When Widener was built it was made of the mostlavish materials available: a thenstate-of-the-art stack system and tons of marbleand granite.

It was thought that with such quality materialsthe library would not burn--and administrators atthe time did not want to put a sprinkler systemthat in the event of a fire would destroy thebooks with water.

"You have marble, you have steel, you havebrick and you thought that with tightly packedbooks there could not be a fire, Cline says. Andthe library's planners did not prepare for one.

An arson fire in the early 1990s that destroyedmuch of the Los Angeles public library'scollection altered that conventional wisdom.Library officials at Harvard and nationwide beganto re-examine their notions about the security oftheir collections.

One myth about Widener holds that the libraryuses an oxygen-suppressant system, which wouldspray a gas like halon to snuff out the fire butmake it impossible for humans inside to breathe.

Not true, Cline says.

There is a halon system in Pusey--one thataccidentally discharged over the summer, resultingin a day-long evacuation. But those systems havesince been outlawed and Pusey's will be replacedsoon.

Additionally, the fear of water on books ismuch less acute now that technology allows wetbooks to be repaired, while burned books cannotbe.

Permanent Changes

The renovation also seeks to address some ofthe other shortcomings of the original design.

The original notion that light was good forbooks has since been proved wrong-it hastens theirdecay.

Currently the temperature and humidity swingwildly, with temperatures in some areas topping 80degrees on hot summer days. According to Zewinski,it is hoped that the project results in improvedtemperature control throughout the library-withthe stacks kept at 68 degrees and 35 percentrelative humidity.

Other aspects of the project will face greaterdifficulties. Because the stacks are structuralcomponents of the building, supporting much of itsweight, they cannot be tampered with to anysignificant degree.

Still, nearly 9,000 feet of stack space will belost in the renovations to allow for new stairsand elevators.

"The physical construction is really unique.You can't remove floors or always widen anelevator, you can't get rid of a couple ofstacks, you can't widen the aisles," Lee says.