In preparation for the construction of the Hoover Institution’s new George P. Shultz Building, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives has been working over the past year on a project to relocate archival collection material housed in the Lou Henry Hoover (LHH) Building to secure offsite storage. This is an interim step before the material moves to its final location, a private bay within a new addition to the Stanford Auxiliary Library 3 (SAL3) offsite storage building in Livermore, California. With a goal of emptying the LHH by the end of December 2019, the Library & Archives developed plans to prepare and relocate the collection material within a period of fifteen months (September 2018 through December 2019).
We moved a total of 58,533 containers of Library & Archives collection material from 21,671 square feet of stacks space in the LHH building to our offsite location. These holdings comprised audiovisual materials, newspapers, optical media, and paper-based archival materials. As part of the preparation process, all boxes were inspected for move readiness, stabilized as needed, bar-coded, assigned a move unit, and verified both prior to and at the time of moving. In order to empty the building stacks we had to create space in the Hoover Tower and the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building stacks for preparation work, as well as store material that did not meet our requirements for moving off site.
The closure of the reading room allowed the project team among many tasks to control the tracking and movement of collection material, resulting in lower risk to these irreplaceable holdings. The closure also allowed staff who normally support circulation of materials to the public to assist in completing the move. Sixty Hoover staff members worked daily to prepare the collection for moving off site: bar-coding each item, setting up move units, verifying the units, and updating collections data that will allow researchers to more easily locate and access the material. In the end, we completed this project well ahead of our aggressive deadline. We are proud to announce that the move was completed on November 14, 2019, one-and-a-half months ahead of schedule. The Library & Archives staff is now refocusing its energies on reopening the reading room. Procedures are being tested and modified to ensure that retrieval of collections from offsite storage, as well as impacts from the construction of the Shultz Building, will have little to no effect on serving our researchers.
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives reading room will reopen on Monday, February 3, 2020. Due to an increase in the volume of collections stored off site and in anticipation of high demand, please contact us before your visit via our new ServiceNow page to ensure the best research experience.
