Students hoping to check out books on forestry and environmental science can now find them housed with other science books in Kline Science Library.

To cut costs, maximize space, and expand library services, 28,000 volumes from the Yale Forestry & Environmental Studies library in Kroon Hall were relocated to KSL this summer, Director of Science Libraries Kari Swanson said. The newly relocated volumes will be housed in a separate area so they may be more easily located, Swanson said.

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Environmentschool dean Peter Crane said Thursday that two library staff members were let go during the consolidation. Both Swanson and Crane described the layoffs as an unfortunate consequence of University-wide budget cuts; Crane announced in April that the environment school would lay off six staff members, whoinclude the two library staff members, to help to close a budget gap of about $2.4 million.

Still, the decision to relocate the environment school volumes was also driven by the benefits the reorganization would offer students — the majority of whom are graduate students pursuing master’s degrees , Crane said.

The relocation project was several years in the making, Crane said, and is a direct response to the development of electronic research.

“The tendency of people to put print materials on reserve has been declining over time,” he said. “We were down to less than five shelves on print reserve.”

Because of this decreased demand for print materials, Crane said about 70,000 of the environment school’s collection of 100,000 volumes were moved in recent years to the Yale’s Library Shelving Facility in Hamden, Conn. The majority of these materials are available to students electronically, Swanson said.

Swanson said that because the environment school’s collection is now housed within KSL, the services KSL provides, such as the library’s personal librarian program, West Campus delivery service and electronic resources, will now cover the environment school collection. Most of these services have been in place for one to two years, Swanson said.

To make room for the incoming volumes, Swanson said a portion of KSL’s collection of 360,000 items had to be rearranged. She said library staffare in the process of organizing the newly arrived volumes on shelving, but the books have been catalogued and are readily available to students and researchers. Their call numbers have been updated on the Yale University Library’s Orbis catalog, she added.

Carla Heister, the environment school librarian, will continue in her role as the library administrator and an adviser to students, Swanson said. Heister will now hold regular office hours in Kroon Hall, as well as additional office hours in KSL.

But now that the last of the volumes have been relocated from the environment school’s library, Crane said plans for the newly vacated space are far from definite.

“We don’t have any clear plans for [the space] at the moment,”he said. “Various groups are jockeying for the space.”

Crane noted that the environment school plans to conduct a comprehensive examination of how efficiently it uses the spaces it occupies within the University, which will include finding new uses for the school’s newly available library space, in addition to the school’s outposts scattered across the University.

Kroon Hall, the environment school’s home, opened in early 2009.