Hello world!

Every day in the library brings new and unexpected projects. Milner Library has been a federal depository library since 1857 and offers a great collection of government information to its ISU campus and community. Unfortunately, for as long as I’ve been at Milner, there have been special projects always requiring extra special work, usually involving collection development assessment.

Since 1999 I’ve been assessing the documents collection in our offsite storage facility. We need to have all older historic 300,000+ government resources out of this builidng by June 30, 2007. Most of these items have been discarded, though  I have saved some of the unique and historically important items.

Concurrent to this gigantic project is rearranging our six floor library. This project entails moving the current federal documents collection of approximately 300,000 print volumes from the main floor of the building up to the Social Science collection on the fourth floor. I was told about this project in February. In theory I need to discard a significant number of docs from the collection so that it will fit onto the Social Science floor. I was told at least 100 shelves need to be weeded, preferably by mid May of this year. (Yikes!) This blog will document this process.

My Administration has given me two volunteer works who will assist my other student worker. Typing discard lists is what the volunteers will be working on in the upcoming weeks. There are lots of other changes going on in the library, but here in this venue I’m really only concerned about my docs responsibilities. I can’t save the world.

I don’t anticipate that anyone out there in the world will care about this blog, but it will help me remember what I’ve done, what I need to do and maybe even help to give me some perspective on these massive responsibilities. Maybe someone will have some helpful advice or encouragement? Stay tuned!