A spellbindery tale

Text and photos: Michael Forster Rothbart

Walk into Memorial Library. Find a call number on the chart inside the elevator and ride up to a floor. Go to the stacks and — voilá! — there are books about the very subject you seek. It’s simple, really, and it’s what we expect of our libraries. But what it takes to get those books on those shelves is anything but simple.

The library, with its 3.4 million volumes, is the largest in the state. The collection grows by 250 volumes and 700 periodicals per day, and it takes 80 library staff to process and organize this onslaught of books, journals, disks and digital files.

Acquiring new books begins with a dozen bibliographers, each responsible for specific subject areas. When books arrive, they are unboxed in the mail room and delivered to Acquisitions to be inventoried.

At bottom left, Nancy Schaefer, library services assistant, moves newly acquired books onto shelves in the Cataloging department.

 

A team of catalogers enters information about each item into the electronic catalog. Catalogers compare each book to the library’s holdings, deciding exactly where a book should shelved. At top, Florita Louis de Malav>=, academic librarian and Spanish/Portugese cataloger, writes on a book’s title page the call number she has just assigned.

 

In the Marking Room, above, student Jessica Schroeder, right, prints labels for book spines while Donna Sievwright, library services assistant, left, uses a “tattletape” machine to add magnetic security strips. A collage of images cut from discarded dust jackets covers the walls.

 

David Kaufman of Access Services, at top right, sorts new and returned books by call number into 20 bins in the central sorting room of Circulation — a task done with about 625,000 volumes each year — before delivery to the proper floors.

 

At bottom right, George Shepard, a library services assistant, completes the process by placing each book right where it belongs on the shelf.