Many of you will have noticed the groaning shelves around the library, and our attempts to accommodate the continuous supply of new material. We move things around, we take away lesser consulted items, we remove the very large “a” size material, constantly revisiting and looking for ways in which to give our readers easy access to what they most need. It is not an easy task. Books keep coming, and overflows grow.

In European Collections and Cataloguing we are trying to address this, by looking carefully at what we send to the open shelves. As we catalogue an item, we decide where it should stand, going through a checklist of decisions in our minds. Firstly, should it be borrowable or non-borrowable? Wanting readers to have easy access to an item, we would prefer to make it borrowable where possible, only making it non-borrowable if it were particularly expensive or rare, if it had many plates and illustrations, or if it were either very large or conversely quite slight. Continue reading “Closed or open access – how do we decide?” →