The first floor of the Ross Pendergraft Library is undergoing some substantial changes this summer. In order to modernize our collection, add more study space, and create a more attractive environment, we’re weeding, shifting, moving, and condensing many of our book collections. Here are just a few of the changes already happening or soon to begin on the first floor:
Law Books Are Going…Going…Gone
The first floor of the library used to be the home of many legal materials from the Pope County Law Library. However, most of those books are now out of date, difficult to search, and available online through our LexisNexis database. Therefore, we have removed those items from our library. We still have the Arkansas Code, Acts of the General Assembly of the state of Arkansas, West’s Arkansas cases, and other locally important legal volumes in our Reference Collection. For help locating legal resources, please see the helpful staff at our Reference Desk. Be aware, however, that we do not provide legal advice.
Oversized Books Have Moved Upstairs
The library’s super-sized books, which used to be behind the Reference Collection on the first floor, have moved upstairs to the second floor in the Compact Shelving Area, next to Periodicals. Our regular book shelves just can’t handle these monster-sized behemoths, and so they have to be moved to a separate area. Compact Shelving offers deeper shelves to accommodate the sizes and closer proximity to the rest of the book collection. You’ll find many of our larger art books or graphic novels in this area, but almost any book over 30 centimeters will be found here. In the catalog, these books will appear as the location “OVERSIZED” in the online catalog. Here’s a handy map, pointing the way to their new home: http://library.atu.edu/help/AZ/2-compact_shelving.php
Library employee Darren Dunn grapples with his bibliophobia through exposure therapy
Reference Inches Backwards
We are currently shifting the Reference Collection back where the Pope County Law Library Collection used to reside. These are on the first floor, just around the corner from the Reference Desk. Our Reference Collection contains almanacs, thesauri, specialized encyclopedias, guidebooks, and other items designed to serve as a quick reference and general overviews of most subjects. These books can be used in the library, but they cannot be checked out. This shift is still in progress, so if you can’t find what you are looking for, just ask the friendly (and mostly stationary) staff at the Reference Desk.
Periodicals Consolidated
Since many of our paper periodicals have transitioned to online only formats, searchable in our e-resources page, we have started to consolidate titles closer together. This will allow us to remove the excess stacks in order to expand casual seating. Look for these changes later in the summer. Stay tuned!
For questions about these changes, or about anything else in the library, email your friendly neighborhood librarians. We’ll be here all summer, during our usual summer hours. Keep checking back for more updates as we continue to make changes to the library.
Baden-Powell was born Feb. 22, 1857 in London,