After 12 years in storage at the Harvard Depository Library, a quarter million of Brown's seldom-used books are being transported to the new Library Collections Annex a mere ten-minute drive from College Hill.
The Annex, which the University bought in 2002 in order to renovate it as a off-site shelving center, is located off Route 10 on the Providence-Cranston border and was previously a printing plant. Its eventual capacity will be 1.7 million books.
But "it's going to take us 15 years to fill that place up," said Eric Shoaf, leader of Preservation Services and the man responsible for general operations at the Annex. Brown's library currently consists of between 3.2 and 3.3 million books, and Shoaf estimates that about 35,000 are added to the collection each year.
The University's libraries are almost completely full, at 95 percent capacity or more, according to Shoaf. Generally, a library is considered full when it reaches 85 percent capacity.
The Annex will meet the University's need for its own library storage facility with greater proximity to campus than the HDL, which is located in Southborough, Mass., at Harvard's Extension Campus, about 30 miles away. The University began leasing space from Harvard in 1992, and pays not only a flat storage fee but also a transaction fee every time a book is removed from storage.
"The more you store, the more it costs," said Sam Streit, a leader in the Scholarly Resources department. Brown-owned storage is "something that we have known we needed for a very long time," he said, but "it's a funding issue, always."
Decisions about which low-use books to send to the Annex for storage will be made by a current group of staff, faculty and library patrons, according to Shoaf. "We have specific subject selectors who buy all the books for the University," he said, "so they have the knowledge and expertise and context with the faculty to be making decisions (about which books to take out of circulation). Different disciplines use materials in different ways, so there's not any kind of blanket decision."
Currently, books requested from the HDL are delivered weekly, but with the opening of the Annex, a book requested on Thursday will be available "sometime after lunch on Friday," Shoaf said. "One of the things you can do is actually specify where you want to have the book delivered" regardless of its original location on campus, he said. He predicts that the "convenience of having materials delivered is really going to make people like the service we have."
The delivery service will be so convenient, in fact, that Shoaf does not anticipate many visitors to the Annex, which will be open Monday through Friday. "Things are not arranged by column, so you can't browse - they use bar codes and the books are shelved according to size," he said. "It's not a browsing library. Even if somebody goes there they'll have to request the material. We did site visits with a dozen universities that have these types of facilities, and the one thing they all said was, 'We built this reading room in our annex but nobody ever comes.'"
