College and Research Libraries Problems of Storing University Library Materials By R A L P H H. HOPP R I " ' H E S U B J E C T O F T H I S symposium, "Stor- age Libraries and Storage Problems" is one of inevitable interest to responsi- ble administrators of libraries. Just as with retirement plans and old age pen- sions, at some time or another most of us will have to consider the subject seri- ously. T h e concept of separate storage librar- ies is not at all new. At least sixty years or more ago the subject was given con- crete consideration by President Eliot of Harvard, who at the turn of the century made specific recommendations for the storage of "dead" books.1 Like many progressive ideas of that day, such as were generated by Melvil Dewey, Presi- dent Eliot, and others, nothing much came of them until nearly a half century later. Storing books in other areas on the campus away from the main library has been practiced, of course, for many years. Typically, however, books were stored in facilities that were anything but ideal and generally were in otherwise unusable rooms in humid basements of other cam- pus buildings. Many of us, I am sure, have experienced the musty smell of rapidly deteriorating paper that greets one upon entering one of these air-locked, damp storage rooms. T h e design and use of a separate stor- age library for any one particular library system has received little attention in the literature until quite recently. T h e Wil- son and Tauber book on university li- braries, published in 1956, gives slight 1 Kimball C. Elkins, "President Eliot and the Storage of 'Dead' Books," Harvard Library Bulletin, V I I I ( 1 9 S 4 ) , 299-312. N O V E M B E R 1 9 6 1 Mr. Hopp is Assistant Director, University of Minnesota Library. This paper was pre- sented at the meeting of the ACRL Univer- sity Libraries Section, Montreal, June 19, 1960. attention to it.2 T h e first issue of Library Trends, published in 1952, was devoted to "Current Trends in College and Uni- versity Libraries" and very little if any space was given to the subject of storage. It was just twenty years ago that the first separate library storage building came into being on any campus in this country. Iowa State University at Ames, in 1940, constructed such a building and, in a sense, pioneered the movement which is now becoming of general con- cern to many university l i b r a r i e s . 3 Shortly afterward Harvard, through the New England Deposit Library, also util- ized the separate storage facility.4 T h e chief concerns of past discussions on book storage have been primarily in areas of physical dimensions and eco- nomics. T o enumerate only a few, I could mention discussions of such ques- tions as: How do you determine capac- ities of given areas by the use of formulas of " X " volumes per square feet or per cubic feet? What is the optimum height of stacks for efficient storage of books? What is the average proportion of oc- tavos, quartos, and folios that ought to 2 L . R. Wilson and M. F . Tauber. The University Library, 2nd ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 54-55, 469-70, 521-22. 3 Charles E . Friley and Robert W . Orr, " A Decade of Book Storage at Iowa State College," CRL, X I I ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 7-10, 19. * Keyes D. Metcalf, " T h e New England Deposit Li- brary after Thirteen Y e a r s , " Harvard Library Bulletin, V I I I ( 1 9 5 4 ) , 313-22. 435 be used in figuring book storage capac- ities? How many and what size should range aisles be? What should be the proper distance between ranges and what effect do these distances have on capacity? What are the relative costs of compact versus standard stacks and how much gain is there in storage capacity when the compacts are used? What are the com- parative merits and costs of storage of material as opposed to microreproduc- tion of them? While these are all im- portant questions that need answers, there are still more basic considerations. Fundamental to any decision to build a storage unit is this question: Is it cheaper to store materials than it is to weed? It is a curious thing in the library profession that almost anyone can make the decision to add a volume to the li- brary, but to weed one from the collec- tion often requires endless consultation and the process generally becomes so costly that weeding is seldom done to the extent that it perhaps otherwise would be. Probably the most frequently given reason for building a storage library is simply that it provides a means for ex- tending the life of the main library build- ing. An adequate plan that results in more than just a postponement of the day when a new main library will be built must be based not only on a study of weeding that can be done or the se- lection of the materials that can be moved to storage, but also upon an analysis of the growth of the collection, as was done by Mr. Metcalf.5 A study of prospective space needs during coming years may show that storing from the present collection is not enough but must also include storing a part of new ac- quisitions. This, of course, has implica- tions for such questions as cooperative acquisitions programs, or brings to the fore that ubiquitous but never solved problem, the acquisitions policy. 5 Ibid. T h e development of any library is de- pendent upon the wisdom of the acquisi- tions program. If we admit that we have many books that can logically go to storage does this mean that we have se- lected badly? Or do we only put older materials in storage, maybe hedging against the future and the possibility of need for these materials? T h e trend to- ward increased use of storage libraries is undoubtedly a symptom of a much more basic problem. Aren't we approaching the time when we have to start actively considering the necessity for specializa- tion among institutions in the develop- ment of collections? Whether desirable or not, few institutions can afford the luxury of having every book or periodi- cal it might conceivably need within easy paging accessibility. After all, books that can be borrowed from another institu- tion, whether another university or an organization specializing in cooperative acquisitions and storage, differ in avail- ability only in the matter of degree from books placed in a separate storage build- ing on our own campus. As Mr. Metcalf has pointed out, the New England De- posit Library has demonstrated that the inconvenience entailed in storing library books at a distance from the main li- brary is not an unbearable burden on scholars. In other words, are we defer- ring decisions that perhaps ought to be made soon rather than wait until library storage buildings become standard items in our institutions' budgetary requests? I f there are those who have been think- ing casually of the time when they will be building a storage library, they will want to consider carefully the many fac- tors involved in such a move. At the University of Minnesota we have set up a pilot-plant operation, taking one level of our central stacks as a sample storage unit. T h i s was done in anticipation of our move to a storage building soon to be constructed in an off-campus location about one mile from our main library. Some of the problems that have been 436 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S raised in this small-scale operation are more easily handled through this experi- mental unit than if we were faced with the full-sized storage library. Before a book is shelved in a new stor- age unit a decision has to be made as to whether storing by classification number should be adhered to in the shelving. Or isn't classification important in a little used collection? T h e other alternatives to shelving by classification are: shelving in fixed and compact order arranged by size and in order of receipt; or grouping the material by the unit from which it came, so that, for example, all chemistry library materials will be together as will those that came from other departmental libraries or other library division; or a combination of these methods. It seems evident that the era of storage libraries is fast approaching, if indeed it has not already arrived. Recognizing that research should precede and determine practice, the Council on Library Re- sources, Inc., recently made two grants for studies in this field. T h e University of Chicago Library, the recipient of one such grant, is presently working on a project which has as one of its objectives the determination of patterns of use of library materials.6 From these it is hoped that standards of selection can be ar- rived at upon which to base university library book-storage programs. T h e study will consist of taking a sampling of a given library's book stock in certain sub- ject fields and establishing the amount of circulation selected books have under- gone since their acquisition. T h e books in these various subjects will then be 8 Council on Library Resources, Inc. Third Annual Report, for the Period Ending June 30, 1959, p. 33. (Also see C L R ' s news release, "Recent Developments," No. 17, April 26, 1959.) characterized by such factors as date of publication, language of text, date of acquisition, and others, to determine the bearing of these factors upon book circu- lation. Several university library collec- tions will be used in the research project. T h e Y a l e U n i v e r s i t y L i b r a r y , also through a grant from the Council on Library Resources, Inc., is studying the problem of selection of materials for storage.7 W e are, of course, gradually accumu- lating experience upon which we can draw as we consider some of the prob- lems faced in setting up storage libraries. As of now, however, one could fairly safely say that there are few experts in this field. I have indicated that Iowa State University has had a storage library for nearly twenty years. T h e i r experience, I believe, has shown that the storage unit has become an important and indispens- able part of their library system. T h e University of Michigan also has a sepa- rate building devoted primarily to the storage of selective collections. T h e Har- vard experience with the New England Deposit Library is a matter of published information and falls between the single- unit storage building for one library and the joint cooperative storage plan of the Midwest Inter-Library Center partici- pated in by a group of libraries. Because of the paucity of published in- formation on storage libraries, reports of the practical considerations, as well as the experimental findings, of day-to-day storage library operations are of con- tinuing interest to a wider and wider audience of university librarians. 7 John Ottemiller, F . Bernice Field, and Lee Ash. " T h e Selective Book Retirement Program at Y a l e , " The Yale University Library Gazette, X X X I V ( 1 9 5 9 ) , 64-72. (Also see C L R ' s news release, "Recent Develop- ments," No. 16, March 18, 1959.) Anniversary Issue CRL readers will be interested in the J u l y 1961 issue of Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, which is the anniversary issue on the National Library of Medicine. Special attention might be called to the " M e m o i r s of R o b e r t F l e t c h e r " by Dr. Estelle Brodman and "Physicians to the Presidents, and T h e i r Patients: A B i b l i o g r a p h y " by Charles A. Roos. N O V E M B E R 1 9 6 1 437