Established 25 years ago in Hamden, Connecticut, the Library Shelving Facility (LSF) is a critical player in Yale Library’s ongoing evolution to meet the changing needs of students, faculty, and other library patrons. Located just three miles from Sterling Memorial Library, LSF provides climate-controlled storage optimized for long-term preservation, high-tech retrieval, and rapid delivery service to locations across campus of more than 8 million books and other items, including rare and fragile special collections materials.
The efficiency and expertise of LSF’s staff—not only in securely moving and tracking such a high volume of physical materials but also in scanning and delivering digital materials—are critical to the excellent service Yale Library is consistently able to provide.
In its first quarter century, LSF has enabled Yale Library to continue building its circulating print collections and extraordinary special collections, even as the library rapidly increases investment in e-books and licensed e-resources. In the 25 years since LSF was founded, Yale Library has significantly grown its collection size, adding more than 7 million books and items—a transformation that would not have been possible without the space and services LSF provides.
“Storage, preservation, services, and people. More than a critical storage facility, LSF is an essential service center with expert staff.”
—Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian
With its 64,000 square feet of processing and storage space, LSF enabled major library renovations in support of new academic programs, new approaches to teaching and learning, and Yale’s expansions to educate a greater number of students. Today, with LSF in place, Yale Library offers more small-group collaboration spaces, in-library classrooms, opportunities to teach with special collections and technology, and support for data-intensive research.
In the narrative below, Michael DiMassa, the first director of LSF, outlines the facility's history and its central role in supporting Yale Library's mission, its increasingly complex operations, and its ongoing commitment to physical collections in the digital age.
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“By the mid-1990s, Yale Library was growing beyond its capacity. It was adding about 250,000 volumes to its collections each year. The situation in Sterling Memorial Library was particularly acute. By early 1997, the installation of air-conditioning ductwork had displaced thousands of linear feet of shelving. Overflow areas made patrons’ discovery process and staff maintenance of Sterling Library’s collection difficult. At the same time, the school libraries, the more than a dozen departmental libraries, and the university’s major special collections depositories were all experiencing similar space problems.
“Library administrators sought a solution. One idea was to build another library on campus—although the high cost and the lack of available real estate presented obstacles. The alternate solution was to construct an off-campus shelving facility in Hamden, Connecticut, just 3 miles from campus. An offsite facility offered several advantages: the capability to carefully control temperature and humidity to preserve the fragile materials in the collections and the possibility of ongoing expansion (which in fact occurred, adding eight more shelving modules to LSF over the course of 25 years).