Wednesday 12 August 2009

Reference section reorganisation update

Our summer project to reorganise the ground floor reference section is nearly complete. This morning, all volumes of the Congressional Record from 1918 to 1982 (the latest we have) have been brought up from the stacks and are now available on the open shelves along the left-hand wall of the ground floor (where the old Bibliographies section was). This should make them easier to access and browse (and save us time and effort fetching them up from the stack!). The indexes to the entire run, including the volumes still in the stack, are also on the ground floor, interfiled where appropriate.

The centre shelving units on the ground floor now house the new, slimmed-down reference section. We have moved a lot of out-of-date or more specialised material upstairs, to be shelved alongside other books on the same subjects. Certain large runs of titles have gone down to the stack where online versions exist - this includes the Monthly Catalog post-1976, America: History and Life, the Declassified Documents Reference System, and the bibliographies to the Evans collection. These are of course still accessible via stack request.

Two things remain to do before the project is over. Guides to microfilm collections held by the library are currently on a trolley awaiting shelving in a dedicated space (please ask staff if you need one and can't find it!), and the microcards of the Evans collection will also be moved down into the stack in due course.

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