Surrounded by graveyards and industrial buildings on the outskirts of South Campus, a nondescript warehouse sits in a rarely visited part of Syracuse University.

The only other university building in the area is home to the materials distribution department, which is down the street. The building itself, called “The Facility,” is gray, and the newly paved parking lot in front of the building is barely filled.

Inside “The Facility,” though, is a complex, high-density storage operation involving more than 600,000 items from SU Libraries, said Anthony Carbone, manager of “The Facility.”

High-density storage is a process by which items are stored with the intent of taking up the least amount of space possible. The result is that 7,100 shelves — at 12 feet tall — can store up to 1 million items in a relatively small space, Carbone said. But “The Facility” is not easily browsable like the shelves in Bird Library.

Since 2012, Carbone said, both Bird and Carnegie Libraries have been moving print volumes, documents and other archival media items into storage inside “The Facility,” which is about three miles from main campus. Continuing to move print volumes into “The Facility” will save the university about $2 million over the next five years, according to a recent SU Libraries report.

The move comes as both Bird and Carnegie libraries have shifted toward adopting a learning commons model, which emphasizes community study spaces rather than stacks of books, said Jill Hurst-Wahl, the director of the Library and Information Science program in the School of Information Studies.

Per day, “The Facility” processes and stores about 1,000 items, according to an SU Library facility fact sheet. That has helped overcapacity in SU libraries drop from 60 percent to less than 15 percent, according to the April report.

Recent estimates peg the cost of keeping a book on an open library stack at $4.26 per year (in 2009 dollars). It only costs $0.86 (in 2009 dollars) to store a book in high-density storage, according a 2010 council of library information resources study. Moving print volumes into “The Facility,” then, will save the university more than $1.9 million within the next five years, according to an April 2015 SU Libraries report.

“The Facility” is also a response to overcrowding in Bird Library, which is partly a result of the shift toward the learning commons model. The model has decreased the amount of shelf space available, according to an April 2015 SU Libraries report.

“In many ways, academic libraries are moving from, fundamentally, a focus on the materials we could gather in a building, which used to be the way we thought of our primary role in order to drive new scholarship, to really a set of services,” said David Seaman, dean of SU Libraries, who was introduced as dean in June.

 

“The Facility’s” main operation takes place in an open room where the building’s staff of five receives all of the books, documents, maps, microfilm, microfiche and special collection items that are chosen by the library administration to be stored.

Each item is stored based on a careful formula that takes into account item type and size in order to maximize space. The vault itself is climate controlled at 53 degrees and 30 percent humidity. In these conditions, items can last up to 270 years, Carbone said.

All of the items that go into “The Facility” are low-use or seldom-circulated items, Seaman said.

“I haven’t seen a student use a microfiche since 2005,” said a library warehouse technician at “The Facility,” referring to the card-like microforms that store images and were most popular in the early 20th century.

In the intake room of “The Facility,” thick hardcover books with titles like “Astronomy and Astrophysics” from 1989 and “Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation” from 2000 are getting ready to be stored in the vault.

However, every item that is catalogued and stored can be accessed by “The Facility’s” staff with a request through SU Libraries. In most cases, a digital copy can be scanned and provided to the person who requested it. “The Facility” averages around 40 scan requests per day, said Carbone.

Nationally, academic libraries on college campuses have also been changing to accommodate more study spaces and less print materials. More and more warehouses like “The Facility” are being built for the sole purpose of high-density storage. As of 2014, an estimated 75 high-density storage facilities have been built in the U.S., according to a report from American Libraries Magazine. That trend, the report said, is expected to increase.

“It actually goes back to an older mode of libraries where you didn’t always have instant access to everything,” said Hurst-Wahl, the library science expert.

In total, SU has about 3.3 million print volumes in its collection, according to an upcoming SU Libraries report. Of those, 454,821 are now in high-density storage at “The Facility,” Carbone said.

However, some fear that moving any print volumes into storage at all, especially to a place that is as far away and as unknown as “The Facility,” undermines the role of the print book in scholarship.

“There’s a loss that if you were walking down that shelf of books you wouldn’t just run into something,” Seaman said. “I love browsing shelves of books, I find things sometimes that I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

Published on September 29, 2015 at 11:47 pm

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu