Shifting

I finally finished shifting the Supreme Court collection from the back hallway to the library balcony.  Yay me!
It's something I can look at and say I did that.  It's the whole end of the day accomplishment thing.  You can point to something tangible.  I get the same thrill of pride when I see the Ministry Resource Collection at Divinity. 
The last few days I've been writing for the library.  This place needs a Mission statement and values really badly.  A collections policy wouldn't hurt either.  You wouldn't believe the number of dupes we have.  I'm trying to stop the flood of duplicate outdated books that come in.
Plus they don't really match what we do anymore.  Not that the historical perspective is bad, but no one uses those books, as far as I can tell, and we only have so much room in the place.
If I learned one thing at Yale it's that the library has to support the mission of the people/institution that use the place.  And that the collection development needs to match that mission and educational needs. 
So far this library doesn't.
It did years ago, but now it's been lost or stuck in the past while the seminar moved ahead.
I hope to help fix it.  I made a start by going over the new publication catalogs we get.  Yesterday I highlighted a bunch of books from Oxford University Press Spring history catalog.  They had some timely and topical materials for the Seminar.
It would be nice to get some of them in for the shelves and sessions.  I have 3 other catalogs that I went through.  Not as much as OUP, but some are things that, if I had the budget and the authority, I would order for the place in a heartbeat.
Since I don't I handed it off to the program directors so they can order things.  I'm putting the other three catalogs in boxes as well.