After nearly two centuries of building its collection of monographs and journals, the Library’s shelves are at 97% capacity. In the short-term, we have been utilizing any available space to shelve many newly acquired monographs apart from their proper locations. As we reach full physical capacity in the coming years, even this will cease to be an option.
To resolve this dilemma and enable the Library to sustainably evolve its collections and spaces for the long-term future, the Library is embarking on a project to evaluate its general collections and identify approximately 200,000 items that can be withdrawn from the collection while simultaneously minimizing loss of access for Wesleyan researchers.
To accomplish this, we’re evaluating three collections:
For each, we will determine where we have online access to the title, and can thus remove the physical item without researchers’ losing access to the content. We’re confident that by taking this path we can get very close to our targets.
At the same time, we recognize that digital access is not always a one-to-one surrogate for print. So we intend to actively engage with faculty across campus in order to identify those titles whose print volumes should be retained due to the unique research value the print itself embodies.
While withdrawing materials from the Library collections is never our first choice, we do believe that the path we have laid out will achieve an effective balance between the need to make space in the library’s stacks with maintaining the excellent level of access to research materials that Wesleyan researchers currently enjoy.
