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archival design advice sought: please respond off list



Dear folks,

    After living in a little cubby hole for the past eleven years, our
Archives is going to get a new home. The architects figure that they can

get us about 4120 square feet total net (5356 square feet gross) on a
two-floor footprint which will also house an  office complex for the
campus administration of our very small University.

    We are in the sketch design phase of planning and trying to work
through a variety of issues. Your advice would be most appreciated.

    First: In our present setting, we have  key-lock doors which we
check manually (by giving the door handle a tug) every time we exit or
enter to make sure they're really shut (occasionally the lock mechanism
is sticky or we absent-mindedly may have turned the key the wrong
direction). In our new facility, we are probably going to use
swipe-cards with a key-pad back-up. We are wondering whether we will
still need to figure in manually checking doors to make sure they are
locked with the new system. If we do, then the number of doors which
separate the staff from the collections room becomes much more of an
issue (we presently have a staff of two and the collections floor is
going to have to be located on a different story than the reading room).

    I would appreciate any input those of you working with this type of
system may wish to share. I'd also be interested in brand names of
particularly good swipe card systems. The one we liked best of those
we've seen is a system which acknowledged what appeared to us to be a
rather casual, swift wave of the card in front of a scanning panel (as
opposed to having to "run" the card through or insert the card into a
reader).

    On a related matter, I would very much appreciate hearing from any
of you who are working in a two-floor site where the collections room is

on another floor than the collections room and who are sharing a
elevator/staircase with the public.  What is being proposed for us is
that we have our own secured staff-only elevator door (swipe card
operated) from the first floor reading room  and our own secured
second-floor exit onto an archives-staff-only corridor. There will be
public-access elevator doors which open out onto a public lobbies on the

first and second floors. The stairs operate similarly: a shared stairs
with a secured door from the reading room and a secured door to the
archives-staff-only corridor. The stairs are also accessible to the
public via the first and second floor lobbies.

    In the best of all worlds, we would like our own private staff-only
stairs which would be physically inaccessible to the public and our
patrons. We are concerned both about security and the time required to
go through the various doors which lead to the collections room from the

reading room (six doors per round-trip in the current sketch plan).

    Your input on this issue would be most appreciated. If our concerns
are real, we need to defend them or, if largely imaginary, lay them
aside.

    Finally: I would very much appreciate any thoughts or (even better)
sketch designs you might be willing to share of well-designed small
facilities with very small staffs where the staff offices are on the
same floor and proximate to the reading room.

    Thank you so much. Please, if you would, respond to me off the list.




--
Lisa Ornstein, Director
Acadian Archives/Archives acadiennes
University of Maine at Fort Kent
25 Pleasant St.
Fort Kent, ME
USA 04743
Tel.: (207) 834-7536
Fax: (207) 834-7518

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