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EMC’s regular collection of music CDs and films on DVD is open to the public. But since we don’t have enough space for all CDs and DVDs, we keep the rest in two reserves. One reserve is in a small room in the EMC space, with CDs and DVDs, and the second is in a bigger room next door, and that reserve has CDs and other materials from other departments (books, artworks, materials for programming, shelves, etc.).

Materials in the reserve have a yellow sticker on them, so in that way we know to shelve them back in the correct space when they come back. And of course, in the catalogue, their location is marked in reserve.

It’s my first time working with the reserve. In my previous library, we didn’t have it. All the books and magazines were open to the public.

Reserves allow the mediatheque to hold more materials, so the offer is bigger. It’s great for the users, but also for the institution, allowing bigger possibilities for storing, archiving, and guarding materials.

But it comes with a price. There is a discussion between the librarians about the fact that yes, we have more materials, but they're on the side, almost invisible to users; they can only find them in the library catalog. Many people browse and judge the materials by cover or remember about an artist as they stumble on them. Reserves remove this possibility.

The mediatheque is buying video game consoles, and the plan is to install them in the small room in the EMC, so at the end of May we decided to shift materials from the small reserve to the bigger reserve and, in that way, unite all the materials in one place.

To do that, we had to build more shelves on the wall. My colleague A collaborated with our technician to measure and purchase shelves before we began the installation process. We were drilling holes, installing shelves, and then shifting materials. We shifted some standing shelves from the small reserve, and I’m happy to say that we had space for everything, and there is still a little bit of space left.

While shifting the materials, we realised we had a lot of them. There will need to be a weeding session soon. I found some potential candidates, like CDs with war effects like cannons, shooting, etc. I need to check the stats, but it was probably not circulating for a long time. I think this was useful before for filmmaking, but now there are more materials available online or in some specialised institutions. But I’m running too quickly; we will discuss this later, when the job comes.

So, the operation reserve is successfully completed, opening new possibilities and projects. And I really liked working in a team with my colleagues, getting closer to them, and building a community.