First of all, I haven't been anywhere interesting, to speak of, all year. (But some blog-worthy trips are coming up before too long, I promise.)
And second of all, I've been really, really busy at work. So busy that, while not actually working overtime hours, much of my creative juices have been spent thinking about work even while at home. But our big project is done now (at least the big showy phase is done). So I should be able to focus some of my ever-decreasing brain power on blogging ideas now.
Plus, I can show you what I've been so busy with.
This is what you would have seen, looking down one of the rows of my government documents collection, just a couple of weeks ago. "My" docs took up two long sets of stacks, prime real estate in our building that we all decided could be put to better use.
So I set upon a massive "weeding" (library jargon) project to clear enough shelves so that one of my sets of stacks could be emptied. That's about 600 shelves worth of documents. A big job under any circumstances, but I wanted to do it in a thoughtful way, and not lose useful material that isn't available somewhere in digital form. Then, we decided that since the final move and dismantling of the shelves would be a noisy affair, that it would be best to get it done over spring break. So a time constraint was added in.
A big job, but one that went smoothly and amazingly fast, thanks to all the library staff and student workers that pitched in to help. Altogether we shifted 1500 shelves, give or take a few, of documents.
The picture above shows how you move this much stuff so quickly: trains of book trucks. At the end of the aisle you can see shelves already starting to be taken down. We had a machine-like efficiency going: a couple of people loading up trucks by taking docs off the shelves marked for disappearance, then a couple more putting them in their new homes at the other end of the floor, followed up by a crew taking down the now empty shelves. It did make quite a racket, so I'm glad there were few, if any, students trying to study while this was going on.
Even though I had lots of help with the heavy lifting (and believe me, it is heavy...quite a nice workout, with no gym fees!) I still had lots of planning and shelf-counting and supervising to do so that the items getting moved got put in the right places, with enough space left at the end for the last few hundred docs. Whew! I'm not used to having this kind of pressure at my usually pretty laid-back workplace!
But it was worth it, in the new space gained for quiet student studying. As some of you might remember, over the summer of 2012 our first floor was transformed from periodical stacks into our wildly successful Learning Commons. It's so successful, in fact, that it's almost always full of caffeinated students and that makes for a rather noisy—although cheerfully noisy—environment. And we didn't really have enough attractive quiet study space for those students, and those times, when quiet is needed.
Voila! The little-used and electronically duplicated documents that I withdrew made space for a new quiet study area. From this...
...to this...
...to this...
In just a few short weeks. I hope you can understand why I've had to neglect the blog while this was going on and preying on my mind. But spring is here and I hope to be doing and seeing more blog-worthy activities and sights in the weeks to come.
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