Migrating Collections

Here's a report from the stacks courtesy of Reference Services head Victoria Carlquist.

If you’ve been in the nonfiction or reference stacks at the Ridgefield Library lately, you’ve undoubtedly wondered what in the world had happened to the reasonable organization of the books on the shelves. And then there’s all that yellow caution tape.

This is what’s going on. We are in the process of reorganizing our collection, and unfortunately this means a bit of chaos until the switching around is complete.

For years we have shelved the reference books (those which do not circulate) in the room behind the Reference desk and the nonfiction circulating collection in the main room of the Library. When looking for nonfiction books, most people tend to peruse only the shelves in the Library’s main room, thereby missing reference materials on the same subjects. Combining the two collections in the main room will make finding more information easier. The reference books are clearly marked on the spines, which we hope will limit confusion.

In order to provide space for the interfiled collections, we needed to move something to the shelves in the reference room, and the biography collection got the nod. So look for Teddy Roosevelt, Anne Boleyn and other favorite historical figures in their new home.

For those of you who are used to finding the business/financial materials in the reference room, they will continue to be there. Multi-volume sets of biographical, art, music, and science encyclopedias will also be found there, as well as the language learning materials.

So please excuse our temporary migratory movement. Hopefully it will not take long for everything to settle into normalcy again. By the way, we interfiled reference and circulating material in Children’s Services some months ago, and this system seems to work well for information-gathering Ridgefielders of all ages!