Starting June 1, the entire Library -- books, videos, magazines, cds, computers, tvs, boomboxes, bookcases, tables, chairs, the posters on the walls and the plants by the windows -- was packed up and moved to summer storage in the old gym. So it's "here today, gone tomorrow" 'til Fall, when we make the final move to new quarters.

What We're Doing

People have been asking just how we will pack up all that stuff -- particularly since we are re-using all the old shelving. which eliminates the "book-brigade" option.

There will be a lot of things in a lot of boxes, of course, but we will be wrapping most of the books onto their shelves with pallet wrap. This method offers several advantages over the boxes we used the last time we had to empty the library (new carpet, ca 1979.)

• The books stay in order, which is a very big deal here in LibraryLand.
• When stood on end, the wrapped shelves have a uniform size and a small footprint, which lessens the storage space required.
• There is no mountain of boxes to dispose of at the end (or scrounge up at the beginning.)

This is how a wrapped shelf will look; the rolls of plastic are on the side:

And here's a closer view of the same shelf, with the wrapping dispensers in front:

If you have strong arms (and some free daytime during the week of June 8th,) why not stop in and wrap a few shelves? Email the Librarian for details. [Too late -- all moved!]

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How It's Going:

6/8/98--

Well, we've been packing boxes for 4 days, and wrapping books for 2. Last week the Librarians boxed everything in the bookcases (magazines, catalogs, etc.) that wasn't a book, so that the underlying shelves could be freed for the big wrapping project. Here's how a corner of the library looked after they were done:

They also broke down, cleaned, and set aside all of the library computers, so that they wouldn't be damaged during the move:

Then, on Friday, the real work began. Teams of students and Librarians began the 5-day (we think) task of wrapping all of the library books in plastic. By the end of the first day we had wrapped 81 shelves, and the place was starting to look a little empty:

Wrapped shelves began to fill every nook and cranny:

Monday (today) we wrapped 77 more shelves, putting the project over the half-way mark one whole day sooner than we expected.

 

7/7/98--

The dust has settled (and we want to tell you there was a lot of dust) and the Librarian is back from a little R&R to report on the second half of the bug-out. By the end of Tuesday. June 9th, we were down to the last 51 shelves, and at 12:30pm on Wednesday the 10th our hardy crew wrapped their last books. 40 different students from grades 7 through 12 turned out over the course of those four days to help get the job done.

A BIG THANK-YOU for all your hard work!

We couldn't have done it without you.

For the last 2 days of that week, the Librarians cleared up the last of the large main reading room, making sure that everything was labeled and ready for the movers. On that Friday the shelving contractors dismantled and removed the shelving and the movers emptied the room. On Saturday Hutter's crew began demolition. Here's what greeted your Librarians on Monday morning, June 15th:

Not even the lights were left as they began to turn the old main reading room into two new classrooms -- which makes this next shot look pretty bad. But it does show some of the smaller rooms where the Librarians spent that last week packing videos and cd-roms, equipment, and what seemed like a zillion cupboards:

And where did everything go? To the old gym, where it made a pretty big pile. You will see that the bookshelves are at the front, ready to be installed in the new library as soon as the carpet is laid:

And there it all stays until sometime in mid-August, when we put things back together for the big BUG-IN! [If you have strong arms (and some free daytime during mid to late August) why not stop in and unwrap a few shelves? Email the Librarian for details.]

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Memories...

Before we began the move, we took a few pictures of things we wouldn't miss about the "old" Library. Here are some of them:

First off, the ever-present buckets in the ceiling! The fiction section has been plagued with leaks since the famous Labor Day Flood of 1980, when one of these very pipes broke and the water ran over the long holiday weekend, until a teacher coming early to work on Tuesday opened the front door and got his shoes wet....

We won't miss those crowded shelves, where we stuffed books every which-way, and even used the tops as extra book space.

The old Library sat in the 1969 addition, and while it was a wonderful room for many years, it was not at all suited to the demands of the computer age. Dan retrofitted the card tray section of our original circulation desk to take a computer, but it sure was uncomfortable.

We had to get a little creative with our electricity, too. We blew our share of fuses, most of them in the back room where the catalog and cd-rom servers were. (That's a prayer flag over the catalog server -- electrical and network problems caused so much data corruption in our last year that we thought we'd give it a try.)

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