Preparing for a moving experience

In my student days, the cup final and the end of the football season usually served as a cue for the summer diet of examinations to begin.
Nowadays, the football season encroaches further into the cricket calendar and seems to lack a definite completion date.
And to complicate things even further, here at City, almost all the Undergraduate student exams were done and dusted before the cup final even took place this year!

The end of the undergraduate student calendar tends to bring us to a bit of a fallow period in library user activity but it has been a very busy time over the last few weeks as we prepare for a major refurbishment of level 5 of the University Library.
Email messages have been circulated, and our subject librarians have been spreading the word, to tell the University community what's going on. For about 6 weeks from mid-June, most of the book collection housed on level 5 will be put into storage.

There's never a good time to mothball a library collection and inconvenience users by closing an entire floor of the library. The postgraduate student community around the University will find
this particularly frustrating with students working towards dissertation submission deadlines and other cohorts, such as speech therapy students, on placements and facing exams during this period.
So the message we've been putting out is, essentially, try to borrow the books you need before level 5 closes and you can have more than your usual quota of 15 or 20 items as well.

Preparation work has also entailed liaising with the various sub-contractors to make sure disruption is kept to a minimum.
The main activity during the first week of the project (from 11 June) will be removing the old furniture on level 5 and packing the books away for temporary storage. Then electrical work will begin to improve the lighting.
The contractors involved in these jobs have been given guidelines about timing restrictions for noisy work.

We're mindful that Law students will still be using level 4 of the library in good numbers until the Graduate Diploma exams are completed on 23 June.

So plenty happening around the library at the moment - perhaps it's a good thing that there isn't the distraction of a major international football tournament this summer......