Ellery Yale Wood (BMC 1952), a long-time resident of Wisbech, England, collected books written for children and young adults from the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth. When she died in the Spring of 2013, she left this remarkable collection of approximately 12,000 books to Bryn Mawr.
Student workers in the Special Collections Department have started this summer on the massive project of unboxing, cleaning, sorting, and inventorying the books, under the direction of Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts Marianne Hansen and Rare Books Cataloguer Patrick Crowley. Rayna Andrews (BMC 2011) has also been hired as the project coordinator to manage the day-to-day work and help with setting priorities for cataloging the books.
Last week was a week of numbers. The second week on the project. The fifth of seven student employees started work. We finished unpacking the first 100 boxes (out of 600!) of books. All the books were vacuumed with a vacuum with a HEPA filter, and the books were propped open on shelves to air out and acclimate. 
The first 707 books were added to a spreadsheet inventory. 
We figured out how many shelves we needed to sort the books, and labeled them with categories of books, including alphabetically A to Z. 
Lat Friday morning we received the next 120 boxes of books (which are being held at a secure storage facility nearby),
and that afternoon the student employees began opening and cleaning the next batch.
As the booksellers who facilitated the move of the Ellery Yale Wood Collection from a very dusty, overcrowded but atmospheric Georgian house in Cambridgeshire, it is wonderful to see the boxes we packed now being opened, catalogued and soon (I hope) to be read at Bryn Mawr.
Brian Lake, Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, London.
I just wanted to thank Eric Pumroy for sending the link to your blog about the Ellery Yale Wood Collection. I was fortunate enough to be on the other end of this in that I helped to sort out and pack up these books at Ellery’s home in Wisbech – where we’d have been very glad of the vacuum you mention! It’s so good to see the images you have posted – the books being sorted and cleaned and enjoyed again.