Mary Lou Bouley, Catalog and Metadata Librarian | Smith College
Lucinda Williams, Acquisitions Supervisor | Smith College

How does one person reclass 20,000 books from Dewey to LC in one year? They get help! Find out how the Acquisitions and Cataloging Departments at Smith College’s Neilson Library collaborated to get the job done.

Session 1A  |  Full Description:

Smith College’s Neilson Library has been completely gutted. All one million volumes have been relocated to the Five College Annex located 8 miles from campus. Lou and Lucinda will tell the story of how the Cataloging and Acquisitions sections worked together as a team to get 20,000 Dewey books reclassified to LC so they could be returned to the New Neilson.

We will explain the why, the how, and the who of this project, all related to the Library Renovation and the new off-site, high-density storage facility for the Five Colleges. We will walk you through the entire process from determining the collection parameters for items returning to campus, to developing training materials, to enlisting and training staff, to refining the process. We faced and conquered challenges as we learned to navigate our new circumstances with fewer resources immediately available to us.

This isn’t the first collaboration in Discovery Services and it won’t be the last. We will discuss collaboration successes and challenges. We will share the stumbling blocks we encountered throughout the process and how they were overcome. We will explain our expected and actual outcomes and review our next steps. We will leave time for discussion among conference attendees after we share our stories and secrets.