During summer 2018, my library closed for facility renovation. Aside from managing the challenges of a building project, such as planning, preparing, and staging operations offsite, we also needed to cut our media storage footprint in half. Initially a concern, our challenge grew into a positive outcome: underused space was repurposed; collections were weeded, and our media moved into a visible, accessible location. This change has significantly boosted the user discovery experience, and has been met with enthusiastic feedback.
My poster will ‘tell the story’ of how we navigated the renovation that inspired our media project. We approached the project in two phases. Phase I (Summer 2018) will show how we consolidated the collection, including pictures of the before-and-after. Phase II (Summer 2019) will explain how we reclassified CDs using the Alpha-Numeric System for Classifying Recordings (ANSCR). ANSCR facilitates a user-friendly browsing experience, as items are grouped by genre, as opposed to an indistinct accession order.
Attendees will learn about the multi-step process used to rehouse and reclassify a collection of 10,000 sound recordings. They will become familiar with ANSCR, which may benefit other libraries considering ways to promote media collections. Likewise, the process, planning, and workflow will be valuable not just for catalogers, but for any librarian interested in project management and creative storage solutions.
