Once upon a time, Holly mentioned that I had a special formula for determining shelving capacity. This brought about a flurry of requests from many people. The reality is that I had little scraps of paper with a few notes and a half-baked spreadsheet estimating the linear feet of available shelving in my library. I have been swamped with my day job, and I have been meaning to write up my process for a while now. I apologize in advance if this doesn’t live up to the hype.
I used to work in a very small library. we were literally spilling off our shelves. To make my case for more aggressive removal, I felt we should talk about max physical item capacity for our library. it was time to get down to business and determine the maximum capacity for each shelf, and thus for the entire library. I was also interested in making sure we had enough wiggle room to allow pages to place articles without getting stuck.
You are reading: How many books fit on a bookshelf
I have a caveat: my project focused on library and collection capacity and it was just an estimate. obviously library items are of different sizes and I certainly wasn’t going to measure every item. I decided to use an estimate for each type of item or each collection. this was more appropriate for my small public library. I already knew we were over capacity just by looking. I was only attempting a rough number for planning purposes as well as for future construction projects. this is just a loot number (scientific guess), as the engineer in my life would say.
length of your shelves
My stacks were almost three feet long, except for one section of my easy-to-read collection, which was an irregularly sized shelf. Depending on your height, your stacks can have between 3 and 8 shelves per stack. this also depends on the space between shelves.
number of shelves available
See Also: Top 10 books and exhibits about the Great Chicago Fire
counts the number of shelves in a section. I counted each shelf in each stack, since my library was small enough to do so. if you don’t use the bottom or top shelves because of difficulty in reaching them, leave them out of the total (unless that shelf space can be used in the future). again, adjust your count based on your library settings. if the stacks have a constant number of shelves, you can simply multiply stacks by shelves to get your number. for example, if each stack has six shelves and each row consists of six stacks, 6 x 6 = 36 shelves. my stacks were irregular in number of shelves, but consistently 3 feet long. now you can include the length: 36 shelves x 3 feet each = 108 feet of shelving.
medium width
Obviously, a picture book takes up less space on a shelf than a full-length novel or reference book. Since this distinction exists, I’ve separated my collections into easy readers, picture books, junior fiction, adult nonfiction, etc. again, my library is small enough to find an average book size for each collection. For my purposes, I used about ¼ inch as the average width for a picture book and 1 inch for the average fiction/nonfiction book. this does not have to be a “perfect” number. the point is to get a pretty good estimate. You can also estimate the number of books that fit in 1 foot (12 inches). If each book has an average width of 1 inch, then you can use 12 books as an average number of books on shelves per foot. I suggest going down to 11 inches for more wiggle room.
Break it down
go section by section through your collection. If picture books have their own dedicated space, calculate an average number of picture books per shelf. Then calculate the average for DVDs, audiobooks, paperbacks, etc. It wouldn’t make sense to try to average all the books in all sections of the library, so calculate specific averages for each shelf rank, collection, or item type, whatever. works best in your particular setup. (For my project, I didn’t count oversized books because we didn’t have many. I also hate oversized books because they mess up my estimate.)
why bother?
Narrow, crowded shelves are my personal definition of hell. it looks terrible and impedes navigation. patrons and staff must be able to keep collections usable by leaving enough space to change or display them. in my perfect world, 2/3 full shelves would make it easier to find and order.
See Also: Top 16 Books of 2016 | Desiring God
Create a spreadsheet with each section on its own line. I’ve included a portion of my spreadsheet so you can see how it works. It’s really basic math of books per foot multiplied by the number of feet of shelving. Of course, this means a completely full shelf with no room to move around and flip through. Since I don’t want the pages to kill me by overcrowding the shelves, I’ll reduce my shelf capacity (number of books per foot times shelf length) by an appropriate percentage.
extra credit for collection nerds
Holly’s Shelf Balancing Items are an interesting way to examine the allocation of collection space. I also like to compare my shelving list to the estimated shelving capacity. my library was 20% over capacity consistently by my estimated number, and boy did it look like it.
Please comment and share your experiences, as I am always looking for a new way to analyze collection data.
mary
(click to enlarge image).
See Also: NCERT Books for Class 2: Download Free PDF – Embibe