Note: As one of the largest East Asian collections in North America, the U-M Asia Library physical collection includes more than 1 million volumes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language material. Among them, 374,000 volumes are located at the Asia Library stacks at Hatcher Library. It is no easy job to manage such a huge and complex stack space. To highlight the long-term, fruitful partnership between the Asia Library and the Department of Physical Collections and Access, we invited Kelly Goodknecht, Physical Collections and Access Supervisor, who has provided care for the Asia Library stacks for ten years since 2015, to share her experience and insights.
Hello! In this post, I’m sharing a peek into the Asia Library stacks, located on floors 3, 3A, and 4 of the Graduate Library’s North Building. Physical Collections and Access staff have taken care of the Asia Library Stacks maintenance since 1996; prior to that year Asia Library managed the stacks.
So what does it mean to manage the stacks? At the core it’s maintaining the condition of the stacks so that staff and patrons can find the materials they need. There are two main categories: regular ongoing tasks and project based work. Routine tasks are what probably first comes to mind when people think about working with the books–pulling requests, shelving materials, and shelf reading to make sure items are in call number order.
Project based work addresses specific stacks needs. Space is the biggest challenge in managing the stacks because the available amount is finite, and collections always grow. Workflows to address overcrowding require coordination between several groups. Physical Collections & Access staff at Hatcher work with Asia Library selectors to determine weeding criteria specific to the needs of the Asia collections and its users, and then work with Physical Collections & Access staff at offsite locations to transfer materials to the remote shelving facilities. We refer to this process as weeding, but are not actually removing materials from the collection, only changing their shelving location (other libraries often weed for withdrawal).
As a rough estimate of what that looks like in practice, in the last five years there has been an average of 21,000-23,000 new items added to the Asia Library collection each year, and an average of 11,000-13,000 items transferred from the stacks to remote shelving.
Much of this weeding work is ongoing, such as routinely pulling older issues of serials and low use single volume monographs, sending them to remote shelving, and shifting the remaining materials to create space where it’s most needed. Other weeding projects are large scale moves of material to accommodate new collections or renovations of existing spaces.
The partnership between Physical Collections & Access staff and Asia Library staff has been central to the success of stacks changes and material transfers. These are some of the major Asia stacks projects and changes since 1996:
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2003-2007: 144,000 items transferred to the Buhr offsite shelving facility.
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2011: All Asia Library stacks floors reorganized and shifted so that call numbers are in A-Z order, starting from floor 3 to 3A to 4 North stacks.
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2013: Creation of Asia Library Special Collections collection and storage area; 5,500 reels of microfilm moved offsite.
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2020: Backlog of new material due to COVID-19 work disruptions placed in closed stacks.
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2021: Asia Library Reference collection condensed; renovation of the reference room to create the Oka Tadoku room begins.
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2022: Oka Tadoku room opens to the public; selections of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean extensive reading materials shelved in the space.
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2023: Korean language learning collection established on floor 3A.
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2024: Review of PN 6790s (graphic novels); decision to keep partial sets on central campus; workflow established for receiving new titles and retroactively sending volumes of older sets offsite.
Asia Library Stacks Assistant, Huai Zhi Chen retires.
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2025: Welcome new Asia Library Stacks Assistant Yumi Tan.
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Currently: weeding Asia Oversize collection (located at attic space) and Graduate Library Folio collections in preparation for relocating the Asia Oversize collection to the Hatcher Folio room.
Hopefully this has shed some light onto what work goes into maintaining the Asia Library stacks and making the materials discoverable and accessible to users. It takes a lot of time and care to maintain the stacks of one of the largest East Asian collections in North America. Thank you to the Asia Library staff, for being our partners in this work!