by Martha Tancock
Trent Communications

By next spring, 6,000 books on the shelves behind Peter Robinson College librarian Jodi Aoki will be gone -- and not to Bata Library -- to relieve the load on Sadleir House's old beams.

Open the door to the Harry Hobbs Memorial Library in Sadleir House next spring and you might be able to see the north wall fireplace. Next term, librarian Jodi Aoki will be culling 6,000 books from the 10,000-volume collection. A daunting task, but necessary to relieve the load on joists and beams built to bear only the weight of a few easy chairs.

        Before the weeding begins, a subcommittee of Peter Robinson College (PR) council must decide on a collections policy, which will give Aoki the direction she needs to remove the 6,000 books.

        Most of the books are duplicates of the Bata collection. Bata librarians have declined to take them because they "didn't feel it would warrant the time required to go through 6,000 books to find those that aren't duplicates," says Aoki. She estimates it will take six weeks full time just to delete the 6,000 from Bata's electronic catalogue TOPCAT. That doesn't include the time it will take to decide which ones to pull.

        A new collections policy will also provide guidelines for managing and developing the collection in the future. The original mandate of the library is "foggy," Aoki says. Since it opened in Trent's earliest days, the two-room library on the east side of the first floor of the Victorian house has operated as a general library. But it gradually began to accumulate books that reflected the activities of faculty at the downtown college.

        The college had three options after architectural and engineering consultants said the weight of the books could damage the building: close the library, move the library or remove some books. To reinforce the floor would impinge on seminar rooms and offices below. The four free-standing shelves in the centre of the west room would have to be removed, leaving only the ones along the walls, where there is more structural support, for the remaining collection.

        The library was not always this full. Nor was it this big. Harry Hobbs, a student in Trent's first graduating class started the first library in a closet. Though the library is named in his memory, "the joke is he's alive and well" and a practising librarian, says Gwyneth Hoyle, the college librarian from 1967 to 1992, when she retired. Out of the closet and into the current quarters it came in 1966. Gillian Sandeman presided over the collection for a year before Hoyle was hired to look after the collection part time. Since the 1980s and to this day, the shelves are so crammed with books that an old one must be removed to make room for a new one.

        Hoyle used to operate the library -- only ever open half days -- on a $1,000 budget, a sum that remained uninflated for all her 25 years. Her approach to acquisitions became more creative as the dollars bought less. There were a "huge number of gifts" and she had her pick from the annual list of free duplicates circulated by the Metropolitan Toronto Library. To fatten her budget, she had a running book sale of culled and donated texts. The sale dividend "wasn't quite as much as my budget, but it was a fair bit" and it allowed her to buy books students and profs at PR requested.

        The doors to the library were not always closed after half a day. At first, it was open all the time. "But there came a time in the early '80s when we found the very best books went missing," remembers Hoyle. "That's when I moved to a 20-hour week and closed the doors."

         "There's always been a lot of affection for the place," says Hoyle. It's a quiet place. And upper-year students often found esoteric books that weren't in Bata because they'd been donated by professors who'd done cutting-edge research. "You never knew what would come in," Hoyle remembers. "Oh, there's lots that's obsolete, too."