Focus on Assessment - Jan 24, 2011

To create easier access to books for our library users, the Access Services Department and the
Arts and Humanities Library (University Park) teamed up in 2010 to relocate one hundred
thousand inches of books from the shelves of central Pattee Library to an annex location. This
project involved several methods of assessment.

A long-term goal of the project is to simplify the arrangement of books and the sequence of call
numbers in central Pattee Library to achieve a more user-friendly shelf arrangement. Another
goal is to enhance the usability of our collections by alleviating the book crowding that existed in
many areas of the central Pattee stacks.

Planning for this project began in 2008, utilizing assessment tools that included facility floor
plans and measurements of shelves and collection density. The planning phase resulted in the
purchase of 33,000 inches of new shelving for room W206 Pattee and relocation of the Arts and
Humanities Library’s current periodicals display to W211 Pattee near the Music and Media
Center. To identify a target number of inches for relocation outside of Pattee Library, additional
assessment tools included data from the Acquisitions and Cataloging Departments related to
numbers of volumes acquired annually, and projections of collection growth from the Collection
Maintenance Unit in Access Services. (Examples of available Acquisitions reports are posted at
https://intranet.libraries.psu.edu/home/acqser/eoyreporting/2009-10firmreceipts.html and
Collection Assessment reports are posted under “Statistics” at
https://intranet.libraries.psu.edu/home/access.html. Staff members in Acquisitions and
Cataloging also generated special reports at our request to support this project.)

To implement the project, librarians in the Arts and Humanities Library developed assessment
criteria with which we identified books and bound volumes of journals for relocation. We began
by consulting the Policy Statement for the Annex Storage Facilities. The Access Services
Department generated several circulation and multiple-copy reports which we used to ensure that
high-use items and those used by classes remained in Pattee Library, while targeting low-use
titles and duplicate copies of books for relocation or withdrawal. Even monographs with low
circulation required assessment. As Linda Musser described in “In-house use data” in the
January 10, 2011 issue of Interview, scholars tend to consult certain works in the library rather
than charge them out, and though these titles have a low circulation history, their importance for
in-house use requires that they remain on site rather than go to storage. Other assessment criteria
included the presence of superseded editions, works in translation, and online availability, for
example via the Hathi Trust, e-journal packages, and open websites. Volumes that demand direct
shelf access for optimal use, such as multivolume sets with complicated indexing, were also
identified for retention in Pattee Library. In the Arts and Humanities Library, each subject
librarian’s knowledge of the disciplinary use of the literature by scholars and the liaison
departments’ curricula contributed to individual decisions to relocate or retain, as well as
consultations in some cases with collegiate faculty in the relevant discipline. We were joined in
this relocation project by our librarian colleagues in the News and Microforms Library, who
contributed decisions for titles in communications, film studies, and journalism.

The volumes that were relocated to a library annex are available to all Penn State library users
via the “I Want It” item request service or the “ILLiad” document delivery service. Between
June and November 2010, one hundred thousand inches of volumes were relocated to a library
annex and an additional three thousand inches were withdrawn, a step toward our goal of a more
user-friendly stacks environment for central Pattee Library. This phase could not have been
accomplished without hundreds of hours of support from staff members in the Arts and
Humanities Library, the Collection Maintenance Unit, and the Departments of Acquisitions,
Cataloging, Information Technologies and Facilities, as well as financial support from the
University Libraries administration. The next step is to reorganize the shelving arrangement of
the remaining books throughout the seven floors of central Pattee Library, from floor B up
through floor 3, into one continuous and logical call number sequence. The Collection
Maintenance Unit in Access Services will measure and map the remaining collections and
implement this phase of the project during 2011.