A school librarian might be horrified by the fact that the books are not organized by call numbers but by a criteria as arbitrary as size. The key identifier is the bar code, which, unlike a call number, bears no relation to the contents of the book.

And then there's the matter of the physical appearance of the facility. The depository shelves are three stories high, two-thirds the length of a football field, and shelved a yard deep--not exactly convenient for browsing.

"One of the things that distinguishes us from a library is that we store by size," Lane says. In a typical library, he says, the books are of different heights and most of the space on a shelf is just air.

"We eliminate the air because space is expensive," he explains.

To access the shelves, depository workers drive motorized lifts that hoist them 30 feet into the air to reach the higher levels. It's not exactly a librarian's typical work environment.

Schneiter recalls one librarian, when asked by a student to describe the depository, told him to imagine himself in an Indiana Jones movie.

From the inside of the stacks, the perspective is indeed dizzying--perhaps even claustrophobic, for the aisles are only just large enough to admit the motorized lifts that function like mobile, stand-alone elevators.

Yet this is no ordinary warehouse. While warehouses turn over merchandise relatively quickly, the depository is equipped to store books for centuries.

The process, Lane says, also differs "because storing books is very labor-intensive: they cannot be piled up," unlike the boxes of records shelved by archival storage companies like Iron Mountain.

"Books are generally stored for the ages; records for a finite amount of time," Schneiter says.

Welcome. Mr. Book, to the Tour

"Let's imagine," Lane says, "that you're a book, and your library has slapped a bar code right in the middle of your forehead and sent you out here."

This, apparently, is the informational "I Am a Book" tour that Lane gives several times a year to officials at other institutions looking to build similar facilities, among others. By now, Lane has his routine down pat.

"Actually," he says, "the bar code would be over your left eyebrow."

At the depository, a book's bar code is (almost) all that matters.

All the processing that involves HOLLIS and the library's own records is done on campus.