The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2014.

What gives you joy? That is what you should do, and what you should have. It determines what you should buy. Keeping tidy is easy: eliminate that which does not give you joy (an excellent argument for divorce, as well). Books are among the most difficult items to let go, because they 1) retain function and 2) contain information, giving them long shelf-life. They retain ‘value’, and the potential for joy, very well. But do you love this individual volume enough to keep it forever?

Among more than fifty paperbacks that didn’t make it are Tolkien, Steinbeck, Conrad, Kipling, Freud, Herman Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry James: cheap classics, most of which can be had from Project Gutenberg if ever wanted again. That leaves only 1200 or so to disappear en route to Kondo’s ideal collection size of between thirty and one hundred volumes.

Yeah, books are hard to let go.

[cross-posted at www.whateverettreads.blogspot.com/]

Deselection, again

Originally published in ALLUNY Newsletter (39.1),
http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/alluny/2014-01spring.pdf

In my last column, I wrote about the law library as a social space.  Before that was even published, I got word that not only would we not be getting comfortable chairs, we would be moving the library to a much smaller space.  This is a drastic, but reasonable, change for our firm.

A law firm library is unlike other law libraries.  We collect for a specific purpose—to support the practices of our attorneys—rather than in a comprehensive way.  History does matter, but not much: for what isn’t available through our database subscriptions, we rely on others, with more archival missions, to collect.  And finally, we are subject to the profit motive.  This isn’t to suggest that the library is a profit center, but we must be mindful that our space costs money, our books cost money, multiple copies of books costs even more money, and our databases allow for billing back usage costs to clients.

My job as a private law firm librarian is to provide timely access to accurate information in the most convenient, cost-effective way possible.  With multiple offices across several states, that means databases.  They are updated immediately, allow multiple concurrent users, and don’t require multiple copies for each office.

So the management committee has determined that our space can be better utilized as additional offices and conference rooms.  Our new space would be approximately one-third the current arrangement, and this would allow far fewer materials to be shelved.  I needed to begin culling my collection immediately.

Some of the decisions were easy.  Most of the deselected items hadn’t circulated for at least five years, and many hadn’t been updated in that time.  Large sets, like the NYCRR, which 1) cost a lot to maintain, 2) take lots of space, 3) are available for free online, and 4) can never be truly current, were among the first to go—along with shelves and shelves of New York case reporters that were housed in the basement.  Old hornbooks, outdated treatises, and back issues of periodicals were next.  The US Code and FCR, both available from the GPO website, freed another full run of shelves.  Digests, the NY Juror 2d, and a second set of McKinney’s Consolidated Laws also disappeared.  All told, the books we discarded left a stack of circulation cards nearly six inches high.

What did we keep?  Practice materials, mostly. Treatises, formbooks, and specialized case reporters from CCH. Historical material that is otherwise not online, like our Session Laws, Attorney General opinions, and Comptroller opinions collections. Local laws. Titles directly related to our current practice areas, or with particular enduring value. And some not available from our database provider because they’re published by the other vendor.

I am a librarian by trade, and an archivist by nature.  Tossing thousands of dollars into a dumpster is not my idea of fun, but I am better positioned to make these choices than anyone else in the firm.  I  know what materials we have online; I know what materials my attorneys actually use (as opposed to what they SAY they use); I know that keeping dated materials on the shelf so the shelf looks full will tempt one of them to use it without checking its currency, leaving him open to malpractice.  Clearing these shelves is an extinction event: the books are gone, and there is no bringing them back. Our library is now, of necessity, a lean, mean, internet using system, and our attorneys will need to adjust. On a more positive note, though, all that free shelf space has allowed me to start a DVD lending collection—so even in a reduced space, more people have reason to visit the new library.

Acquisitions

Originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 37.1, March 2012.

Spring is here, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of …baseball? And more importantly, to preparing for the season’s fantasy team draft.  Now, a sports fan knows that nothing is as interesting as his fantasy team, and nothing is so boring as someone else’s team, so let me assure you, this isn’t about my team—not really. I’m writing about resource selection and strategy, which as the New York Times best-seller and Oscar-nominated Moneyball showed, is the real business of baseball, just as it is for libraries.

A bit of background, first. In fantasy baseball, players build teams by selecting rosters of actual Major League players, whose statistical records in several categories are compiled and ranked.  The top-ranked team, based on these stats at the season’s end, wins.  A great player, like Albert Pujols, can contribute mightily to several categories, while one like Coco Crisp may only contribute to one.  So, obviously, Pujols is worth a lot more—and while we all want to choose Pujos, only one can have him.  Strategy is required to make up that value in other ways.

One other note: some leagues start fresh each year, with all players available to everyone in the draft.  Mine has been together more than ten years, though, and decided long ago that for the sake of continuity, each team would be able to ‘keep’ a number of players from one year to the next.  The guy who got Pujols wouldn’t have to give him up, and would have a big advantage each year.

But how does this relate to the library?  Each season, I need to re-evaluate my roster. I need to decide who I want to keep, and who I want to draft, to build the best collection of talent, for my strategy, that I can afford.  Isn’t that just like collection development?

So how would we build a resource team now, if preparing to draft materials?   Perhaps we start by ‘keeping’ those that provide the most value: big hitters like Lexis, Westlaw or Bloomberg are all-around players like Pujols: very hard to replace, and you’ll probably only get one—then examine what else you need to provide a competitive roster within the remaining budget.  If I support a strong energy practice, maybe I should draft an energy-law newsletter this year instead of renewing the bankruptcy report that has been unused for years—that one isn’t helping my team win now.  Will it be better to subscribe to a business-development resource, or will a particular treatise in IP allow my attorney to win more cases and thus bring in new business via enhanced reputation?

And, like baseball, these competitive decisions will change through the season.  That expensive real-estate treatise we had to have for a particular matter? The case is over—canceling the updates is like dropping an injured player so he can be replaced with one who contributes now.  Constant review, coupled with a strategy for maximizing resource value, is the key to building both a successful fantasy team and a useful library.

Deselection

Originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 36.1, March 2011

Most of us became librarians because we love books—love reading them, buying them, discussing them—collecting them and, eventually, realizing we have too many of them.  Acquisitions are the most exciting part of librarianship, after all, and there is always something missing from a collection, but at some point we just run out of shelf space.

We encountered this problem while I was at the University of Michigan’s Undergraduate Library (the UgLi, an appropriate abbreviation if you’ve seen the building).  When built, the UgLi was intended to be a model collection for any undergraduate institution, consisting of the 100,000 most important titles.  This wasn’t an arbitrary number, but one based on the average holdings of a typical liberal arts college and meant to ensure that, no matter an institution’s size, it would provide an appropriate collection for a solid education; if a UMich student needed more, he could walk next door to peruse the five-million plus volumes in the Graduate Library.  Yet after fifty years, during which acquisition librarians tried to maintain currency and relevancy of their collections, the UgLi was now stuffed to over-flowing, with closer to 300,000 volumes in the catalog.

My assignment was developing criteria for our student shelvers to apply in an initial pass through the collection.  Books culled at this stage would get several additional screenings; only those rejected at every step would ultimately be discarded.  For the students, we wanted easy, binary choices.  We had originally selected all of these titles, so quality was no concern—but currency and usage were: we wanted only the most current, and most requested, material.  To achieve this, I built a decision tree, with any ‘yes’ answer meaning a book stayed on the shelf.

The questions: Is the book less than ten years old?  If no, open the book.  Has it been checked out in the past two years?  If no, has it been on course reserves in the past five years?  If no, place it on the culling cart for additional screening.  These three questions address the currency and perceived value of each item, bringing those which are questionable to light.

Next, subject librarians examined the culled items to insure that nothing of seminal importance, the absence of which could compromise a collection’s credibility, was up for withdrawal.  After that, students checked remaining titles against the University catalogue; any unique titles, with no other holdings, were immediately transferred to the Graduate Library.  Books still marked for weeding were then corralled in a holding pen, where selectors from other University libraries had the option of claiming them for transfer.  Only if rejected at every step of the process would a book finally make it to the University book sale, then finally the recycle bins behind the loading dock where, after dark, some sad student might go digging for treasure.

A law library—even an academic one—is of course very different from the UgLi.  For starters, most of our clients wear more than pajamas when they visit.  But the lessons are transferable: when weeding, objectives must be clear; non-arbitrary criteria must be developed to support them; all potentially-affected clientele must be considered.  The UgLi was only interested in the monograph collection; we have additional considerations, as well.  How do print materials relate to, or duplicate, digital collections?  Are we comfortable leasing information via databases, or do we need an archival print copy?  What can we afford, and what do we do about print material no longer kept current?  Each answer is part of the decision and each decision deserves consideration, because mistakes can’t be un-shredded.