Blog June Post 7 - Dismantling the Stack

So yesterday I was once again in Grafton at HQ.  I'm really over driving and am so glad that my commute is only 15mins each way and not an hour and half to two hours.

Anyway, my reason for being at HQ yesterday was to dismantle our stack collection.  You see our library service is made up of three councils and as from 30 June one of those member councils is leaving us.  Therefore, we have to ensure that the member council leaving us gets 23% of all collections - including stack.

What is stack?  Our stack collection is made up of fiction and non-fiction items that are so old but also so useful/valuable that instead of leaving them on the browsing shelves in the branches, they are housed in stack in HQ.  Library users can still access them via reservations.

So the process we followed is that we allowed the two staff from the leaving member council to go through stack and choose the items they would like for their branch libraries.  The staff from the remaining member council libraries then went through and made a decision on whether it was something that was not being used by our users or if it was something we wanted to negotiate with.

Most of the ones chosen for negotiation were things that would break up a book series, or there was no other copy in our branches.  If there was no other copy we applied the weeding concept - if it hasn't been used in the last two years then perhaps it's not going to be used again.  This is a hard rule to apply to stack because the lack of use could be because people don't know they are available because they are not in a browsing collection.  So there was some hard decisions made - but they had to be made.

I then go thinking about should or when a library only has ebooks - how do you create a stack?  Can you even create a stack collection?  What if formats and ereaders change and how then can you still access these resources?  Will licenses allow libraries to keep items "forever"?  Should we be keeping items "forever"?

So while this post is rather short compared to my previous posts - I do leave you to ponder the future of stack and the impact of ebooks on such collections.