A lot of times a book I need is at the Service Center and it takes a day or two for it to arrive. Now, I don’t have a problem with this, but often when I’m perusing the stacks I notice a large number of foreign-language titles. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I can’t imagine there’s a ton of demand for books in, say, Romanian. It seems to me like it would make more sense to stock Perkins with books written in good old English and leave the foreign-language stuff in the Service Center. Am I missing something here? Who determines which books are given shelf space in Perkins and which ones are in the Service Center?
With apologies to The Clash, when considering which materials to move, we realized “if it goes there will be trouble, and if it says it will be double.” In other words, we knew we weren’t going to make everyone happy.
The criteria used initially to assess movement of materials to the Library Service Center (LSC) was the 10 / 10 rule: anything published more than ten years ago that circulated less than ten times would go to the LSC. Of course, you can always request that material you will need frequently be moved back to Perkins/Bostock. And, you do realize there’s a Slavic and Eurasian Studies Program at Duke, don’t you?