Before the new shelving was installed, Musselman Library struggled to find the balance between protection of the special collections and providing open collaboration space for students. The rare books, many of them quite old, require a highly regulated environment, which typically requires extra space or even dedicated special collections rooms. “In our collections room, we needed to have a shelving solution that was going to help us care for those materials, make them retrievable, but more importantly keep the temperature, humidity and airflow as stable as possible,” said Carolyn Sautter, Director of Special Collections and College Archives.
Four years ago, the library elected to move a few modules of seldom-accessed periodicals and archival boxes to offsite storage to create space for the ever-growing collections. “We’re always looking for ways to maximize our footprint as we have it now with the collection we have and utilizing our offsite storage facility,” said Hinton. “That allowed us to open up quiet study space on our fourth floor by moving books off of fourth floor down to third to consolidate.” The offsite library book storage, however, was not convenient for researchers to access and it was already nearing capacity, making librarians reluctant to move more volumes to the offsite location.