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Those of you with really great hearing might have heard me breathe a heavy sigh of relief this past Thursday when we dropped off the 23 boxes of Gov Docs at the UNC library. The delivery represented the end (more or less) of the VERY long Gov Doc weeding process that began back in 2004. During the process we weeded, listed, waited and weeded some more. All in all I think we got rid of 65% of our print Gov Doc collection maybe more. What remains is a much leaner and more useful collection focused on our own curriculum and documents of historical significance. As I type students are shifting the collection and once that is done we will have a better idea of how much space we cleared out for use by Patrick to give breathing room elsewhere in the stacks.
Although this part of the process has come to a close, there are still some loose ends to tie up. First of all, our bound Gov Doc periodicals that we are keeping need to be sent to off-site (Patty, come back soon!!) We also need to weed our map collection where we will focus on keeping North Carolina maps and not much else. This will free up several map cases for Special Collections to use. Our print Serial Set collection, which turns out to be one of the most complete in the state, will most likely get moved offsite. I also have a dream of doing an inventory of our Gov Doc collection so we can clean up our stray records in Voyager for docs we do not have on our shelves. The microfiche Gov Doc collection also needs to be weeded. I had better stop thinking of things or this could go on forever.
Much thanks goes to all of those who have helped this process along the way. Lauren Pressley did some of the earliest weeding, an army of students pulled, scanned, boxed, reboxed and shifted the documents, Erik and Tim created and helped pull data from our weeding database, JP helped delete literally tens of thousands of records from Voyager. Steve and Patty took over the processing of incoming documents and Patty did an amazing job cataloging items that were not in Voyager. Mary Scanlon helped make some tough decisions on what to keep and not keep and everyone in RIS tolerated book trucks, dusty documents and my intensity to see the project through. Thanks to everyone I think we have made a collection better and more useful and freed up much needed space for other purposes.
2 Comments on ‘Light @ the End of the Gov Docs Tunnel (almost)’
What a great accomplishment, Roz, due mostly to your hard work and determination! Thank you from all of us!
This was an amazingly complex LONG project that I don’t believe could have been successfully completed without your unique organizational and implementational skills! Thanks from the person who would have had to do it otherwise (and would have most likely sneaked the stuff out to a dumpster :-))