While the North and South Academic Buildings approach completion by the end of the summer in a highly visible position at the center of the Williams campus, the first library construction in the whole Stetson-Sawyer project is far from sight, but nearly finished and soon to be operational. On a fine May morning I joined a group touring the high-density shelving facility the Williams College Library has built on Route 7 North, opposite the Cozy Corner. I took away two strong impressions: One, that the building suggests how pure functionality can be aesthetically appealing. And the other, fascination at seeing two book environments in which I’ve spent my life — libraries and bookstores — melding to find a new model for an old need. The facility reminded me of nothing so much as the country’s largest book distribution warehouse, which I visited decades ago, back when computer-based stocking procedures were just being innovated. To follow me on the tour, please click through.
The Weight of Books: Dealing with the Volume of Volumes
As libraries stride into the digital future, they cannot abandon their traditional role as repository for the weight of human knowledge as embodied in the books that have come down to us, not least in their physical volumes. But the calculus of access has definitely changed. Do you need to have physical access to a journal article that is readily available online? Does a book that is consulted once in a decade need to be ready at hand, when space is at a premium for higher uses than deep storage? Melding new technologies with the time-honored purposes of archive keeping, libraries search for efficient means to store, preserve, and access the books and materials in their care.
When I parked and walked up to the building, its surface first struck me as looking like exposed insulation, but thereafter rather appealed to me as having texture and substance. I compared it to another concrete building about to open in Williamstown, Tadao Ando’s Stone Hill Center at the Clark, and marveled at the medium’s adaptability, from Ando’s smooth wood-like grain to this lava-like material. As I was looking at the surface, facility supervisor David Chalifoux came up to me and explained that the building was constructed from 35’ high panels of concrete with a raked finish, the large pre-cast rectangles raised into place to define the structure. (A slide show of the construction process can be seen here.)
Inside the office and processing area, the overall impression is of the proverbial clean, well-lighted place for books. The rooms were not yet set up for business but seemed light and airy, and the eagerness of those who were to work there was testimonial enough to the pleasantness of the place. Cleaning is essential to preservation of printed materials, so the lab-like feel was appropriate to the task at hand.
Attached was the enclosed loading dock, where the facility’s dedicated van will park when not making one of its anticipated two trips a day to the libraries on campus. It is expected that there will be retrievals in midmorning and late afternoon, so the longest wait for delivery of materials should be half a day. (Journals and government documents will eventually be scanned instead of delivered physically.) There is an anteroom where returning books get a high-suction vacuuming before entering the shelving facility proper, for which environmental conditions are very carefully controlled.
The stacks are accessed by a forklift, into which the attendant is strapped to move along the rows and up and down the shelves, where volumes will be arranged by size for compactness, and stored in waxed trays that slide out for access. There is no Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification for shelving, no designated spot for each book, but barcodes on book and tray that are matched and stored electronically for retrieval.
In addition to stringent environmental control, the building was constructed with energy efficiency in mind, with R50 roof insulation installed and a state grant received for a photovoltaic roof that is expected to supply a third of the facility’s electricity. The building has a state-of-the-art HVAC unit that is expected to draw visitors (just as the boiler room of the original Clark building was what other museum directors always wanted to see when they visited back in the mid-Fifties — I know because my sometime-office in shop storage is next door.)
This sort of high-density shelving facility is considered a first for a college the size of Williams, though following the model of Yale and Brown, and is likely to serve as example for others in turn. In siting and construction it is designed to allow the addition of further modules to double the capacity or more.
A facility of this kind was under consideration even before the overall Stetson-Sawyer project took the shape it did, but it’s another instance of the serendipity of how the whole development fell into place. Coming on line now, the LSF will facilitate the whole game of musical buildings, and obviate the need to find storage space during the displacements of construction. The month of July will be devoted to moving collections, not just Chapin and the Archives, but Library volumes now in the closed stacks of Stetson. Then there will be a long process of sorting materials by size, with retrievals expected to begin by next summer.
So we go outside to look around the building. Sure, it’s a big industrial box in a rural setting, but it has been sited with some care for its surroundings, and in the forthrightness of its materials and shape, it displays a symmetry of purpose and the aesthetic appeal of form following function. One functional element that turns out to be beautiful is the metal mesh screen around the outdoor staircase to the building’s mechanical systems on the mezzanine level above the office areas. Visitors may come to marvel at the HVAC unit, but will be dazzled by the light that filters into that metallic staircase.
So up in a field by the Vermont border, the Williams College Library of the 21st century begins to take shape. The LSF will immediately relieve some space constraints and facilitate the construction process for the New Sawyer, but moreover is built for future expansion, with provision for further modules to be added as needed. It will be a hidden resource of the College for decades to come, and a key asset for the Library as it adapts to the future.
