When E.S. Bird Library first opened, the top and bottom shelves were vacant of books. Only the middle shelves had books on them, and even those shelves were not completely full.

Walking into Bird now, the shelves are overflowing trying to accommodate all the books. But library officials seem to have found a solution: a compact high-density library annex to house 1.2 million volumes. The facility will be constructed on Jamesville Avenue next to the Hawkins Building, where the library already stores some of its materials.

For the past decade, space has been an issue in the library. As a research library, having a constantly growing collection is essential, said Pamela McLaughlin, director of communication and external relations at Syracuse University Library. And now, having a storage facility has become essential to help solve the space problem.

‘It’s been growing and now we are going to start resolving it,’ she said.

The library has grown to 3.1 million volumes, McLaughlin said. The library had been using storage areas in a few different places around campus to help manage the space issue before plans for the South Campus annex were approved.

But even with storage in The Warehouse, the Hawkins Building and Carnegie Library, it has not helped the library’s problem, said TC Carrier, director of program management at SU Library.

‘A lot of things here are over capacity actually,’ she said. ‘We’re actually over 100 percent. There are some things that are not even on the shelving anymore; they’re in back places because they just don’t fit.’

The SU Board of Trustees approved $5 million to go toward the construction of the South Campus annex at its meeting in May. The university is backing the annex with $4 million and the rest of the money comes from the library budget.

The planning for the annex is still in preliminary phases, Carrier said. After the plans received approval from the Board of Trustees, there was still a lot of preplanning to be done, she said.

The soil at the site was tested and sent to Onondaga County for approval, Carrier said. The next step will be to break ground on the site, which is expected to happen in mid-October, she said. The plan is to have the physical building done in July and to move materials into the facility next October, Carrier said.

Since the facility is a compact, high-density storage annex, the books will be arranged in a different way. The building will house 1.2 million library volumes. The volumes will be categorized and arranged by height, before being packed into trays. About six trays can fit on one shelf, and the shelf heights are adjustable for maximum storage.

Originally, the facility was going to house 1.6 million volumes, but plans have since changed, Carrier said. Architectural drawings and microforms will now be housed along the side of the facility, which detracts from the number of volumes.

All of the materials going into the South Campus annex are low-use materials. By storing these materials in the annex, they are still accessible if they are needed, but the space is cleared for collections that are used most often, McLaughlin said. This will help ease the crowded shelves in the library, so students can use the library more efficiently.

‘You will see a difference in what this place looks like. Floor to ceiling, bottom to top,’ she said. ‘The stuff that you do want to be able to use will be more findable because things will be more organized and there will be less on a shelf.’Students and professors can access the material in the annex by using an online system, in which the books will be delivered to main campus within a 24-hour period after the request, or by going to the annex itself to sit in a conference room.

McLaughlin said that since the plans were announced after students and faculty left campus last spring, there has been little reaction. But she said she thinks people are adjusting to the fact that housing materials off-site is not a revolutionary idea.

Other research libraries at institutions across the nation have off-campus storage facilities to house special collections, including Brown University, Harvard University, Columbia University and Princeton University.

‘There’s a lot of overlap among research libraries, but every library has a unique core of materials that no other library or few other libraries have,’ she said. ‘I think it makes a statement that we are a research library and that we intend to become a better one by stewarding these materials in a really good way.’

medelane@syr.edu

Published on August 31, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Meghin: medelane@syr.edu | @meghinwithani