New storage facility for the Bodleian!

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I am amused by the title of this article: "What do you do with 8 million books? Build a shelf 153 miles long," by Richard Garner, The Independent. They offer pretty darned good retrieval times, and the thought that they were storing books in a former salt mine makes all kinds of alarms go off in my head.

(No, I'm not really a librarian myself, although I worked part-time in a couple of libraries when I was younger. My userpic is a quote from the third Librarian movie, and I just love it!)

Comments

[aelfgyfu_mead]

But how many of your missing and mis-shelved books are from patrons putting them "back" where they think they found them? No patrons will be losing books here. Only staff can lose books at the new facility!

I imagine they'll have to have people shelf-reading regularly, or at a minimum keeping an eye out for mis-shelved books. At least books shouldn't be turning up in the bathrooms there....

[delphia2000.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think our worst problem is with our 'volunteer' shelvers who don't always get it right even with the training vid they have to watch LOL!

I'm wondering if they'll go with bar-coding or chipping to keep track electronically. We bar-code on the front now, but if it was small enough bar-code for the spine, you could easily run a scanner over a whole shelf to find stuff fast.

We have heard about book drops that sort by genre and automatically put all the fiction, children's, non-fic, etc. into a specific cart/holder. Of course, our remodel won't be that advanced.