Book spines, vinyl jackets and film canisters whizzed by in a blur as Michael Kelty steered the lift truck through the massive warehouse’s narrow aisles.
The lift’s platform rose 30 feet before Kelty applied the brakes. He stopped at the top of one of the dozens of identical racks lined with books of all shapes and sizes in one of the bays of the Preservation and Access Service Center for Colorado Academic Libraries, or PASCAL for short. Located in an unremarkable building on the eastern end of the Anschutz Medical Campus, the center holds about 1.8 million books, films and records from universities across the state.
The University of Colorado School of Medicine, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Denver and the schools centered at the Auraria Campus in downtown Denver all have materials stored in the building’s two cavernous bays, where the temperature is a constant 55 degrees and the humidity is a precise 35 percent. A complex sprinkler system lines the bays’ columns and their lofty ceilings.
As he navigated the massive lift truck – also known as an order picker – through the rows and rows of densely packed racks, Kelty, it seemed, knew exactly where he was headed.
“I like organizing things. When you get 5,000 books coming in, I kind of like the fact that I get to choose where I go,” said Kelty, manager of the PASCAL facility. “I don’t have to worry about patrons coming and messing them up.”
Organizational skills are a must for a storage center that takes in an average of 200,000 new items a year and up to 2,000 items on particularly busy days. The center also receives more than a hundred demands for scans, loans and other services in on any given day.
“On a typical day I scan 300 to 8,000 (pieces),” said James Treibeirt, a materials handler at the center. He spoke as he checked in government documents from CU Boulder into the PASCAL computer system. “The most I’ve scanned in a day was 1,300 or 1,400 … I prefer sorting and scanning books and sending them digitally.”
Even as more casual readers turn to e-readers and the Internet, academic libraries still cling to their collections of books, records and even laserdiscs, Kelty said.
“Libraries are still afraid to throw stuff away,” Kelty said. “You can see, the University of Colorado, they save everything,” he added, gesturing at the towering shelves.
That policy extends to bound journals, 16 millimeter film canisters, oversized art books and fragile volumes from the late 19th century. In a specific section of the center’s first bank of shelves nicknamed “SLAP” (Special Location At PASCAL), Kelty pulled out a cardboard box bearing a volume titled “Pinks and Blues” with a publication date of 1873. As he turned the pages with gloved fingers, the University of Colorado’s embossed stamp was visible on one of the front pages.
“We have to be more careful when we know it’s special collections … Everything that comes to SLAP is sent down in a special container by their own courier,” Kelty said. “Boulder sends down their own courier every day to pick up material. Patrons demand it. They don’t want to wait two days. They wanted everything to stay on campus, but there’s just no room up there any more.”
Kelty and the other two full-time staff members at PASCAL sort books and other articles according to size and shape, following a precise system formalized in the 1980s at the first storage site of its kind built at Harvard University. That storage center in Massachusetts became the model for copycat buildings across the state, Kelty said; at the time, it was a giant leap forward in the technology of preservation.
“They’re all Harvard-style depositories,” he said, referring to the network of about 50 PASCAL-like centers across the country. “The first one was built in 1986. It’s still a relatively young field, but it’s getting old fast because of technology. They’re still building them, but I don’t think it’s a good field to get into.”
An increasingly digitized world isn’t the only threat to PASCAL. When the storage center went up in 2001, the former Fitzsimons Army hospital was relatively undeveloped. The University of Colorado School of Medicine, the University of Colorado Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado and the other institutions that would end up moving to Aurora were still on the other end of town.
More than a decade later, PASCAL’s real estate has become much more valuable. As the Anschutz Medical Campus built up around PASCAL, the center had to fight to hang onto the building and get permission to build a second bay, after the first hit capacity about three years ago.
“We were here before most of these buildings were here. That’s why it was built here, because there was state-owned space,” Kelty said. “Now, we’re storing all of these books on land that’s too valuable for that purpose. We had to bring our lawyers in and show that the state had set this land aside for that purpose.”
That purpose goes beyond books. The PASCAL site holds the entire collection of CU film professor Stan Brakhage. It holds the archives of former Colorado Senator and current U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. The shelves devoted to vinyls hold complete symphonic collections, as well as records by pop acts like Peter, Paul and Mary.
“I think everyone who works in libraries feels the nostalgia,” Kelty said. “But something is changing. I think electronic documents are eating into our circulation. It’s not that I mind, it’s less work for us.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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