NYPL, Columbia, Princeton to Collaborate
on Storage Site
New York Public Library, Columbia University, and Princeton University—the three libraries with the largest collections in the greater New York Metropolitan and surrounding area-have agreed to build and share a climate-controlled, automated book storage facility at Princeton's Plainsboro, New Jersey, campus. The overcrowded research libraries will use the high-density facility to house millions of their most infrequently used books and scholarly journals—to be carefully selected by librarians and faculty.
Columbia anticipates moving one million volumes by 2001, the first year of operation, and will add 110,000 books and journal collections per year; NYPL will deposit 1.3 million volumes and an estimated additional 150,000 volumes per year. Princeton and Columbia have agreed to begin digitizing back issues of stored journals, which users value purely for their content.
Researchers can obtain articles and book excerpts electronically from the remote storage area the same day; others materials will be available within 24 hours of a reader request and will be accessible to all three institutions.
Posted April 5, 1999.
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