Monday, January 30, 2012

It's a bird, it's a plane...

It's the intrepid Kim Myers, (left) from Drake Library, ascending up in the cherry picker with a staff person at the University of Buffalo's remote storage facility! She and Charlie Cowling from Drake were there this past Friday to look at the book scanners they use. The facility itself is also quite interesting. It stores all the older bound journal volumes from the UB libraries, freeing up a tremendous amount of space for other purposes. The building was purpose built, with compact shelving, and many other features, such as the cherry pickers being guided via a wire embedded in the floor, helping to avoid crashes into the sides of the shelving!

The scanners they have are integrated with the library interlibrary loan software so when someone needs an article from one of these stored journals they simply put in a request, and the item is pulled, scanned and then emailed to them. A very practical and efficient answer to what to do with all those older bound journals, which do still have some interest, but also take up such room.

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