Library reaches 100,000 deliveries

After six years and nearly 100,000 deliveries, IU’s Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility, or ALF, has never lost a book, damaged a book or delivered one late.

The library currently holds about 1.8 million books, and 1,500 arrive daily. The library stores them by size, not subject, so the four full-time staff members and seven part-time student workers shelve and retrieve the books using a series of barcodes.

A slip-up in protocol means a book is gone forever.

“Talk about a needle in a haystack,” said Vaughn Nuest, ALF’s manager.

The books in the library are comprised of rare, valuable, fragile and seldom-used books from campus libraries.

A goal of the library is to provide access to the books while libraries try to solve overflow problems and free up space to meet students’ needs better, Nuest said.

Before, Nuest said, students or researchers could go into the Herman B Wells Library and pick up a book they needed in just a few minutes. Because ALF is in a more remote location – off Tenth Street and the 45/46 bypass on Range Road – there are accessibility issues Nuest and other ALF workers aim to ease.

“There’s a tendency to think books go here and are locked up in cold storage, and that’s not the case,” said Eric Bartheld, director of communications for IU-Bloomington libraries.

While the books are kept in a strictly climate-controlled vault-of-sorts to extend their shelf-life, someone who needs a book stored in ALF can request it using IUCAT – IU libraries’ online catalog – and it will be delivered to a campus library or regional campus libraries.

Nuest said if the book is requested by 12 p.m. Monday through Saturday, it will be delivered on the Bloomington campus by 5 p.m the same day.

ALF also scans and sends articles and book chapters electronically.

“Sometimes it can be a challenge,” said full-time staff member Mecco Mai about keeping up with the inflow.

The procedures are hard to mess up as long as the worker pays attention and works hard, and all the workers there are focused on efficiency and getting things done, he said.

Nuest said all employees are professional staff members who work for extraordinary service.

“We want perfection,” Nuest said.

ALF has a capacity of about 2.2 million books, about the volume of books the Herman B Wells Library can hold. When it’s filled up, there is space to build four more modules, Nuest said.

ALF also wants to preserve books. Before storage, the books are vacuum-sealed and stored in acid-free and lignin-free boxes. The campus libraries don’t throw out books – in years to come, a researcher could be looking for a 1990s-era book on Windows.

“What we’re really trying to do is keep these books for future generations,” Nuest said.