Georgetown University Library
Off-Campus Storage

Faculty and librarians reviewed over 300,000 storage candidates and selected for storage more than 162,000 volumes from the Lauinger Library and the Blommer Science Library. Considered for storage were books published between 1859 and 1969 (with a few exceptions) that have not circulated since 1993. Many are duplicate copies or variant editions of titles remaining on campus. The last shipment was delivered to the storage facility on August 25, 2000.

The storage project was necessary because the Library no longer had the shelf space to accommodate the 30,000-plus volumes added annually. Adding any more shelves beyond the thousands installed over the past eight years would have eliminated significant study space. To allow for continued growth in the collection, low-use books were transferred to the Washington Research Library Consortium's (WRLC) Offsite Storage facility located in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. The shelf space gained will accommodate acquisitions for the next 5 years.

Library liaisons worked with faculty colleagues in each department or program in determining which of the storage candidates would remain on campus. In addition to personal contact with faculty, we created a storage Web site where faculty and other Library users could individually remove titles from the storage candidates list. Over 4000 volumes remain on campus as a result of requests received in this way.

Remember that we can retrieve materials from storage at your request. Each book housed in the storage facility includes the location "Off-campus storage" in GEORGE, the online catalog. Expect a book to take 1–2 business days (M–F) to be retrieved from storage. If a title you use frequently has been stored, it will be returned to the Library shelves. To help you decide whether a particular title is relevant to your research, the tables of contents of over 1500 books were photocopied and will soon be scanned and linked to their records in GEORGE.