For the past few weeks, I have lost the use of about 49 square feet of the stack space in one of my repositories. They were doing load-testing of the floor above and had to shore it up in my space. So, I moved ten stacks and five pallets of unprocessed materials out of their way. I had thought that I would have to close down the Archives, since there is no other space in the building to move boxes to -- I upended the patron tables and stacked up furniture in columns to the ceiling in order to make room for the boxes. I also disassembled the ten stacks of shelves and moved them into space out side the "Zone of Doom" that I had to clear.

I discovered something in the process -- if you set aside some aesthetic considerations, there is a lot of space to be squeezed out. For starters, the pallets are not effective use of floor space. a pallet can only have boxes piled, at best, five high, and that tends to damage the boxes. They (the Divine Predecessor Archivists) could have put in another bank of shelves instead of putting down pallets for the backlog. I was able to reassemble all ten stacks outside the Zone, which means that I should be able to add at least eight stacks when I get the space back. That's 144 more c.f. of records off the floor.

The building I'm in has tall, deep window sills. In fact, the window sills make very nice shelving space. I use it primarily for material that is scheduled for deaccessioning, and backlog material (it's off the pallets on the floor), but I can store between fifteen and twenty-one boxes in each window sill. Before putting anything in there, I sealed the windows up with cardboard and masking tape. The windows have been leaking light into the Archives for years and I had plenty of cardboard from non-archival boxes that were used to transfer records into the Archives. I'll leave one window undarkened for looking outside, but using the other six will get me between 90 and 126 more c.f. of records off the floor. I can get rid of all the pallets, which are made of wood.

Finally, it is possible to arrange stacks of shelves in non-traditional configurations to get more shelving space, at the expense of a little convenience for the archives staff. The current layout ran rows of shelves in parallel the length of my stack space. Two rows have back-to-back shelves, two are against the walls, and one more is a single row because a double row would block the door. So, in my emergency configuration, I've put some stacks perpendicular to the existing rows -- at the ends of the rows, or in between. Now, the result of this is that approximately 1/3 of one stack might be blocked by the perpendicular stack. In order to access a box out of the blocked area, you would have to remove one beside it and slide the box before removing it. This would be bad for a part of the collections that are handled frequently, but certainly the backlog materials, which have been sitting on a pallet for ten years, are not bein g handled much, and I'm willing to do a little bit of extra work in return for an extra 36 c.f. of records off the floor.

Now to find some more shelves to scrounge.

Tags: archives, backlog, space