Show Moving a Great Library As the new Publip Library building in Copley square nears completion the question of how the 700000 volumes composing the library shall be moved from the old structure to the new one becomes a most perplexing one These 700000 volumes if packed the closest possible way namely on end would make a row between twelve and fifteen miles long When the removal is made the library will have to be closed perhaps per-haps for two months If books were bricks the problem would not be so difficult but they cannot be thrown into a cart at one end and dumped out in a heap at the other First they must all be cleaned before being taken to the new building No one has any conception of the dust on books that are not in constant use As one librarian puts it the dirt of books is the dirtiest dirt in the world To clean them is even a larger job than moving for they must be cleaned separately while they can be moved in bulk by a shelf lot at a time After they are cleaned they will probably be put Into boxes the size of the shelves eight to ten feet long on the average and all properly labelled so as to avoid confusion then they are to be transported trans-ported to the new building unloaded and put on the shelves in exact order The liability o confusion must be guarded against The books cannot be sent to the new building any faster than they can be put up on the new shelvesfor they must be put up in absolutely correct order No plan has yet been decided upon Moving a library brary is not art everyday affair and there are hardly any precedents not even one really practicable precedent to go by The Pubic Library at Lowell was moved last spring but that contained con-tained only 15000 or 20000 books about as many as are contained in one or two alcoves of the Boston library The Boston library itself was moved some thirty odd years ago from its rooms in Mason street where I was started to its present building but the problem of moving was nothing to what I Is now The nearest precedent in respect of size was the moving of the great royal library at Berlin a good many years ago That library contained 800000 volumes and was moved in twentyfour hours by a regiment of soldiers who carried the books shelf by shelf to the new building marching In files keeping step to music by the regiment band all with military precision pre-cision All the books a they stand will be placed on the new shelves in exactly the same corresponding positions The alcove arrangements will not be the same but the shelves ranges and sections the last corresponding to the old alcoves must be or the library would have to be recatalogued This would be too costly besides The Harvard Har-vard library containing about half as many volumes as the Boston Public Library began to recatalogue its books in 1861 and the work was finished only about five years ago That is to say recataloguelng the Boston Public Library would take about fifty years Boston Herald Hlrald |