Breaking Down a Collection, Building Up Community

The Pennsylvania State University Engineering Library is undergoing a major transformation. In October 2021, PSU announced that the Engineering Library would move to the Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building, a new construction set to be completed by Fall 2024. However, there was a catch to receiving a new space: we will not be taking our collection with us. The new Engineering Library will be bookless, except for our reserve and reference collections. Faculty and staff sprung into work to prepare for our move to a new building and a new service model. The most important factor in preparing for this move was what to do with the over 30,000 books in our collection that we cannot take with us. After three and a half years of hard work, the Engineering Library successfully emptied our stacks in March 2024. By the end of the project, approximately 12,850 items were redistributed to other PSU libraries on the University Park campus and to other campuses across the commonwealth and 24,660 items were deselected from our collection to be donated or recycled. While losing a collection and gaining a new space has been a bittersweet journey, the process had an unforeseen consequence: community building.

Departmental Community

The Engineering Library is a part of the STEM Branch Libraries Department at the University Park campus. In preparation for this change, the Engineering Library employees relied on institutional knowledge and support from the other libraries in the STEM department. Engineering Library employees worked most intimately with the STEM employees at the Pattee and Paterno Library, as this library received over 10,000 items from our collection. Monthly meetings and nearly daily communication between the two libraries forged strong relationships that allowed for the clear communication, strong collaboration, and mutual trust that resulted in a .01% error rate when transferring items.[1] As the PSU STEM Libraries prepare for any future collection changes, they can continue to draw on the relationships and workflows established during the Engineering Library collection move.

University Wide Community

The Engineering Library asked for help from every library location at Pennsylvania State University. Items in the Engineering Library collection were offered to other PSU library locations across the commonwealth. When library locations accepted items, employees worked closely together to ensure the accurate and timely transfer of items. Additionally, the Engineering Library conducted a university wide search for every lost item in our collection. The cooperation of every library location allowed for the Engineering Library to be fully confident in the accuracy of our holdings during this time of drastic change. Furthermore, Engineering Library employees relied on the knowledge and expertise of collection maintenance, cataloging, and library IT services departments (to name a few).

Engineering Move Party

The collaborative spirit of the Engineering Collection move culminated in Spring 2024. By March, the Engineering Library had deselected, donated, recycled, and relocated every item in our collection, except for the approximately 10,000 items that were scheduled to move to the Pattee and Paterno Library. In order to pack and process the vast number of items, the Engineering Library called upon our library community for help. Volunteers from PSU library locations across the commonwealth gathered on the first Monday of Spring Break, to help us move our collection in a “Goodbye” Moving Party. Our enthusiastic, meticulous, and diligent volunteers exceeded our expectations: the Engineering Library packed all 10,000 items by the end of the day.

After three and a half long years, the Engineering Library has whittled our collection down from 30,000+ items to a few hundred reference and reserve items. This monumental task could not have happened without the support from across the commonwealth. In the process of moving our collection, the Engineering Library faculty and staff grew closer not only to our departmental partners, but to the entire library community. In our new location, the Engineering Library is primed to continue to develop the communication, trust, and collaboration we have curated across our library community.

Katie Woods
Engineering Collection Move Project Manager
Library Services Associate — Penn State University Libraries
MSLIS, expected May 2024

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[1] When moving over 10,000 items to the Pattee and Paterno Library, employees only missed processing one item that stuck to another in transit. This item was quickly found and the error fixed.