This article is more than 5 years old.

Yesterday morning, the last of the individual books from Data Chambers were delivered, barcoded, accessioned and shelved onto the shelves at the off site storage facility. While we are not nearly “done” with what has to be shelved in the new facility, completing this step was about as important to the start up of this operation as landing a man on the moon was for the space program. One Giant Leap.

Carolyn, Ellen, Bradley and Tony pause to present the last volume

As of 3pm yesterday afternoon, we had accessioned a combined total of 102,297 items, shelved over the period from December 5 to March 2. Included in that total is all of the volumes from Data Chambers, (nearly 100,000) plus about another 20,000 volumes that were moved out of ZSR last summer.

Cristina and Chris size the last tray

Whats next? We have yet to accession the archival boxes of Special Collection material as well as another approximately 50,000 volumes from ZSR.

Progress The shelves are about 65% full.

This is cause for celebration and certainly a reason to pause and be appreciative of all of the hard work that’s been done to get us this far. Still, we know there is that final frontier just out of our reach, (aka, space…in ZSR) and certainly more discoveries to be made.

Scott and Bradley show how its done.

Special thanks to all who worked at the off site facility to date: Erik, Molly, Susan, Tim, Jean-Paul, Travis, Giz, Roz, Kevin, Beth, Leslie, Steve, Kaeley, David, Peter, Patrick, Lynn, Anna, Derrik, Prentice, Katherine, Craig, Cristina, Doris, Audra, Wanda, Rebecca, Barry, Charles, Linda E., Bradley, Megan, Chris, Ellen M., Vicki, Carolyn and of course, Tony, Roddie and Scott. A special thank you to all of you who stepped up to my calls for assistance at the last minute, taking on extra shifts on short notice. And a sincere nod of appreciation for those of you who couldn’t participate at off site, but instead, lent your hand to keeping things afloat in ZSR while your colleagues went off to do this mysterious work. Working with you all, even when the work is hard, is not work at all.