Putting Books Out to Pasture: Whither the Stacks?

SOUTHBOROUGH--Tom Schneiter has an entry from the Harvard Online Library Information System (HOLLIS) pinned to the bulletin board in his office.

The book, an obscure work on linguistics titled How the Irish Speak English, has special meaning for Schneiter, a Harvard library administrator. The title is one of only two volumes that the Harvard Depository, the University's high-density book storage facility, has been unable to locate in over 14 years of operation.

With between 350 and 400 requests for retrievals each day, that's a success rate of well over 99.99 percent.

When it comes to innovations in library administration, glitzy new information technology generally gets the press. Yet the speed and glamour of digitized archives and meticulously cross-referenced databases overshadow one of the more fundamental changes in the structure of the modern research library: the invention of the book warehouse.

The accuracy rate isn't the only benefit of facilities like the Harvard Depository, which was one of the nation's first--and still the most innovative--high-density book storage facilities.

Students and scholars sometimes bemoan the fact that books in the Depository cannot be browsed, but the space-efficient warehouses can be climate-controlled for better preservation of materials, and are much less expensive to construct than traditional stacks.

The Ron Lane Show

The Harvard Depository would be a completely foreign environment to your average librarian.

But then again, there are no librarians at this special library.

"I'm actually the only person on the staff with a library background as opposed to a warehousing background," says Schneiter. He's the assistant director of the Harvard University Libraries and oversees depository--and his office is in Holyoke Center.

The depository, which Schneiter jokingly calls "The Ron Lane Show," was the brainchild of Ronald Lane, the longtime facilities manager and originator of most of the warehouse's innovative techniques.

The team of Lane and Schneiter-- both pleasant, silver-haired men, quick with a laugh--are a bibliophilic Laurel and Hardy.

Schneiter, who has been working in libraries for more than a quarter of a century, tends to use library terminology that makes Lane roll his eyes.

Lane, like most of the staff, came from a career in the warehousing industry. He was working at Iron Mountain, Inc., a record management company, when Harvard resolved to build the first incarnation of what would eventually become the depository.

For the first few years, Iron Mountain managed the facility, but in 1990 Harvard took the helm and the staff became Harvard staff.

The depositor is now administrated from Holyoke Center, though it bears the imprint of its warehousing origins.

A school librarian might be horrified by the fact that the books are not organized by call numbers but by a criteria as arbitrary as size. The key identifier is the bar code, which, unlike a call number, bears no relation to the contents of the book.

And then there's the matter of the physical appearance of the facility. The depository shelves are three stories high, two-thirds the length of a football field, and shelved a yard deep--not exactly convenient for browsing.

"One of the things that distinguishes us from a library is that we store by size," Lane says. In a typical library, he says, the books are of different heights and most of the space on a shelf is just air.

"We eliminate the air because space is expensive," he explains.

To access the shelves, depository workers drive motorized lifts that hoist them 30 feet into the air to reach the higher levels. It's not exactly a librarian's typical work environment.

Schneiter recalls one librarian, when asked by a student to describe the depository, told him to imagine himself in an Indiana Jones movie.

From the inside of the stacks, the perspective is indeed dizzying--perhaps even claustrophobic, for the aisles are only just large enough to admit the motorized lifts that function like mobile, stand-alone elevators.

Yet this is no ordinary warehouse. While warehouses turn over merchandise relatively quickly, the depository is equipped to store books for centuries.

The process, Lane says, also differs "because storing books is very labor-intensive: they cannot be piled up," unlike the boxes of records shelved by archival storage companies like Iron Mountain.

"Books are generally stored for the ages; records for a finite amount of time," Schneiter says.

Welcome. Mr. Book, to the Tour

"Let's imagine," Lane says, "that you're a book, and your library has slapped a bar code right in the middle of your forehead and sent you out here."

This, apparently, is the informational "I Am a Book" tour that Lane gives several times a year to officials at other institutions looking to build similar facilities, among others. By now, Lane has his routine down pat.

"Actually," he says, "the bar code would be over your left eyebrow."

At the depository, a book's bar code is (almost) all that matters.

All the processing that involves HOLLIS and the library's own records is done on campus.

"By the time it gets out here, all we are dealing with is the bar code," Schneiter says. "All materials transferred to the [depository] are handled equally carefully, it doesn't really matter what the bar code is attached to."

"It actually ceases to be a book," Lane jokes. This time, it's Schneiter who rolls his eyes.

Depository staff sort the books by size and place them in a tray.

Then it's just more bar codes, as the bar code on the book is linked to the bar code on the tray, and then to a bar code on the shelf that is its final resting place.

"It's like an address," Schneiter says.

Playing It by Ear

In the years since the depository was founded, this basic scheme has undergone some revision. But because the facility is one of the first of its kind, Lane has had to play it by ear and employ some good old Yankee ingenuity.

"Most of the procedures Ron Lane has developed from his years in the warehousing business," Schneiter says. "He's one of these people that ideas just spin off."

The software for all the bar codes, for example, was originally used for commercial archives management, but Lane had to rewrite it for use with book storage.

The man-aboard motorized lifts were another innovation, which welded a framework to hold materials to the top of the machine. Lane also modified several storage containers to better transport various types of materials. Waxed shelves have reduced friction and made it easier to slide out heavy boxes of books.

"No one wants to retrieve materials from the unwaxed shelves now," Lane says.

At the moment, the first two of the six modules are being emptied so that the shelves can be retrofitted for the special localized sprinklers that would put out a fire without unleashing water on all the books at once.

"We keep working at it, making it better," Lane says.

Putting Books Out to Pasture

Harvard's libraries generally only send seldom-used books to the depository, so as to reduce the number of trips needed to retrieve materials requested by patrons.

The depository, then, which shares a suburban tract of land 30 miles from the Yard with the Harvard Medical School's New England Primate Research Center, is essentially a retirement home for books that haven't been checked out for several years.

"The client [library] decides which books to send to the depository," Schneiter says. "My operation just takes care of the material that's sent out there. Generally, though, the operating principle is that the book will be seldom used."

Even so, since some faculty members wouldn't be able to browse through all the books and manuscripts in a library, they felt their scholarship might be impaired.

Schneiter, who worked in Yale's library system before coming to Harvard, recalls the displeasure he faced while overseeing that university's book storage facility.

"At Yale I had many conversations with faculty members who, many years later, were angry about the selection of books to fill that storage space. They were still simmering about it 15 years after the library was filled," Schneiter says.

But, administrators say, the depository's speed and accuracy has won over its onetime detractors.

"The Depository was designed for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The fact that the site is at a distance requires us to provide regular and consistent delivery service to the libraries and archives in Cambridge and Boston," Graham says.

Vans leave the depository twice each morning to ensure that books arrive at the client library one business day after they are requested.

A few years ago, the depository installed the FETCHERRS system, which allowed patrons to request materials directly from HOLLIS and eliminated the need to make a separate trip to Widener to fill out a form.

Graham says online library catalogues have become so complete that most browsing now takes place in a single setting, where library patrons are able to access Harvard's collections as a whole--rather than being limited by the holdings of various faculties.

For the Ages

Research libraries, says Barbara Graham, associate director in the university library for administration and programs have a two-fold mission: to serve the research and teaching needs of present and future scholars and students and to act as stewards of the collections for the generations to come.

Among the challenges for fragile or deteriorating materials, she adds, is that research libraries must simultaneously be responsive to the need of scholars and students for access and ensure the ongoing viability of these research resources.

"The depository's climate-controlled environment is a conscious effort to bolster the longevity of the materials stored there while also providing access through delivery service back to the participating library," she says.

Books not stored in controlled environments are often in trouble.

Until the current renovations are completed, Widener Library is one of the worst offenders, library officials say.

"The odor of Widener's deeper recesses, while providing olfactory nostalgia to generations of readers, is actually the smell of decaying books," Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles wrote in his 1999 annual letter to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The depository, on the other hand, was built partly to provide a climate-controlled environment for the better preservation of crumbling books and paper records.

"The depository helps secure their safe-keeping, their well-being, in perpetuity," Graham says.

Lane and the staff members driving the "man-aboards" retrieval devices wear heavy sweatshirts because the facility is kept at a chilly 50 degrees, with a mere 35 percent humidity. These conditions, Lane says, are "an attainable level recommended by preservationists."

The film vault is kept even cooler, as a key chemical component of the material, acetate, has a tendency to decay over time.

These conditions will keep the collections readable for generations--up to 400 years.

Leaving the depository, Schneiter looks back at the shelves. "It's preserving the intellectual record," Schneiter says, surveying the immense rows of books.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Lane responds. " I just put them on the shelves."