Storage Management: beyond the stacks 

Images: State Library of Victoria's offsite store and the 'big book'

When the Stack Management group met recently in Melbourne after a year’s hiatus, one of the decisions they made was to change the group’s name to Storage Management.

Vanessa Ross, Storage Coordinator at the State Library of Victoria, told us about the storage challenges facing libraries today, and in the future.

Why did the group change its name?

The name change was suggested because ‘stack management’ doesn’t fully represent the group’s concerns. Stack storage typically means closed-access storage, but we do so much more than that.

What are the challenges and priorities for storage management in the next 10 years?

Finding enough storage space will always be an issue. We expect that there will be more retrospective unpublished materials, such as manuscripts, coming into collections. As well, digital publication is predicted to increase exponentially, which presents new and ongoing challenges for collecting and preserving material. As a group we’re also trying to find ways to reduce duplication and to work with greater consistency across our libraries.

How did you get into storage management?

I was working as a project manager in what was known as the Preservation and Storage Division during the library’s redevelopment in the 1990s, and was seconded to work with the team managing the fit-outs. Various stages of the redevelopment required vacating open- and closed-access storage areas to allow building and fit-out works to progress.

The day I became responsible for storage I burst into tears, because it was such a frightening prospect. There was so much involved in assessing, planning and storing collection items, and much of the knowledge about the items themselves lay with individuals in the library. Once those people left, their knowledge left with them. But being launched headfirst allowed me to make an ‘unknown’ known and transparent by carefully documenting everything and sharing that documentation. We know more about the items in our collections than we ever have before, and they’re stored better than ever before.

What’s the biggest storage challenge you’ve faced?

As part of the redevelopment, the Arts collection – which is multifaceted and difficult by nature – had to be moved from a first storey building with no lift access. The collection had occupied Queens Hall for a number of years and had outgrown the room in every aspect. It consisted of material in every format under the sun: sound reels, film, fiche, DVD, video, cassette, pamphlets, and a number of book format collections, including elephant folios.

Many months were spent untangling the collection, interfiling multiple split sequences, stripping out a new, relevant and current open-access component, preparing all the material to be transported safely to new locations, in order, with adequate growth at necessary points through the many sub collections. It was the largest and most complex of all the moves I’d worked on to date. The planning required was phenomenal.

What’s the most difficult thing you’ve had to store?

In 2010 we acquired a handmade picture book called Zolden: global explorer, fondly known as ‘the big book’. It’s roughly two metres square, constructed from paper and fibreboard sheets and weighs in at more than 350kg! It took six gentle and strong men to manoeuvre the book to be photographed before we transported it to offsite storage, where it rests on custom-made mobile polypropylene benches, without which it would likely not be moved again.