Where's the Library?

Wow, we haven't posted anything since October!  That just goes to show how busy we've been this year.  Our library is undergoing a major renovation and the entire school year up until now has been dedicated to preparing for construction.  We've had countless meetings about shelving, about what the new reference desk is going to look like, about how the new media classroom will be used, about how we want the cabinets in our new offices to look.  We've debated endlessly the best way to pack 10,000 books into boxes, and where to store them for the summer, and how to arrange them when they're unpacked again.  When the construction deadline was moved up from the end of the school year to spring break, we sprang into high gear with a solid month of weeding, desperate pleas to return books, inventory, the physical packing of the 10,000 books, and the packing and moving of our offices from our spacious library to an itty bitty conference room.  Whew!

Takin' out the trash; gettin' stuff done.

 Our biggest project, of course, was the actual packing and moving of our collection.  We closed the library completely to students and staff and dedicated a week for packing.  We did this ourselves, with the help of parent volunteers, using boxes provided by the moving company that was also packing and moving the science wing below us.  We divided the library into sections--graphic novels, fiction, nonfiction 001-399, nonfiction 400-899, nonfiction 900s, reference desk materials, yearbooks, and magazines (we have large bound editions of LIFE and American Heritage magazines from the 1940s and 50s).  We packed the boxes in shelf order to make it easier when we unpack.  Filling the boxes was occasionally a tricky problem, though--book sizes, especially in the arts and history sections, vary greatly!  We worked in three-person teams:  One person removed the books from the shelf and handed them to person number two, who made sure the box was filled completely and in shelf order.  Person number three taped and moved the boxes as we went, and made sure empty boxes were labeled properly (with color-coded tags reading "fiction box 5" or "400-899 box 23") and close at hand.  Using this method, we packed almost 10,000 books in less than three days.  Our final breakdown was as follows:

• 10 boxes of graphic novels
• 32 boxes of fiction
• 6 boxes of yearbooks
• 28 boxes of magazines
• 57 boxes nonfiction 001-399  
• 75 boxes nonfiction 400-899
• 100 boxes nonfiction 900s
• 1 box reference
• plus an additional 10 boxes of various workroom materials and odds and ends (board games, workbooks, books that were returned late that will need to be shelved when we unpack, etc.)

Lizz and Sean pack the fiction collection

When all the books were packed, we had a big room full of empty shelves with stacks of hundreds of boxes lining the walls. 

The boxes were moved to the gymnasium, where they will be stored until the new library is completed in the fall.  

While we packed out offices, the movers took down the shelving, removed all the furniture, and stripped the library bare.  The library's last official act took place the day before spring break, when we used the space to collect the laptops from the freshmen and sophomore classes for repairs and reimaging over spring break.

Now, with break over and school back in session, the construction company has put up a wall where the hallway to the library used to be.  

We won't see our library until school starts again until August, when it will look very different and be much improved!