 25 years of accumulated dirt that was lodged under a shelving unit, now removed.

Over the last few months you will have noticed multi-colored flags in the reference materials on the 2nd floor. In our renovated space we will only have about 10% of the existing print reference collection because how this collection is used has changed so radically over the last decade. Students these days are far more likely to go online to find the answer to a reference question and so most of these volumes do not need to occupy prime real estate on the main floor of the library. The flags were part of our process of consulting the faculty on which volumes to keep, relocate, or withdrawn. Apart from the books that will remain, the rest will be relocated to the general collection (where students will come across them when they are browsing the books we own on a subject,) some (that don’t fit a particular discipline and that we cannot bear to get rid of yet) will go to a small collection on the compact shelving on the 1st floor, some will be replaced with an online equivalent, and some will be withdrawn.

Sharon and Marina in Technical Services have been processing those volumes and Sharon just told me that she has withdrawn the last of the designated  volumes. These have all gone to our partner The Book Network Project, if they cannot take them, have been recycled. Increasingly over the next couple of months you will see more changes  on the 2nd floor, different furniture, fewer materials, as we proceed to empty the space in time for construction which begins on 5/14/12.

Some things will continue to change, the cafe for instance and some of the offices, but we are getting pretty close now.