Behind-the-Scenes is a series in which we share stories of the work we do hidden from view, and more recently what we accomplished during our year-long hiatus from public service.
We’re kicking off this series with a bit about a project we’ve dubbed The Great Book Inventory of 2018.
In August 2017, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. moved from the Carnegie Library to an interim location on the 3rd floor of the Newseum for the duration of the Carnegie building’s renovation. While a significant portion of the Historical Society’s collection came with it and was stored onsite, the rest was placed in offsite storage, including its 9,000+ piece book collection.
By late 2018, when the renovation was nearing completion, Historical Society staff was focused on how best to organize collections in the redesigned spaces in the Carnegie Library. To help with this effort, staff decided embark on project to bring all of the books out of storage and inventory and sort the collection.
The main goal of the book inventory project was to optimize its organization for the new reading room. It would also ready the collection for re-opening public services, and collect missing data for the books, such as number of copies, book dimensions, and condition.
Over seven weeks, library staff, with tremendous assistance by a dedicated corps of volunteers and interns, conducted an extensive inventory project of over 9,000 books. They identified 5,000 unique titles and 4,000 duplicate copies. One copy of each title was separated out for the reading room and all remaining copies were divided between special browsing sections or an archival duplicate set.
If a title had more than three copies, the surplus copies were sent to Second Story Books. Thanks to this partnership, the profits from the sale of these books will help the Historical Society acquire new titles and fill content gaps.
Thanks to their efforts, the book inventory project made significant advances to the collection’s organization and will provide better research services to patrons in the future. These materials and more are ready for access starting August 27, 2019– the Kiplinger Research Library’s re-opening date! On your visit the library, see a special display of interesting books we uncovered during the inventory project.
Creating a Printed Materials Catalog
The biggest change made was to the electronic cataloging system. To aid in preventive conservation, many fragile books were moved to back-of-house storage where they can be better housed and protected from wear and tear. In addition, many categories of material such as annual reports or serial publications were also moved to back-of-house. Together, approximately 2,800 materials were relocated.
Due to this migration of materials, the Library Catalog (which included the Book Collection and the Pamphlet Collection) was renamed the Printed Materials Collection and object IDs were changed for materials that were moved to back-of-house.
For library patrons, there should be no noticeable change. All materials are still fully searchable via our online catalog and can be requested during a research appointment. However, now the materials are more consistently organized and fragile items are now better protected.
Future Steps
With the library reopening date approaching, the staff and volunteers are hard at work preparing the printed materials collection for public service. To name a few, staff are adding colored spine labels for each special browsing section, creating shelf labels, and adding visible call numbers to all books.
There is still a lot of work left to be done as part of this larger project. Future steps include exploring and implementing strategies for rehousing the duplicate books and finding a conservation plan for books identified as in poor condition.
Stay tuned for part two where we’ll look at our latest digitization projects.