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Re: shelving



> It does appear that compact shelving will increase your
> storage capacity by 50% or more.

It can, but it's not just a question of installing compact shelving. You
also have to have the right kind of shelf for the material you are
storing. Prior to our move in 1998, we were storing all our material on
standard library book shelving - not the most space efficient way to store
Paige boxes (our main unit of storage), 16mm films, maps, drawings, or
large artifacts.

Our space has three carriages which run along column lines - in those
cases, the shelves are stationary and only 24" deep. These three carriages
are the starting points for each of the three modules in our system.

With the exception of one range used to house book materials and the
carriages that run along column lines, all our current shelving is 36"
deep, 42" wide, and 14" high; double faced. Each individual shelving
section can hold 6 Paige boxes, with nothing hanging over the edge
(previously we could only put four on a shelf, with lots of overhang).
This 36x42x14 configuration also works well for oversize material and
media, and meant that we didn't have to spend extra money for a lot of
specialized shelving to house the many types of materials we have. The
one area where we did adopt a specialized solution was photographic
negatives. We use a hanging file system which is not only amazingly
compact, but makes retrieval very easy. Another archives in St. Louis uses
this hanging file system, and when our Spacesaver rep. took us there and
showed the system to us, I knew we had to have it. Fortunately, we were
able to get it.

With our new facility we were fortunate enough to get a significant space
increase, so our carriages range from 64 feet long in two of our modules
to 81 feet long in our third module. Yes, 81 feet, and that's about as
long as compact shelving can be made. Carriages that long precluded any
kind of manual shelving. While there was certainly a "shakedown" period
with our system (fully electric), it also allowed for those very long
carriages, which means fewer aisles, which means greater storage capacity.

On the whole, I'll take our electric system.

Carole Prietto, University Archivist     phone:  (314) 935-9730
Washington University in St. Louis       fax:  (314) 935-8320
Box 1061, One Brookings Drive            prietto@library.wustl.edu
St. Louis, Missouri 63130

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