Thank you to everyone who offered advice on this…it was all wonderful. I wanted to share the wisdom with ARLIS-L:
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Book carts: the moving kind, which you may be able to rent from your moving company. The entire cart can be shrink-wrapped to “pack” the cart, and
then covered with additional plastic sheeting for water protection. (Recommended by two museum librarians.)
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Pluses: can make maintaining shelf order easier; can accommodate fragile books by allowing them to stand upright or on spines; can make moving, storing and eventual reshelving much easier; can aid in space planning
because determining linear feet would be easier on carts than in boxes
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Minus: may require more space than boxes to store and move
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Note: carts should be labeled; flags can be used to identify the beginnings/endings of shelves
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Box suggestions:
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Archival Boxes
i. Archival Boxes:
an academic librarian recommended these custom enclosures (through Carmen); requires assembly (time-consuming); good for odd-sizes
ii. Gaylord: two librarians suggested Gaylord.
For example,
acid free banker’s size boxes. This size would fit most books, even art or oversized ones. If you buy bigger boxes, and if you’re trying to pack them snugly, then you run the risk of the boxes becoming really heavy
and difficult to move.
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Interim storage/moving:
i. Bankers Box® R-Kive® Heavy-Duty
Storage Boxes, Letter/Legal Size, 10"H x 12"W x 15"L, 60% Recycled Content, White/Blue, Pack Of 20:
A museum librarian used these for interim storage of special collections; could work well for long-term storage because they are double-walled, but they are expensive.
ii. Bankers
Box® Presto Storage Box :
A museum librarian used these for interim storage of oversize books
iii. Paige Company:
Recommended by a museum library and a bookseller.
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Boxes in a variety of sizes that are solid and sturdy. While they are well-known for their “Miracle Box” which is one-piece and pushes into the shape of a box from a flat state, is it not needed. Their regular
banker boxes will fit the majority of the items upside down on their spines.
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Their boxes are hinged lid, 1.2 cubic foot cartons, with 7.3+ PH, and 2-3 wall construction. Over 5,000 costs $2.15 per carton. At 10,000+, the price drops to $1.95 per
iv. Do
not buy if you want super strong archival boxes that can withstand long-term off-site storage in climate-controlled environment (or ask for a sample first):
Hollinger Heavy-Duty Record Storage Boxes
SKU: #82-023
The preservation industry standard for storage and transportation of records and collections
Double layered ends, single layered sides, and double layered bottom
Choose from Archival Grey (buffered pH 8.5), Tan (buffered pH 8.5), or White (unbuffered pH 7.0)
Acid/Lignin-free, attached or separate lids, shipped flat and easy assembly without glues or tape
Dimensions: 10”H x 12”W x 15”D
White
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Packing:
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Use boxes large enough for non-oversize books to stand upright or on spines, fill the empty space with packing peanuts or paper
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The best support for books is other books. If the order of the books doesn’t matter, try to put similarly sized items together and pack them snugly. If you end up with weird gaps in the boxes, fill them with
crumpled up acid free tissue or interleaving paper. This is an image taken from their institutional disaster recovery plan, source unknown, but it’s a good visual guide for packing books in boxes:
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If you can’t get acid-free boxes, you can wrap books in acid-free tissue and pack in regular boxes.
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Packing fragile books—if it isn’t possible to restore or otherwise stabilize the books ahead of time, you can easily make temporary enclosures that provide a modicum of stability and at least would hold the book
together (in case its spine is about to fall off, or something). They’ve placed books in acid-free envelopes of different sizes, like
this or
this. If the book seems to need a further bit of quick stabilization, you could tie the enveloped book with string around the envelope
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A book seller packs this way: adhere to shelf order as much as possible. Place the oversized books in larger boxes in the order that they are not accepted into the regular boxes, and keep notes on which sequential
letters of the alphabet are in each regular box, as well as the oversized boxes. When they are eventually unpacked at the new location, the person shelving can unpack the regular banker boxes first, leaving appropriate room for the oversized materials (and
any anticipated future expansion) on each shelf.
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Protection suggestions—an academic librarian urges us to always think of waterproofing (they suffered horrible losses):
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Tyvek envelopes for wrapping individual books
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Line entire box with plastic sheeting
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Cover book carts and boxes with plastic sheeting
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Inventory: Create an itemized box inventory; divide up the inventory by box, and then place each part of the inventory list into each corresponding
box. That will definitely take extra time, but if it’s necessary for the project to know what’s in each box ahead of time, then it will make things much easier down the line.
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MISC:
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Reinforce shelving with gussets! From museum librarian: “We added some shelving to our reading room over the summer and had to have it reinstalled after the installers failed to take us seriously when we told
them how heavy our books were. When the shelves started leaning, they had to come back and reinforce the shelving with gussets, which delayed our re-opening by a month. Apparently, these gussets are on all our standalone and compact shelving, but we had
no idea that we would have to specify it.”
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ALA Moving or Relocating a Library
libguide
Miki Bulos | Lucas Research Library | P.O. Box 10877 San Rafael,CA 94912 | 415-662-1918 |
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