The place where Harvard University stores millions of books

Large universities almost always have very large libraries where tens and hundreds of thousands of books are stored. Harvard has such a library: Weider (Widener) is considered the flagship library, which can be an example for many other libraries in the world. Here and own treasure - the "Bible", printed by Gutenberg himself. But in reality, the heart of the Harvard "book system" is Vault.

Harvard repository is located about 40 kilometers from the campus, and it looks more like an Amazon warehouse than a library. The total area of ​​the premises where more than 9 million books, films, videos are stored is more than 18 thousand square meters.


')
The store is built for cars and automatic systems, not for people. When the book arrives, it is measured and marked with a color sticker. Then the book is placed in a special box of a certain size, add a bar code and placed on the shelf.



There is a constant temperature in the storage, a UV filter is on fluorescent lamps, and the temperature is always constant at 10 degrees Celsius.



Each worker action is stored in the storage due to the presence of laser scanners. The movement of a person through the repository is usually subject to a specific algorithm, which is also used to place books and other library objects.

It is worth noting that a couple of decades ago it was enough to place an order, press a button, and after a couple of days you could wait for the book ordered. Now ordered book is scanned and sent to the teacher or student by e-mail in the form of a PDF-file. A large role in the process of delivering a book, its electronic copy, is now played by a person. But it is quite possible that in some time everything will be fully automated.