How to Move a Mountain: The Preparation and Transfer of One Million Volumes to an Off-Site Storage Facility

In late 2013, Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame embarked on an audacious journey to renovate its iconic fourteen-story building. Driven by an immediate pressing need to reduce the footprint of physical collections in the library, a massive project commenced in the fall of 2014 to prepare approximately one million volumes for transfer to an off-site high-density mobile shelving storage facility. The project was carried out in two large phases that involved coordination of work and schedules between the renovation committee, vendors, and multiple library teams, including the Collections Preparation Team that was responsible for ensuring that all items moving off-site had accurate catalog records and were barcoded. This article provides background information about putting the project together and describes how the work to prepare titles for transfer was organized and completed under a very short deadline. This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Serials Librarian on July 13, 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0361526X.2018.1428476