Chicago State’s brave new library

It’s not often that a librarian is warned to stay away from the bookshelves because of high voltage, and that students aren’t allowed to roam freely through the stacks -- but it’s becoming more common.

At Chicago State University, a South Side college that dates to the 1860s, only robots are allowed to browse most books and archives.

The library, unveiled last fall, was designed to make it easier for students and faculty to access exactly the right book, instead of wandering aimlessly through the stacks in a frustrating search, said Lawrence McCrank, dean of CSU’s Library and Instructional Services.

In 2001, when school officials were initially mapping out the needs of the students, many of whom are older and working at least part time, one of the biggest concerns they voiced was a desire to save time, McCrank said.

“We discovered that the average student took 30 minutes to find a book. Books would be misplaced or not filed correctly,” McCrank said. “That’s a lot of time that cuts into how long students can spend analyzing the material, focusing on work, or continuing to find even more research on a particular subject.”

Limited physical access

Chicago State officials, though, did decide that students needed easy physical access to some books. Materials for current classroom coursework and more recently published items are scattered through the top two stories of the four-story library.

But the nerve center of the building is a central, massive concrete warehouse that holds nearly 80% of its collection, including about 375,000 volumes and the school’s archive materials.

Silver-toned metal storage bins are stacked on top of one another, with the rows towering from floor to three-story ceiling. Books, microfiche rolls and digital media disks -- all published before 1991 -- are held inside each bin.

Each item is tagged with a unique radio-frequency ID chip -- a small white sticker with an electronic sensor built into it. A computer system uses the chips to figure out which bin each book or other bit of material is stored.

To get a particular book, students and faculty must log onto the library’s website from home or school and place an order for a title.

Once the order is received, the library’s computer system directs a robotic crane -- dubbed “Rover” by the librarians -- to retrieve one of more than 6,300 bins. Each bin holds the equivalent of four bookshelves.

The crane then brings the bin to a workstation at the front of the warehouse, where a librarian picks up the book.

All told, the system takes about three minutes from when the order for the book is placed to when the librarian is carrying it to the circulation desk for pickup, said Leathea Williams, head of the library’s circulation department.

“Gone are the days where students will go and hide books from classmates on the shelves. We don’t even need to keep track of which stacks are devoted to music or education or history,” Williams said. “The books don’t even need to be stored together by subject.

“The books can go anywhere there’s free space, because the computer keeps track of it all for us.”

Balancing needs

While the dot-com boom sparked the rise in digital publishing, as well as widespread predictions that books would become a thing of the past, librarians have spent recent years wrestling with how to preserve, catalog and store millions of dusty tomes that were rarely used, but important enough to keep in their collections.

The problem is only growing as libraries struggle to balance dwindling funds with a trend toward redefining their purpose in a community. These days, it is no longer enough to cram rows of open stacks into hallowed halls. Instead, space for books is giving way to computer labs, coffeehouses and study rooms where people can gather and work.

Some schools have opted to store their literary overflow at off-campus sites. Several of the University of California campuses house millions of lesser-used books in the UC Southern Regional Library Facility in Los Angeles, a temperature-controlled warehouse.

Other schools have opted for an on-site location with an automated storage and retrieval system such as Chicago State’s. California State University’s Northridge campus spearheaded this push in the 1990s, when it opened a partially underground wing where a series of cranes pull cases of books from the stacks. The wing holds about two-thirds of the library’s collection.

Such reliance on technology alarms critics, who note that these storage systems eliminate the tradition of students accidentally discovering new and sometimes better material while roaming through the stacks.

‘Simply a warehouse’

“That’s not a library,” said Jonathan Gaw, a technology analyst with the research firm IDC Corp. “Once a library loses the ability for people to go immerse themselves in books, it’s not a library. It’s simply a warehouse.”

And though the storage might be efficient, Chicago State officials acknowledge that the system isn’t flawless: Earlier this month, the power on campus went out for a few minutes.

“The lights came right back, but it took a full day to bring the computer system back online,” Williams said. “People weren’t happy that they couldn’t get their books.”

p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com