Of the roughly 12.5 million volumes in Yale’s libraries, approximately 4 million are housed right in the middle of campus, in the lavish Sterling Memorial Library. Another 3 million or so are three miles away, in a nondescript warehouse here in Hamden. Yale’s Library Shelving Facility in Hamden houses the overflow from campus libraries.
Aside from library staff, few at Yale have ever been to the decade-old Library Shelving Facility. But LSF was always meant to be more like an unobtrusive waiter than a gaudy architectural marvel. After all, if not for the facility’s 30-foot-high stacks and capacity to hold millions of Yale’s most obscure texts, University officials say, the libraries on campus proper would be overflowing.
Re-Storing Public Possessions 