1.2 Million Books in Shannon Library: Here’s What the Numbers Mean

The shelves at the University of Virginia’s Shannon Library are finally full.

Well, almost. Three miles of empty shelf space still remain; the existing collection fills roughly 12 miles.

“Every single day, we’re adding new materials,” Caleb Mechem, UVA Library’s print collection strategist, said. “When we were planning what to bring back from Ivy Stacks, we really wanted to ensure that there is room for growth for new materials over the next five years.”

While UVA’s central library was under nearly four years’ worth of renovation, more than a million books in its collection were moved off-site to the Ivy Stacks, where they could be retrieved by request, or to the adjoining Clemons Library. As staff prepared for Shannon’s reopening in January, they began moving materials back over – everything from academic journals to best-selling fiction.

After about nine months of ferrying the books back to Shannon and Clemons, with staff moving 4,000 books a day in a cherry-picker forklift, the books have found their home – and so will the thousands of Hoos returning to Grounds.

To help readers make sense of the scope of the book move-in project – and everything in Shannon’s collection – UVA Today made this handy infographic for you.