Moveable Compact Shelving: The Current Answer
| Published date | 01 April 1987 |
| Pages | 23-26 |
| Date | 01 April 1987 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047704 |
| Author | Michael Gorman |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Moveable Compact Shelving:
The Current Answer
Michael Gorman
The compact shelving discussed in this
article is defined as moveable shelving
driven, in the main, by electric power.
The shelving eliminates all but one aisle
in any set of ranges of shelving. Most
such shelving moves in a perpendicular
direction on rails mounted on the floor.
Moveable compact shelving provides a
successful permanent answer to the storage
and preservation problems that afflict
many libraries. Its advantages greatly
outweigh its minor disadvantages. "Any
library which installs such a system
will find that it has made a prudent and
cost-effective investment."
Gorman is Director of General Services at
the University of Illinois Libraries, Urbana, IL.
Despite the predictions of the sages of the
"Information Age" (an Age that may, I suspect,
have died before it was born), many large research
libraries are faced with the problem of storing
and retrieving enormous numbers of individual carriers
of knowledge and information, the vast majority
of which are books. The storage and retrieval
of those physical objects pose a problem for all
the large libraries, especially large research libraries,
that have been saddled with outmoded physical
plants.
The emphasis on large research libraries in
this article arises partly from the author's experience
and partly, and more importantly, from the fact
that research libraries are laden with a double
burden. That burden lies in the fact that many
such libraries are parts of old established institutions
and are, therefore, housed in outmoded and inap-
propriate buildings, and in the fact that research
libraries are, by their very nature, preservers of
carriers of knowledge and information. Large re-
search libraries do not, by and large, ever dispose
of any of their materials and the result is that
their collections increase each year.
The library that I have the honour to serve
adds approximately 200,000 net physical carriers
each year. In other words, the library has to deal
with an additional two million volumes every decade.
This may seem an extreme case but it is not, viewed
in proportion, atypical of the problem facing many
research libraries. It should be noted, too, that
although the space problem is at its most acute
in the large research library, the fact is that almost
all libraries have expanding collections. This is
as it should be, for did not Dr. Ranganathan re-
mind us (in his Five Laws of Library Science) that
"The library is a growing organism"? The answers
developed today for the large research libraries
may be the answer of tomorrow for all other li-
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