Update on the Southside Library Collection

The Southside Branch Library collection is growing! We now have 6544 items showing in the catalog and “shelf ready” for the Grand Opening. A couple thousand of these items are gifts that were processed by library staff in-house. These are piled high in boxes in the Technical Services area. The rest of the items are our initial orders from vendors. These are sitting at the vendor warehouses, awaiting shipment until the building is ready for occupancy.

According to our March 6th report, we currently have 12,500 adult titles on order with Baker &Taylor. End of February, our children’s vendor BWI reported that there were approx. 5,000 children’s titles on order. B&T and BWI are our major vendors for the project under the state contract, but we will also be ordering materials from smaller and specialty vendors. Our librarians are busy selecting more titles for fiction and nonfiction, and new orders are sent to the vendors weekly. In addition, we just ordered over 400 new DVDs. We’ve included films from the American Film Institute’s Top 100 List, Academy Award winners, and the highest circulating video titles from our current collection. Library staff will be processing these over the summer.

You will be seeing the Southside copies, with the message "Unavailable" more frequently as you peruse our library catalog. All these bright, shiny, new materials will be available when our Southside Branch Library opens in Fall 2006!