AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Planning one storeroom with integrated preventive conservation controls is admittedly a complex endeavor. But how do large organizations undertake comprehensive storage planning, especially when they have fifty storage areas of 250,000sf in three historic Manhattan research centers (plus a giant high-bay storage facility in New Jersey)? How does an organization begin to steer planning to meaningfully incorporate climate action methodology and build resilience systems? What coaching, education, and facilitation are needed to redirect a storied institution from localized episodic planning to a powerful and pervasive strategy to protect collections?

The Research Libraries for the New York Public Library (NYPL) is building a foundation for dynamic storage planning for a changing world. Large institutions need to focus on global, values-based thinking when building or renovating collections storage to equitably incorporate sustainability and preservation concepts. With support from the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (SCHC) program of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), NYPL designed a collaborative pre-planning exercise to inform long-range collection storage planning. A project team of NYPL stakeholders and experts in cultural heritage architecture, preservation environment, and sustainability collaborated to establish a path toward a more responsive and ongoing storage planning model. The project included a week-long walkthrough of all storerooms, followed by several months of distillation of these observations. The project established in its report foundational planning tasks, maintenance tasks, and capacity concepts for exploration in future storage planning.

This talk will discuss building a unified momentum through sustained institutional messaging, risk-taking, and taking advantage of key moments. A specific area of focus will include relationship-building between collection management, facilities, capital planning, energy, health and safety, and curatorial staff to build trust and create space for planning. Discussion of the pre-planning exercise will highlight conditions NYPL is attempting to address, concepts the pre-planning team used for structuring their observations, and logistical practicalities of planning this type of onsite assessment. 

Building on the success of the pre-planning grant, NYPL received a second NEH SCHC grant in August 2024 to develop the Collection Space Construction Design Standard. NYPL will convene experts in architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, fire protection, security, and sustainability, to create construction design standards for reading rooms, storage, and collection workspaces that will be made available to other institutions. This presentation will also include an update on this project, as well as collection storage’s high-level inclusion in NYPL’s new strategic plan.