Book People Archive

Re: On Books and The Housing of Them

At 8:50 PM -0500 on 3/30/01, Charles P. Hall wrote:

>Readers of this list will appreciate his love for books, and dislike for
>new-fangled contraptions then being installed to hide the books in
>rolling book shelves. (You still see these in Doctor's offices and the
>like today, each shelve is on rails and they are shoved left and right
>to make a gap big enough to walk into at the proper spot.)

I can't speak for all libraries, but a library that I formerly worked 
at (the now-no-longer-a-seperate-entity Engineering Library at the 
University of Michigan) installed this form of compact shelving in 
order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. You see, 
the ADA requires that newly-installed library shelving be a certain 
width apart for wheelchair access, but doing so means that you can 
only fit 33-50% of the amount of books in a given area/volume of 
space that you could before the ADA when shelves could be closer 
together. By installing compact shelving, the stacks could be opened 
wide enough for wheelchair access, and collapsed in for increased 
storage capacity.

Oh, and we had to install hand-crank mechanisms for the shelves, 
rather than electronic push-buttons, because the shelves were in 
public areas and the manufacturer couldn't guarantee that the 
automatic shelves would stop for anything less than 50 pounds 
(meaning that little kids in the stacks could be squashed!)

Rolling compact shelving is very big in library storage these days, 
though usually not in public access areas. Building new storage 
facilities is a much larger capital outlay than installing compact 
shelving.
-- 

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