Hi all,

We are in the process of investigating ways to secure boxed holdings to our shelves in the event of an earthquake. Our current shelving system is standard-issue archival metal. I am leaning closely toward nylon straps, similar to those on a backpack. Can anyone share stories (horror or otherwise) about these kinds of straps? Product suggestions are welcome as well. Note that we are not considering bungee cords or the Book-Keeper Bar from Q Safety.

thanks,
Brandon Burke
Hoover Institution Archives
Stanford University

The straps sound promising. We don't have earthquake-proof shelving either but I've never come up with a good solution. The easy part is thinking of things (rods, cords, etc.) that will hold the stuff on the shelf. The hard part is figuring how to attach them to the shelves.

Why did you rule out the Book-Keeper Bar?

David Seubert
UC Santa Barbara

The straps do sound promising -- I would think that perhaps the "Fastex" fastners in the middle of each shelf might make it easy to open and close them.

My concern and reason for posting is that the non-earthquake-rated shelving systems may have an issue. When I studied earthquake forces a bit when involved with structural engineers who were designing equipment rack mounting for broadcast centres (my previous life in Glendale, CA), I learned that a minimum design goal was to withstand 0.5G of acceleration both laterally and vertically. The interesting (scary?) part of the Northridge earthquake was that some seismic records in building approached (and may have exceeded) 1G of vertical acceleration.

If the library shelving is merely hanging with hooks in slotted vertical rails, there is a chance that the shelves may become unhooked. If there are also rectangular pieces that insert themselves into lower slots, thereby locking the shelves from rising up unless they are first pulled out, then it is probably secure. I would, however, look into three points of weakness:
(1) Attachment of the verticals to the structure
(2) Attachment of the shelves to the verticals
(3) Attachment of the straps to the shelves for holding the contents on the shelves

I should mention that in (1), there is a risk with tying the verticals to the slab below and the slab above without understanding the designed allowable motion between the slabs in the structure as that slab-to-slab movement that may not destroy (or even damage) the structure might rip the shelving apart. In general (and that's the best I could do) I always thought it better to attach just to the bottom slab and let the top slab alone to do what it wanted without forcing my racks to do anything unnatural.

Of course, the ideal scenario is to have a building which is seismically isolated. Examples that come to mind are the retrofit of LA City Hall and of a major government building in Salt Lake City. In new construction, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels (Roman Catholic) in Los Angeles is a wonderful seismic isolation design. After losing their cathedral in the Northridge earthquake, they decided their new one would ride out anything likely to hit it. I contributed in minor, non-seismic ways to both LA City Hall and the LA Cathedral http://www.olacathedral.org/ and especially studied the plans for the LA Cathedral as we were able to make the seismic spaces double as temporary cable chases for TV production.

Cheers,

Richard

First of all, thanks for the responses, guys..

Per Richard's response, i need to do some more investigation as far as our current shelving is concerned. Not sure where we stand regarding those "verticals". To the best of my knowledge, though, the shelving in question (at Hoover) survived Loma Prieta in 1989; pretty unscathed really. So either magnitude 6.9 (surface-wave magnitude 7.1) wasn't enough to upset the applecart or somebody did something right when they set that shelving up in the first place. My guess is the latter.

David: The Book-Keeper Bar would work for us in as much as the shelving in question will be holding uniform content; boxes we designed to hold 7" reels. Thousands of them, actually. Problem is, i don't know that we have enough room in between shelving units - we're talking half and inch or so - for the nuts/bolts needed to affix the Bars. My hope was that straps would buy us a little more room.

About the boxes..



The boxes are specked to fit either four across (using both sides of a shelf; that is, access from the aisle on either side of the shelving unit) or two side-by-side, with the spines of the reel boxes facing the aisles. The latter being the only orientation that would make sense along the walls. In any case, our thought was that four big(ger) boxes would be easier for a strap/bar/etc to hold onto than 100-some-odd 7" reels.

I'll check out our current shelving units again on Monday and let you know about those verticals..

again thanks,
Brandon.

This photo shows how our shelving units hold onto their support beams:



Again, pretty standard issue for archives. I'd like to hear more about those "verticals" and how they relate (or could be incorporated in)to shelving such as ours. Likewise for other, comparable preventative measures..

thanks again,
Brandon.

On a related note, here's an example of our boxing project in action..


Here is a wall of as-yet unboxed reels.


This wall has already been boxed. Since the height of each row of shelving is only slightly taller than the boxes themselves, we elected to keep the box orientation "spine-out". They could just as easily face the wall but, given that there's so little headroom per shelf, it was determined that (once strapped in) the likelihood of the tapes falling off of the shelf was the same either way.


The new boxes also allow us to better utilize the shelving in the center of the room, traditionally occupied by nothing but manuscript boxes. In this image, you can see the difference in shelf orientation from the old (left bays) to the new (right bay): an added row of shelving!

Note: We still have still have some tapes in manuscript boxes of course; more often than not, from collections that were processed years ago. As a general rule though, i consider that something of a waste of space. Plus, i like to keep like media in optimized storage conditions so we're making the move - slowly but surely - toward a "magnetic media storage area" which makes the use of these center-of-the-room aisles that much more valuable.

Brandon.

Hi Brandon

Thanks for putting the pictures up and the specs for your tape boxes. I am interested in what the boxes are made out of, including the handles. Impressive!

Cheers

Marie

Hi Marie,

We first came upon the idea for those boxes while visiting Stanford's excellent SAL3 storage facility. The SAL3 folks use a similar box for bound paper materials and they were nice enough to give us a couple to take back to Hoover. We edited the dimensions so the interior of the box fits 7" reel boxes and the exterior dimension allows for the two shelf orientations you see above (side-by-side or four across). SUL purchased the boxes from Metal Edge so we went to them with the edited dimensions. I believe the paper stock is their SafeCare Archival Corrugated Board.

- Acid/lignin-free High Alpha Cellulose Board, Both Liners and Medium.
- B flute
- Ph 8.5+/-.5 with 3% Calcium Carbonate Buffering
- Alkaline Sizing, No Alum Rosin Sizing
- Passes ANSI IT9.2 (Photo Activity Test)
- Color Fast
- 250# Board Test

I'll have to get back to you regarding the handles - i'm out of the office until later in the week. Suffice it to say, they're the same handles SUL was using; we simply changed the dimensions of the box itself.

Hope this helps. Again, i'll get back to you once i'm back at work..

best,
Brandon.

Update on our RFE/RL boxing project.

As mentioned before, the main impetus for this project was earthquake protection. We also, however, want to isolate the tapes to one section of the stacks, paving the way for an eventual Magnetic Media Storage Area with Temp/RH optimized for mag tape.

As you can see here, the tapes occupy the bottom two rows of shelving in a very large closed-stack area..


Note: As of this writing, we have already moved most of the tapes so the 2nd-to-bottom row is largely empty now.

History: The tapes were originally placed along these bottom rows because the shelving has support beams down there that disallow, for example, the placement of manuscript boxes across both sides of the shelves. Rather than waste the space, it was decided (at the time) that the space could be filled with RFE/RL tapes.

It should be mentioned that, until the manuscript boxes currently occupying our desired real estate are moved to a new location, we are storing our tape boxes in several temporary staging areas around the room. The students and i placed these flags on the shelves so as to avoid any confusion..



Since the tapes are separated by language service (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc), we decided to mark the boxes with temporary pencil makes until a proper decal/tag/etc is created. "Begin" and "End" boxes are noted for each service as well as any inclusive series. Below are shots of the Begin and End boxes for the Czech Music Series..





Attendees of our Hoover Archives tour, during the 2008 ARSC Conference, should notice a dramatic difference between then and now..



More updates as we continue.

best,
Brandon.

Received an email during the week on this topic. With James' permission, i'm including the text of his inquiry below..



In response: No we haven't moved forward with straps. An unrelated collection needs to be processed in full before we can move it to an off-site storage facility and make room for the Magnetic Media Storage Area. Until then, we can only estimate the number of linear feet the project will require and exact shelving units the tapes will occupy.

That said, there are a number of options out there.

The BoingBAR, for example, provides support in the form of an elastic/bungee cord. An issue there being the integrity of the elastic over time. But otherwise, i think they're probably a good solution. Note the fact that they offer both internal and external mounts, which can be helpful, given the myriad ways shelving units can be configured, and the different sized contents they can hold.



Another option we looked at is the Book-KEEPER Bar, also available from EPS. The Book-KEEPER Bar has been successfully employed by a number of institutions of merit that i will refrain from mentioning here. Noteworthy is the fact that the Book-KEEPER Bar fastens to the interior of the shelving unit which some may see as a limitation.



*** Sorry. Need to take a break from writing this message. Will finish later. - Brandon ***

Continuing now..

The last product we looked at on the EPS website was the D-Ring ShelfSTRAP but it was hard to discern from the image (and brief description) whether the straps were woven nylon - like that of a backpack strap - or some other kind of thinner plastic - like, say, an FM radio antenna.



As far as i can tell, the above are all Q-Safety products. EPS is simply a vendor, as is SciLine.

There's also the QuakeNET but it was "designed for items that are too small to be secured by [their] BoingBAR™ or Book-KEEPER™ bar," which effectively rules out our project.

A final suggestion, for now, is Tania Collins' of the Research & Collections Division at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Hers is more of a do-it-yourself nylon strap scenario, but this PDF is really helpful and explains the process in good detail. Example images:





I'll post more on this topic when i have time..

cheers,
Brandon

Progress report:

We're almost done with the full inventory from last quarter, so the next step is to start putting labels on the Metal Edge boxes.


Here you can see an example of a label for a box of tapes from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty's Kirghiz language service.


And here is what a shelf looks like with labeled boxes and correct box orientation.

cheers,
Brandon

What sort of labels are you using? I always worry about label adhesive drying out and the label peeling off over time.

Eric

Hi Eric,

We're using foil-backed PermaPlus labels from Gaylord. The part number is MLVS10F. They're actually VHS labels.

We also use them on our CD-R cases (again Gaylord) where we fold about a 1/4" over the spine to display the item number and the name of the collection.

Here's an examaple..


cheers,
Brandon

Update..

Finished populating the first complete row of shelving. Below are two shots, each affording a different view of the aisle..





And another shot of the box orientation, for good measure..



cheers,
Brandon