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Permanent off-site storage
program.
Recently the Diamond Law Library
started a permanent offsite storage program for lesser used items.
The initial move of
materials from the basement to an
off-site storage space is virtually
finished. This material comprises
pre-1979 legal treatises from the US
and major common law jurisdictions. Before the move we culled from
that group all items which had circulated at least three times in the
last ten years. We have also been giving the material one last review
before sending it out, and are keeping on site additional material
which, although it hasn't circulated out of the library, would be
awkward to use from an off-site facility, such as multi-volume sets
and selected government documents.
We are also going to move
off-site one small sub-section of the International Law collection
which had already been moved from the 2nd floor to the cellar as
they were low use items. These are mostly
older books on international relations peripheral to international
law. As with the treatises, we are keeping here multi-volume sets and
anything that has circulated 3 or more times.
The records in Pegasus
will clearly show which items are off-site. To request retrieval of a
book, you can ask at the reference desk
or fill out the form
at http://library.law.columbia.edu/bookreq.htm in this website. Items requested before
1:30 P.M. will be available the next
day. Call the Circulation Desk at
854-3922 to inquire as to whether your item has arrived.
This initial stage, which will
encompass about 65,000 volumes, will be all we will move off-site for
the next two to three years. After that we expect to be send roughly
10,000 - 12,000 volumes a year into the one-day retrieval storage
program. This roughly matches our acquisitions rate.
The Greene Hall library space was
designed to accommodate about 700,000 volumes. We now have over a
million volumes in the collection, so you can understand why we've had
to turn to off-site storage.
If you have any questions, please
don't hesitate to let me know.
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Kent McKeever
Director of the Library |
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