And Faculty say the massive size of this project is justified by the potential consequences should the books continue to decay.

"It would be intellectual suicide not to go ahead with this project," wrote James Engell, professor of English and comparative literature.

Library officials say they are attempting to learn from the experiences of other major research libraries which have undergone similar renovations. Columbia University is currently working on a similar project.

They also looked to the experience at Langdell Library at Harvard Law School, which closed for a year while it was renovated earlier this decade. But because it shut down, Langdell offers few lessons for Harvard's biggest library, which has no plans to close and has exponentially more books than its law school counterpart.

"We can't do a Langdell. [There is] no place in the world to shelve that many books [and] we just can't close it," says Sidney Verba '53, director of the University library and Pforzheimer University professor.

Moving the Books

The most difficult problem then has been cooking up a way to move the books around inside Widener while construction workers invade the building.

According to Lee, Yale's project provided a powerful example of what not to do. For Sterling, Yale left its books on the stacks and attempted to work around them.