Harvard ’s flagship library , Widener , is an imposing granite regular hexahedron construct quite literally as shrine to the book . A key alcove cuts through the muckle to show off a prized souvenir : an original Gutenberg bible . But this is not the heart of Harvard ’s libraries . No , that would be its cold storage website , an anonymous concrete construction few students or even faculty know about .
The Harvard Depository , some 30 miles from the Cambridge campus , better resembles an Amazon warehouse than a library . The 200,000 satisfying infantry readiness home the vast majority of Harvard Library ’s collection — some 9 million books , films , LPs , magnetized tapes , and pamphlets classify not by the Dewey decimal organisation but by sizing .
A enthralling new synergistic documentary , Cold Storage , glimpses inside this little - known world .
The 25 - hour documentary , which you may find along with many moreinteractive easter eggs here , was conceive as part of a largerThe Library Beyond the Book . “ We ’re go through a kind of reinvention of the institution , ” tell Jeffrey Schnapp , a prof and manager of Harvard ’s metaLAB , when I talk to him several month ago . As books increasingly transcend their strong-arm strain , Schnapp was interested in looking back at a place when a book of account is concentrate entirely to an objective . So he and Cristoforo Magliozzi made Cold Storage .
The Harvard Depository is a man built for and see by machines , not for humans .
When book make it at the Harvard Depository , it is first sized and and marked with a color - coded sticker . Then it is put in pane - inert boxes order by size of it , bar - coded , and placed on a shelf — by a human being operating a forklift . The storage adroitness is kept at a unremitting 50 degrees F. Its dark , fluorescent spark with a UV filter flicker on only when a particular shelf is being access for recovery .
“ Humans interact with the objects moderately much as they were part of the machine system , ” says Schnapp . A proletarian ’s optimum way through the shelves to retrieve a series of book is set by an algorithm . Laser scanner are used to log every natural process .
Some books are buy and placed in storage immediately , with the arithmetic mean it may not be used for decades . There is a sensory faculty , though , that storing these books is an ultimately quixotic task . “ We ca n’t maintain and store everlastingly everything we ’re collecting . It ’s unsustainable , ” says Matthew Sheehy , head teacher of access services , in the infotainment .
When I was an undergraduate at Harvard , I knew the Harvard Depository only as it seem in the on-line depository library catalogue . I could click a push button and a book would magically appear on campus a couple day later . By my aged year , I could click a button and an email would belt down up in my inbox a couple days later , with a scanned PDF of the book section I requested .
Cold Storage is shoot as an homage and a companion to Alain Renais ’s 1956 documentary , All the World ’s Memory , about the French National Library . In demarcation to Harvard ’s library , the French National Library had on - internet site storage and recovery — a place where the great unwashed could be among rule book .
Now , technology is putting greater distance between us and the forcible books . First , the Book are moved offsite and retrieved at the mouse click of a push button . Then they ’re simply scan . In the futurity , will the forcible aim exist at all , or will library just be large waiter farms that do up digital scans ? These are questions that every library is grip with .
Among Harvard student , the grand Widener Library is known not for its Gutenberg bible but primarily as a place to have sexual practice — a fact that would have almost sure as shooting displease Eleanor Elkins Widener , the materfamilias who donate the depository library after her son ’s drowning on the Titanic . library shift . Dumb , randy teenagers also get up . The subroutine library was a cultural institution is n’t going aside , but it also believably not be what Eleanor Elkins Widener envisioned .
All images are screencaptures from Cold Storage . Watch the infotainment here .
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