Moving the Books

The most difficult problem then has beencooking up a way to move the books around insideWidener while construction workers invade thebuilding.

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

"They wound up with a mess on their hands," Leesays.

That mess was composed of metal filings on thebooks and accumulations of dirt and dust on thevolumes.

According to Cline, Yale now plans to spend $1million this year cleaning up the miss, includinghand-vacuuming of each of the library 3.75 millionbooks.

Harvard aims to do its Ivy counterpart onebetter.

"I'm feeling very confident that we'll do thisproject and we'll do it with well with nowherenear the disaster as what happened at Yale," saysDavid A. Zewinski '76, associate dean for physicalresources and planning in FAS.

The University plans to divide each ofWidener's ten stack levels into two sections, witheach of these 20 sections containing roughly 2.5miles of shelves and 300,000 books.

The process of shifting the books will worklike this: D-level will first be cleared asoverflow space, with half of its current booksshifted to Pusey library and half sent to theHarvard Depository.

The then-empty D-level will be renovated first.Then, as renovations move up the building, thefloor being worked on will have its books shiftedto the then-empty space in D.

In this way, library officials plan to have thebooks remain accessible in their temporarylocations throughout the process except when theyare in transit.

The renovations are expected to take betweenthree and four weeks per section, with theexception of D-level, whose extensive renovationswill begin the project with three to four monthsof work.

"It's a huge logistical operation, but they areconfident they can do it," Zewinski says.

Smoked Out