Oranging & Shifting

Okay, there are several libraries on the Marshall campus. There’s Government Documents, Special Collections, the Music Library (where I now work), plus the Health Sciences Library, which is actually off-campus, up the street at Cabell Hospital. But, beyond those, there are two main libraries on campus. There’s the Morrow Library, the old library, which students just call “The Stacks,” and there’s Drinko, which is new.
Drinko is an interesting architectural accomplishment; I’ve never seen a building quite like it. It’s actually beautiful, with lots of wide-open space and windows where you don’t expect them to be and hidden stairwells and all that sort of thing. The problem is that the architect went for form over function. It’s a huge building, but there’s an awful lot of wasted space. Wasted space in a library is bad news, as you might imagine.
Anyway, when they built Drinko they went to bring the books over there from Morrow, and discovered that the two buildings had approximately the same amount of shelf space, even though Morrow is a smaller building, and shares its space with Government Documents (exactly what it sounds like) and Special Collections (local and Appalachian works and stuff that would be irreplaceable if it was lost or damaged). So, what they’ve done is, older books and books that don’t circulate as much are in Morrow (along with the vast majority of our print periodicals holdings), and newer and more popular books are in Drinko.
Simple enough, except that every semester a ton of new books come in, and so more stuff is constantly being sent back to Morrow. The first thing that needs to be done is to figure out what’s going, which fortunately was not my problem. Then all the books that are going to Morrow have to have their call-number labels altered.
You can always tell a Morrow book from a Drinko book because the Morrow books have orange stickers over their call numbers. And at the end of every semester, we sat with cart after cart of books that are being transferred and applied those orange stickers to them. The Circulation Staff refers to this job as “oranging,” and it’s actually kind of fun, but seriously time-consuming.
Once all the Morrow books are gone, we have to rearrange the collection in Drinko so that the books are fairly evenly spaced, leaving plenty of room for new arrivals in whatever subject during the coming semester. Then we arrange the Stacks so that there's room for all the stuff we just brought over from Drinko. So, we move millions of books around the shelves and across the campus. This is called “shifting” and it is even more time-consuming and absolutely no fun in and of itself, though it can be fun if you’re with people whose company you enjoy. Both are infinitely better than shelf-reading.