Libraries Annex Expansion Nears Completion

by DENISE WOLFE

Construction upgrades to the Libraries Annex addition are nearly complete, and preparations to receive Lockwood Library's collections are moving into their final stages.

Once work wraps up, Annex staff will turn their attention to a checklist of tasks before any materials arrive: programming new aisles into the wire guidance system for the facility's order pickers, labeling roughly 4,000 new shelves with barcodes and human-readable identifiers, and accessioning those shelves into the inventory system. Work on backfilling partially filled trays — already well underway — has brought the count down from about 34,000 to fewer than 9,000. Shelves will be consolidated and larger items will be shifted to the new addition to streamline the eventual intake process. The move of Lockwood materials is still tentatively planned to begin in late 2026 and conclude by mid-2027. 

When complete, the addition is expected to hold somewhere in the range of half a million items. Of those coming from Lockwood, roughly 40% will be temporarily housed at the Annex before returning, with the rest making the move permanent.

New Spacesaver shelving offers several improvements over the existing racking. Units are engineered to carry more weight without sagging, and each shelf includes a back panel that keeps trays from sliding off the rear — a recurring problem that can damage materials and make retrieval difficult. The shelving sits four inches off the ground rather than two, reducing physical strain on staff working at the lowest level, and a dust cover on the bottom shelf keeps items from slipping underneath. The lighter gray finish also makes for a noticeably brighter workspace. An added practical benefit: the new shelving is easier to reconfigure, giving more flexibility as the collection evolves. 

With four aisles rather than the eight in the main warehouse, the addition is also expected to improve retrieval times for the Lockwood materials, which will circulate at higher rates than most items currently stored at the Annex. Longer term, the expansion positions the Annex to become the Libraries' largest repository of physical materials — with room to grow, and at a fraction of the footprint traditional shelving would require.