PEABODY — A large-scale project to update the materials of the Peabody Veterans Memorial High School library has been underway for a few months now, aging the collection down by nine years, according to Library Media Specialist Julie Pease.
School Committee Member Beverley Griffin Dunne briefed the project’s progress at last Tuesday’s school committee meeting and they later unanimously approved for the outdated books to be designated surplus.
This surplus has been offered to the Peabody Institute Library who declined taking any of them on. Now, they will be offered to students and teachers to take as they please.
Finally, the remaining books will be taken to Savers where they will be sold off for money that will fundraise for the junior class.
“The books are still working for us, all the way out the door, and it’s a great thing because they’re not going to waste,” Dunne said.
At this point in the project, the PVMHS library has taken out boxes of old materials, so much so that Pease had to pause to get more storage. Now, Dunne reported, there is space in the stacks for new books and materials to be put in for the future.
Each book and media material in the library’s collection has been pulled out and reviewed to determine if they have outgrown their use for high school, something that Dunne noted was no easy task and is being performed solely by Pease.
Another unexpected outcome of this project has been the uncovering of bits of Peabody history, as books that are a century old have been picked out of the shelves.
“She even found a book from the 1920’s and I said to her, ‘Did it say Kirstein Library on that?’ And she said, ‘Yes it did,’” said Dunne. “I explained to her the Kirstein Library was at the original high school, and that those books had come over.”
