met museum, library, folios, library stacks
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Folio Shift: (Space) Raiders of the (Not) Lost Art

Library books using warehouse storage.

In the library world, you don’t have to click too many times before you see a reference to the warehouse scene at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sprawling warehouse

Not the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the closest you can get copyright-free. Image generated by StockCake.com

In a scene that has driven many an impressionable young person to get a degree in library and information science, the Ark of the Covenant, after an entire movie’s worth of action and adventure showing it to be the ultimate weapon, is placed in a crate and filed away in a giant warehouse, presumably never to be seen or found again.

However, it turns out warehouse storage has changed a lot since 1981! Now, facilities like Clancy Cullen, where we store a significant portion of Watson Library’s collection, are state-of-the-art, climate-controlled structures with impeccable inventory systems capable of keeping track of millions of volumes without error. Unfortunately, offsite storage is impractical for certain very large books in our collection.

Watson Library’s folio collection (books too large to shelve upright) contains many of the oldest, most impressive, and most valuable books in the collection, but the majority are not regularly consulted. In the library stacks, they are unwieldy, difficult to keep in order, and by virtue of their size, take up an inordinately large footprint in an increasingly space-conscious area. However, they would be too expensive and difficult to store offsite and bring back and forth as needed.

Left: close-up of folios on the shelves; right: long aisle of folios

For perspective, most of the folios in this picture are more than 2 feet tall/long. All photos by author unless otherwise indicated

When the Museum began discussions about effective storage for items in The Met collection, we were eager to be a part of those solutions. Cutting-edge renovations were completed in October of this year, and we were quick to move in to a newly-revamped storage area on the lower level of the Museum, perfect for high-value but infrequently used items like our folios. After generating a list of folios that are more frequently requested and should remain in the Watson stacks for easier access, we were able to inventory and relocate about sixty percent of the folios to this new storage area.

Yellow slips of paper sticking out of folios on shelves

High-use folios flagged to remain in the stacks for easy access

In the photos above, you can see that many of these folios have been put in custom enclosures by Watson’s Book Conservation unit, many over the past year in preparation for this move. This enabled them to be moved and re-stacked safely.

As with all library shifts, we once again worked with the Clancy Cullen Library Services team, who employed a small army of library movers who have the skills, expertise, and equipment for a job like this. They dusted each volume before placing them on a flotilla of custom-made moving carts and making the pilgrimage through the tunnels under The Met to the new space.

Folios sitting in a large, wooden carrying case

Custom-made carts for safely moving large books made this move a snap (having 12 trained movers to load, push, and unload them didn’t hurt either)

When they finally arrived at the other end, they were shelved much more efficiently, on easy-to-access shelves rather than cramped aisles in the stacks.

Folios sitting on new shelving units

Folios now nicely shelved, but probably not laying waste to entire regions

With the space freed up in Watson’s stacks, we are now able to expand storage for special collections materials, a much-needed upgrade. We can all sleep a little easier knowing that these gentle giants will be housed in a safe place for the next 150 years of their lives, and that if one of them proves to be a biblical weapon capable of leveling mountains, we will be able to find and retrieve it easily.


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