Theme I:
ON BROOKLYN’S GREEN FIELDS:
The Paging Operation

·  The Inventory Project

To keep the cost and size of the Field Library within reasonable parameters, the College decided that the circulating collection (some 700,000 volumes) would be housed on its second floor in a compact, closed-stack area and paged for readers on demand. To ensure that every book represented in the online catalog would be available for use--that readers would not request lost or missing books--the Library conducted an Inventory Project, at the end of which the catalog accurately reflected the collection.

The Inventory Project was completed early in 1999/2000 and was fully described in last year’s annual report. Lost materials were either reordered or withdrawn from the Library catalog. Without question, the Inventory Project has made a huge difference in speed of service and reader satisfaction while we are in temporary quarters. We were pioneers in both methodology and intent, and the Library staff (particularly those in Technical Services and Access Services), our partners at CUNY central, and the College administration (who enthusiastically supported the Project) can be justifiably proud of this achievement. 

·  The Paging Operation: How It Worked and What It Cost
Readers would acknowledge that the biggest service change related to the Library’s move to temporary quarters was the paging of the circulating collections, some 700,000 volumes.

Over the course of the fall semester 1999, 39 work-study students were hired as pagers. Work-studies are a valuable and highly-sought commodity at Brooklyn College, and it was not easy to obtain so many new students, on top of the substantial number the Library already employed: careful coordination with the office of Financial Aid was required. Carol McLoughlin and Robert Litwin handled the direct supervision of the paging operation. Each student worked an average of 12 hours a week, allowing three pagers each hour the Library was open. Since many students could not begin working until mid to late September, our shelving crew performed much of the initial paging. The pagers worked a total of 7,995 hours and $43,608 of work-study award money was spent on the operation, plus $36,000 in temporary services funds (we could not hire enough work-studies to staff the operation completely). 

·  Reader Satisfaction

In the Field Library, books were paged for readers within 5-10 minutes of a request’s submission, and we received rave reviews for the service. Comments such as, “Excellent service”; “I prefer this paging service to retrieving my own books”; and “Very fast and efficient” abounded. 

·  Paging from LaGuardia Community College

Starting in the spring semester, 2000, we also paged older periodical materials housed remotely at LaGuardia Community College (LGCC), using $7,250 provided by the College administration for this purpose. (In the fall 1999, before funding for the service was available, we obtained via interlibrary loan or document supply items that could have been paged from LGCC.)

The LGCC paging operation went well: we paid staff in the LaGuardia library to retrieve our materials, then fax the requested articles to us. Readers submitted requests both in Roosevelt and the Field Libraries, and all were filled within the established time frame of four working days. 

·  Lessons Learned
It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary ... or, For That Matter, to the Field Library saw immediately that it was critical for the Library’s two largest temporary sites, Field and Roosevelt, each to have librarians to assist students, and that professional and support staff alike must be highly knowledgeable about which services and collections were available where: to send a student from Roosevelt to Field (for example) for reference help, then back to Roosevelt where the needed materials were housed, did not represent good service. This meant that it was necessary to establish two reference desks--the real Reference desk in the Field Library, and a second de facto reference desk in the Government Publications & Microforms area in Roosevelt staffed by Jane Cramer and adjunct librarians.

Lost in the Wilds of the Library of Congress We learned some rather sobering lessons about the degree to which college students understand Library of Congress cataloging and subject headings. In our new closed-stack environment, the popular tack of identifying one useful title, then browsing the neighboring stacks for similar items, was no longer an option. And, since students are busy and practical persons, they quickly determined they were unwilling to wait even ten or fifteen minutes for materials to be paged, unless the materials retrieved were guaranteed to be relevant to their research.

This well-reasoned approach meant more work for both Circulation staff and Reference librarians, as students asked hundreds of questions about how to locate materials in CUNY+, how to interpret Library of Congress catalog records, how to identify the elements they had to record on the paging request forms, and how to comprehend and use Library of Congress subject headings.

A student writing a paper on Vietnam will not know which of the hundreds of subject headings that begin with this term will yield materials relevant to his or her topic--Vietnam–History–1945-1975? Vietnam–Politics and government–1945-1974? Vietnam–Relations–United States? And what of the many subject headings beginning with some version of Vietnam, or with Vietnam buried inside them--Vietnamese conflict? Sino Vietnamese conflict? Cambodian Vietnamese conflict? And these subject headings are only a few possibilities.