2014-06 Boston Public Library report

ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries
ALA Annual Report, June, 2014
Boston Public Library
Catherine J. Willis, Chief of Technical and Digital Services
Since I just recently joined the “Big Heads” group, this is my first report to the members.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend this year’s meeting, but my colleague Robert
Cunningham has agreed to take my place at the table.
In this first report, I would like to provide some background information about the Boston Public
Library and speak briefly about our current organization and recent activities.
THE LIBRARY
AND ITS
LEADERSHIP
The Boston Public Library was established in 1848 and was the first municipally funded public
library in the United States. The library was also the first to establish a branch library and the first
to have a separate Children’s Room with open shelves which allowed the children to browse the
collection independently.
The Boston Public Library has been an accredited Research Library for many years. The library’s
collection of more than 23 million items includes outstanding and expansive collections of books,
maps, manuscripts, letters, Government Documents, drawings, and other original works dating
back as early as the 10th century. More than 100,000 historical texts, maps, photographs,
manuscript pages, etc. have been digitized in the Boston Public Library labs and uploaded to the
Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America, and flickr. In addition to the numerous
online databases, journals, and ebooks, available, we have recently begun to offer streaming
movies, television programs, music and spoken recordings. All these e-resources are available
free to any library card holder in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Past presidents of the BPL include many famous librarians including:
• Charles Coffin Jewett, who was a strong advocate of descriptive, alphabetical catalogs of
items in a library
• Justin Winsor, the founder of ALA
• Herbert Putnam, who went on to become the Librarian of Congress for 40 years
Our current leadership includes Amy Ryan, president, Michael Colford, Director of Library
Services, and David Leonard, Director of Administration and Technology.
CATALOGING – SPECIAL PROJECTS
The Boston Public Library has not yet finished the retrospective conversion of its older materials.
We still have millions of titles that need to be added to our online catalog and OCLC. Every year
I receive funding to outsource this work and I have added an average of 150,000 titles each year.
This year I have split the money up and while most of it is going toward “regular” materials, I
have created two mini-projects which will culminate with MARC records for two of our special
collections:
The first is the Joan of Arc Collection. Joan of Arc was an historic figure, religious icon, and
female warrior and is represented in about 7,000 monographs and 3,000 artifacts related to her
life. The material includes early Latin and French texts, histories, biographies, plays, novels,
poetry, scores, and children’s books.
The second is the John Merriam Collection of children’s books which include illustrations by
famous and important artists. The materials in this collection have never been cataloged so the
vendor is working with the actual books and will return them fully cataloged and processed.
PRESERVATION / DIGITAL SERVICES
We at the Boston Public Library have focused much of our preservation dollars on conserving,
cataloging and digitizing some of the library’s collections of distinction. Recent projects included
close to 6,500 individual manuscripts from the library’s large collection of Anti-Slavery
Materials. All of the letters written by and sent to William Lloyd Garrison have been fully
cataloged by BPL Catalogers, digitized, and made discoverable online and we are working on the
remaining 33,500 items in that collection. We have already completed the cataloging and
digitization of our Revolutionary War manuscript Collection.
We are also still working on the extensive Thomas Pennant Barton Collection of Shakespeare.
This collection was the first in the United States to include the first four folios of the collected
works of William Shakespeare, as well as some 45 early quarto editions of individual plays, many
published during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
My favorite completely cataloged and digitized collection is the John Adams Library which
includes nearly 3,000 volumes collected by Massachusetts native and the second President of the
United States, as well as hundreds of additional volumes donated by friends and family members
during the 19th century. The complete collection of printed books and pamphlets totals more than
1,900 titles and 3,500 volumes. Adams liberally annotated his books, and beside a passage in
which the author (who was a woman) advocated for more freedoms for women, Adams wrote:
“This woman is an idiot!”
Perhaps my favorite single digitized item is: True Copie of the Court Booke of the Governor
and Society of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (1628-1645) Check it out:
https://archive.org/details/truecopieofcourt00barl
MAJOR RENOVATION
The Johnson Building, which comprises half of the Central Library campus in Copley Square, is
being completely renovated. This in itself is a major undertaking, but the fact that the Johnson
building houses most of the circulating collection at the Central Library means that this
construction has disrupted many things, put most importantly where we shelve our materials.
Every nook and cranny in the beautiful McKim building (the Research Library half of the Central
Library Campus) is now the temporary home to popular fiction, DVDs, CDs, and circulating
items classed in the M’s and N’s (music and fine arts). Of course, this project was preceded with
a major weeding project which was ably handled by the Technical Services staff. But even after
significant weeding, not all items could be moved into the McKim building. Consequently, we
had to move some of the lesser used items to our new off-site storage facility.
Which leads me into my next topic . . .
REMOTE STORAGE FACILITIES
I am currently managing the closing of two of our old remote storage facilities and opening a
new, state of the art facility with high density shelving and the ultimate in climate control. This
was not just simply a physical move – the situation required much more work.
The materials stored in the two old warehouse style buildings were in very poor shape and each
item needed to be physically cleaned and some also needed to be treated for pests and possibly
even mold. While all these items were cataloged years ago and had spine labels, only some of
these items were barcoded and consequently, only those items had MARC records in our online
catalog. The high density storage shelves meant that items would be shelved by size, not call
number. The success of the project required that every item be barcoded and entered into a
“locator system” (developed by W.B. Meyers) so that retrieval would be possible.
While the project is still in progress, the end is in sight and the result will be that every item will
be physically cleaned, barcoded, entered into the locator system and shelved on the high density
shelves. To date, there are over 1.2 million items shelved.
Even though the Meyers staff is still busy cleaning, barcoding and shelving items, my staff are
already retrieving shelved items when requested. Once all the items are shelved, this facility will
be open to researchers and a Reference Librarian will be available by appointment.
The nifty thing is the way I developed the functional requirements for the locator system.
Without going into a long technical description of all the details, the bottom line is that at the end
of the project, all these items will also be reflected in our online catalog. If anyone is interested in
the details, please let me know.
To help everyone better understand the scope of this project, I have included several photos which
show the project at various stages.
Pallets showing cartons of books and loose volumes of bound serials. There was no order to the
materials on these pallets.
A wider shot showing some of the pallets of materials to be shelved in our high density shelving.
There was so much to bring in from our two old buildings, this room was constantly being
emptied and then refilled with new pallets and bins of materials to be shelved.
This view shows the sad condition of many of our bound serials. After cleaning and
decontaminating, all the loose (and fragile) newspapers were double wrapped, barcoded, and
labeled with the title, call number, enumeration and chronology.
This is a view of the high density shelving before we started shelving items. There are 54 aisles
(108 rows of shelves) in this room alone. Once the pallet room (seen in previous images) is
emptied, additional high density shelving will be constructed there.
To me, this is beautiful!
Here is a close-up of some shelves of monographs and the labeling needed for successful
retrieval. Each item has an specific “address” which is used to identify its exact location. The
address is basically the aisle/row number, range number, shelf number, and box number.