How many books are in your library?

Today I got to see collection stats for the medium-sized public library where I work, and I learned that this library that occupies its own building, has a dozen full-time employees, and serves tens of thousands of people has a collection that's only about 10x the size of the collection in my bedroom. Its nonfiction collection is only about 4x the size of mine.

How does your home library stack up against your work library?

I don't have that many books at home on my shelves. I end up donating a lot of the books I've read to my public high school library so I consider my work library a kind of extension of my home library. I have over 10,000 books here, 3/4s of which are nonfiction.

>1 melannen: I've probably only got about a third of my library on LT, so mine is probably roughly the same size as your's, c.7.5k.

On the other side of the scales, my work library's website says we have 6 million books and periodicals, 7M feet of film, 1.5M maps, 0.25M hours of video etc. Full disclosure: it's a national library and copyright library with substantial map, graphic, moving image, sound, manuscript and archival collections.

There are about 240 employees; we just scraped under the bar of 250 employees for the recent UK gender pay gap exercise. Once you've reconciled the part-time staff, there are probably about 220 FTE (full-time equivalent) staff. If you want to strip out the archivists, curators, administrators, porters, canteen staff etc., there are, let's say for the sake of round numbers, about 60 librarians, which is 100,000 books and periodicals each. So each librarian's share of the library's printed books collection is 13 times the size of my entire library, let alone the contents of any one room.

I have about 400 books at home and there are about half a million books at my work library. We're a public research library, so mostly non-fiction in the collection, and mostly not the sort of thing anyone would sit down and read straight through for fun.

If you bring in the microforms, vertical files, manuscript collections, family tree charts, pamphlets, maps, audiobook cartridges, etc., we're at well over a million items. Plus a couple cuneiform tablets and some parchments.

>2 mamzel: I have the opposite problem - my local libraries have been really opposed to adding donations to the collections recently (and we've lost several long-term charity books sales in the last couple years, including the library system's) so I have been rescuing lots of books from the recycle bins at work.

But yeah, I was mostly surprised at how relatively small our collection is at work! I guess it's a lot less compact than my home library is.

>5 melannen: I work in a public school library and am responsible for collection development. I frequently buy books with the intention of donating them. Some books don't make it. One recent disappointment was Uprooted by Naomi Novik. I really was hoping to be able to add it (I loved, loved, loved her Temeraire series) but it had sections that were, alas, just too explicit for a school. We do accept book donations with the proviso that we don't already own it, it is appropriate for high school, it is in good condition, etc. We explain that any that we can't use are brought to the public library's Friends of the Library for their book sales.