Staff changes

Our kind and committed languages liaison librarian, and Arts and Humanities Team Leader, Anna Beasley retired this August. Our experienced and learned Law Librarian since 1974, and Social Sciences Team Leader, Ian Sainsbury,  is retiring in September 2010. We wish then both well with their respective plans to enjoy homes, families and world travel.  We are fortunate to have already been able to replace Ian, and expect great things from an equally well-qualified successor, Ross Connell. (Note that we do not subscribe to nepotism as Ross is no relation to his Faculty Team Leader and office companion, Gordon Connell ). We are also glad to be able to promote our own Charlie Carpenter to Liaison Librarian, covering Karen Drury’ s maternity leave. Jonathan Jones takes up Charlie’s Trainee Liaison Librarian post supporting Classics and Philosophy, also this September.

Collections Project 2009-2013

Our ambitious project to re-profile Library collections to better meet users’ needs, and address space issues, moves on apace:

• We joined UK Research Reserve this year, and have submitted the first list of journal volumes we’re withdrawing from stock. The list represents 264 linear metres of journals.

• Work continues on our review of books and serials as we make decisions about which items to withdraw (8% of books so far), relegate to closed access storage (now at 6%), or keep at/move to Main Library. (From Summer 2011 academic activity leaves Bulmershe campus and our library there will close). So far over a third of all our books have been reviewed, and roughly 35% of those books requiring changes have been processed. Shelf space ‘saved’ at Main Library amounts to over 1.5 km so far. We will use it for easing tightly shelved areas, accommodating Bulmershe stock and for additional study space.
• The lease for a new off-campus store was signed in June 2010. We plan to start filling it with lesser used research material from November, following shelving installation.
• This summer we switched some books and journals between floors at Main Library with a view to later creating a more user-friendly, numerical sequence of Dewey numbers from our 2nd to 4th Floors. We moved about 300 shelves of material although we had to move 2,050 shelves to enable this.  It certainly gave us a taster of the larger scale moves next year.
  

Rachel Redrup
Marketing Co-ordinator, University of Reading Library