Over the past couple weeks, some of my fellow librarians have been using the COVID-19 semi-shutdown to inventory our entire collection and dust all the shelves. They emptied two shelves at a time, cleaned the metal surfaces, and then checked in each and every book. This updates our catalog to let us know when each item was last seen. We can later try to learn the whereabouts of anything not scanned in 2020. It also uncovered a few items that had previously been marked as missing or discarded, but found their way back onto our shelves somehow.
Once the adult fiction section was done, Miss A. began the tedious task of shifting the books so there was a roughly equal gap at the end of each shelf. This allows us to display a book and gives us room to add one or two items that may be presently checked out. This breathing room is essential to managing the ebb and flow of our collection, and it had become haphazard since our massive rearranging of the building in mid-2019.
While Miss A. was starting at Z and accumulating a cart of excess books as she worked backwards through the authors alphabetically, I began consolidating the shelves at A with a goal of creating enough empty shelf space for her surplus somewhere in the middle. It actually worked out fairly well. There will always need to be some ongoing fine-tuning as the collection circulates, but we're better off now than we were before with no shelves crammed completely full and none half-empty.
Soon, I anticipate another round of weeding as we cull the once-popular fiction that has lost its popularity. We try to keep the classics no matter how little they circulate, but Danielle Steel, James Patterson, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Nora Roberts, and the Kellermans don't earn their shelf space when there are so many copies in the district with comparatively few borrowers and frequent courier deliveries for requests.
Maybe library curation isn't as messy as making sausage, but perhaps you were happier not knowing how it works behind the scenes. Sorry!
