As early as this spring, UB could break ground on a new storage facility for the millions of low-use books, journals and magazines sitting untouched in UB libraries.
Two UB officials introduced the storage proposal at a Faculty Senate meeting Wednesday in Capen Hall.
According to Karen Senglaup, director of access services for arts and sciences libraries, UB's libraries are currently over capacity. The new Library Annex, a 16,000 square-foot facility to be built across from North Campus on Rensch Road, would house up to 1.5 million volumes of low-use materials, Senglaup said.
"The facility, with 30-foot-high shelving, will be modeled after Harvard and Cornell storage facilities," she said.
Both Senglaup and Steve Roberts, assistant vice president for University Libraries, said off-site library facilities have been successful at many large universities.
UB's new annex would have an on-site reading center and computerized cataloguing for a fast turnaround on stored material. Requests for materials would be submitted online via the UB libraries' Web site, and the annex staff would deliver the request either to an on-campus library or to the person directly.
With the addition of such a building, Roberts said a lot of space would be freed in on-campus libraries, which currently have approximately 3.5 million volumes of material and gain around 70,000 new volumes every year.
"There will be a great deal of consolidation," Roberts said. "We have plans to consolidate space within the libraries as space becomes available."
The possibility of scanning and digitizing low-use media was brought up at the meeting, but Senglaup said there are many problems with digitizing and even if UB were to use the high-tech process, there would still be space problems.
"As far as digital media goes, there are compatibility issues. The evolving technology does not permit us to have full digitalization," Senglaup said.
Building a new, traditional library to store the overcapacity materials would cost 10 to 15 times as much as the off-site facility, Roberts said. And converting a vacant on-campus building would have very high costs because of the necessary load-bearing needs to store so much material.
Although UB will be in charge of the building's development and construction, UB will not own the Library Annex, according to Roberts. Instead, UB will take out a long-term lease on the building from the developer.
"We were without the money upfront to own it outright, and we need to address the problem now," Roberts said. "We also don't want to own a one-purpose building that may become obsolete in a matter of years."
UB librarians would decide which materials would be moved to the Library Annex based on the age and use of the older books and journals.
Construction of the building is slated for late this spring, and use of it may begin as soon as early 2006.
