HISTORY : High-Tech Homecoming Set for Historic-Document Trove

Hundreds of thousands of priceless, historic U.S.-owned documents scattered throughout the capital in temporary storage for two decades are about to be brought together in a permanent home.

And that home is designed to be a model of efficiency when it begins accepting its store of national treasures two years from now.

The second National Archives building under construction on 33 acres at the University of Maryland in College Park will soon make it possible to keep the 500,000-cubic-foot inventory in half the space that would have been required under a more traditional system.

NO MORE ROOM: Every usable inch of space in the original National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue was filled 20 years ago. Since then, every State Department record since 1790, 14 million photographs dating to the Civil War and 111,000 reels of film since the inauguration of President William McKinley have been among historic documents stored at various temporary facilities located throughout Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

The construction of the second Archives building to hold such a mass of materials at a reasonable cost might have been impossible, except for the new storage system.

A traditional shelving system would have required a building of nearly 2.5 million square feet, almost 50% larger than the new archives building, which at 1.7 million square feet will be the largest of its kind in the world.

The key to the compact system is the electronically powered movable shelves, known as high-density mobile storage systems, that eliminate the need for fixed aisles between rows of shelves, said Doug O’Connell, federal marketing manager for the Spacesaver Group, the Wisconsin corporation that will manufacture and install the shelves.

Storage units, ranging from book shelves to museum screens, are mounted on carriages that run back and forth on steel rails. By pushing a button, the electronically powered carriages are compacted together, creating an aisle so that a particular area can be reached.

“The whole idea is that you’re putting rows of shelving where there used to be aisles,” O’Connell said.

“The National Archives Administration had only a certain amount of money for a new building,” he said. “This was the only way to squeeze the amount of material they had into a building they could afford.”

High-density storage systems are not new, but were not widely used in the United States until about 20 years ago, he said. Similar systems have been used in Europe since World War II.

The shelving system will be the second most expensive part of the $250-million project, second only to the actual construction of the building, which is estimated at $140 million. Under the $48-million contract with Spacesaver, 81,000 feet of rail and 520 miles of shelving will be installed.

In addition to all State Department records, international treaties, joint resolutions and federal laws dating to 1790, all of the Archives’ audio-visual materials will be stored in the new facility, said Jill Brett, a spokeswoman for the National Archives.

These include the world’s largest collection of nonfiction film, 7 million photographs taken by or for the government--including some by photographic greats such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. The new building also will house 9 million aerial photographs and numerous architectural drawings, Brett said.

SAFETY MEASURES: The Archives and Records Administration has taken precautions to ensure protection of the delicate, sometimes priceless, materials. These include “quick response” sprinklers, smoke detectors, emergency backup systems and special regulations on shelving unit spacing and construction materials.

The new facility also will be specially designed to conform to strict temperature and humidity standards to protect the materials.

Construction of the building began in March and is scheduled for completion in July, 1993. The National Archives expects to begin moving records into the building in January, 1994.