A Moving Experience
Bob Farina, Library Director, Trademark Law Library, shares his thoughts on library moves, complete with original illustration, in this guest post: A MOVING EXPERIENCE. Other recent articles by Bob Farina on the Government Info Pro include: But I Don’t Want To Have a Standard Deviation … (an article on using statistics as a librarian) and The Mentor … Who, Me?! (a piece on supporting the professional development of others).
Bob's articles are always informative and entertaining, so read on....
Managing Your Resources – during a Move!
How many of us have been through this before?! It isn’t fun. It is a challenge and it is exciting, but so is running naked through a rain forest in Borneo – snakes, lizards, frogs, squirrels and lemurs, all of which fly by the way, not to mention bats, orangutans, etc. are best left to those Explorer Island folks. Moving a library can be like that; you never quite know what you’re getting into because it isn’t a “normal” occurrence. If you’re lucky, your library is small, electronic or both. I am so blessed, thank God!
Snakes, Monkeys & Other Beasts …
You will find that much planning goes into the move of any large facility’s resources. However, it has often been my observation that the library is typically an afterthought of executive management when it comes to the logistics of moving and the staging required for the efficient breakdown and build-out of the old and new spaces. Are there turf war issues in your organization? Multiply that by 100 or so as soon as the whisper of a physical corporate move are heard. The weasels become wolverines, worms sprout fangs and spit venom – you have enemies you never dreamed of in your worst nightmares, especially if the size of everyone’s space is being reduced.
If you are a resourceful, thinking librarian, your armor, shield and weapons are your internal corporate alliances, statistics proving the essential nature of your existence, and the good will that you and your staff have generated by marketing all that is good and wonderful about the library and its staff. If you are fortunate enough to be involved in the early planning stages of new space, don’t miss any of the meetings, and before those meetings, hold brainstorming sessions with your staff to be prepared for anything. Be ready to interject ideas for uses of space that are not currently feasible in your existing environment. Will you be doing training? Do you have overhead projection equipment, video workstations, etc. for creating streaming videos or webcasts on your users’ workstations? Is there the possibility for a leisure reading area for your users to sit down and peruse a book or newspaper? What internal groups would be interested in that – your clients, the union (if there is one), your HR department or in-house professional association (attorneys, scientists, engineers, etc.)? Those are your natural allies, so work on them early on, but be smart about it – start garnering support with those that have the most clout throughout the organization. That big gorilla carries a lot of weight!
READ MORE OF BOB'S INSIGHTS ON MOVING A LIBRARY...
But I don’t want to be a pirate …
Realize that nice guys & girls do often finish last. If you make a commitment with another department about cooperating in new space such that you support each other in the planning stages, possibly to the eventual detriment of some other department, don’t flinch when you see that other organization get cut! Honor your commitments and you will be respected for it; back away and suffer the consequences that wounded animals do – snarl, snap, crunch … Don’t give up anything without a fight – no one else will! Compromise like Mitterand so that somehow or another you always seem to expand the empire because it’s good for everybody. Get as much as you can and do as much as you can to prove your point, and no one will ever fault you for your aggressiveness in serving the organization. And remember the most important rule – include your staff in all of your plans and share the treasures with them. Communication in both directions is key to establishing the rapport necessary to be able to work quickly and effectively to set goals and priorities and to achieve the desired accomplishments. Positive results should garner rewards for the whole team.
The Logistics of the Thing
The latest move that I oversaw was for the Trademark Law Library in November 2005. It included moving sliding compact shelving units and their contents - comprised of only about 5,000 volumes and 150 journal titles, plus workstations and equipment for 4 staff members and 7 public workstations, plus a few other odds and ends (file cabinets, stationary shelving units, copiers, etc.). That’s a piece of cake compared to the massive efforts and coordination necessary for our cousins in the larger Patent Office libraries. Nevertheless, the process was quite nerve-wracking due to the coordination and communication necessary for everything to get done quickly with the absolute minimum amount of reference downtime possible. We shut down on Friday afternoon at 5pm and were open for business in the new facility (5 miles down the road) at 9am on Monday morning.
During the course of the previous two weeks, the majority of our collection was bundled up onto storage capacity book carts which were shrink-wrapped. The mover was a library mover (not just a bunch of semi-literate guys with a truck – been there, done that – DON’T!), which allowed us the luxury of making changes to the physical arrangement of the collection in the new space where extra shelving units were placed to accommodate our calculated expansion capacity and re-arrangement of a part of the collection. In addition to tagging the points for the beginning and ends of shelves, we were able to designate how the movers were to rearrange parts of the collection. The shelves were also individually tagged to correspond with the exact ranges that they came from and to match up with the books and periodicals that would re-inhabit that space on down the road. It was a beautiful system done by knowledgeable people who do this for a living. Yet part of it still went wrong and had to be fixed! Luckily, ours is a small collection and the problem was caught in progress before everything was completed. Expect things like that. No matter how small the collection or how expert a mover you have, something will have to be changed at some point; it’s just inevitable. Keep your cool.
And then, there are the little things that go wrong because you are moving into a new, unfamiliar space -- like hallways and doorways that don’t allow for the same turning radius as the big old building you may have come from. Be prepared for everything to stop because the partial tear-down of your shelving units was insufficient to get that puppy down the hallway and around the entryway into your beautiful, nice, new space. The teardown may have to be more complete than anticipated, which means that the build-out will take a little longer too. In our situation, the move of PTO’s entire campus was so large that timetables were constantly having to be reset for construction changes, restaging of furniture and equipment, staff relocations, etc. Relocation is a team effort which means that every so often, especially the farther on down the line you are in the move progression, the more delays and changes you can expect. “You’ve gotta take one for the team” on occasion. My library space had to become a staging area for another group on my floor because the build-out for their area was not completed for them on time. That delay meant that my shelving units were being stacked in pieces on the floor while people were working in workstation cubbies in our library office workspace. Meanwhile, bookcarts were being stored three floors up in our building where no one had yet been scheduled to move in for at least a couple of weeks.
Planned Chaos Reigns
In retrospect, it wasn’t that bad, but only because my staff and I did contingency planning. Having been through this kind of thing before, I got my staff together to decide on what resources were absolutely necessary for us to have access to, should everything go horribly wrong. The Library communicates with the examining attorneys primarily electronically - by email, telephone and fax because there is a large work-at-home program at Trademarks and because all of the files in the office are eventually digitized. Nevertheless, for our purposes, a small paper collection is necessary for some back up materials and for niche products that are not available electronically.
We identified all the hardcopy materials that became our essential ready reference collection. We disciplined ourselves to clean up our Internet bookmarks and made back-up copies of anything of importance on our individual workstations – those things that we could not live without in case of any system failures affecting individual desktop computers. We documented our procedures and processes and made sure that we kept in contact with our clients to let them know how to reach us should any normal communication route go down. We have our library colleagues in the Scientific and Technical Information Center to thank for making sure that we had access to any resources we needed in order to keep operating without skipping a beat, plus we had the valuable support of vendors like LexisNexis, who were ready to provide customer service and systems support should we encounter any snafus in the new space that would cut our “life lines".
Conclusion
In the end, moving/relocation success stories like this, even with those occasional hiccoughs along the way, are all about your most precious resources – your people. Plan well and play nice with everyone you can, but kick butt when it is required in order to get the show on the road at critical points during the move. Coffee and doughnuts go a long way with the guys who are physically moving your stuff, and it gives you the opportunity to let them know that you appreciate what they are doing for you and why it is so important that it be done right. Planning, communicating and strategizing all throughout the process are extremely important in getting to a successful conclusion to this major disruption in your operations. Schmooze your Move Coordinator at every opportunity and remember that you will not have total control over the entire move activity. Make sure you connect with the key players who call the shots in order to get things done the way you would want them done if you could direct all of the activities required to get the job done. In the end, the lions, tigers, bears, flying lizards and the lot will all nestle back into their normal habitats and go back to being the corporate animals you know and love. When it’s all done, get fuzzy and warm with a Library Week Open House!
