Thrill-seeking couples can now do much better than the South Stacks for exciting “study breaks” — a new library with secret coordinates, high-tech security and unmarked trucks awaits. But good luck finding it.

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The Green Library stacks are filled to the brim, so librarians have moved rarely-accessed materials to a top-secret facility called SAL 3. The library’s location remains unknown, largely due to the high value of some of the materials held there. #gallery http://daily.stanford.edu/image/full/8021
Maggie Skortcheva

The Green Library stacks are filled to the brim, so librarians have moved rarely-accessed materials to a top-secret facility called SAL 3. The library’s location remains unknown, largely due to the high value of some of the materials held there.

For the past three years, five University librarians have been working full-time to move truckloads of seldom-accessed materials to a secret, high-tech storage facility some 50 miles from campus, a library spokesperson said. A total of three million volumes will be moved by 2012, and some of the material is so valuable that only select personnel in the library system know where the clandestine facility is located.

“The libraries continue to buy 100,000 volumes a year,” said Andrew Herkovic, the director of communications and development for the libraries.

The purchases include newspapers, magazines, photographs, sound recordings, videos, personal and corporate papers and even works in progress.

“It’s pretty much a given that we cannot build new library storage facilities on campus,” Herkovic said. “Even if we had absolute title to every shelf on campus, we just couldn’t hold everything.”

So the solution, according to Herkovic, was Stanford Auxiliary Library (SAL) 3 — a modular, “magnificently high-tech,” above-ground facility built from scratch in 2003 to accommodate Stanford’s fast-growing collection of materials that could not fit on campus.

Because students and faculty cannot get in even for a tour, Herkovic volunteered a mental image not unlike the final scenes from the film “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

“It’s like kind of a nightmare vision of books as high and as far as you can see in a canyon-like environment,” he said. “The shelves are 30 feet high and exactly 52 inches apart. The forklift device we use to access the books are exactly 48 inches wide so it’s very narrow, very claustrophobic and very cold.”

“It’s a very weird kind of space and place to work,” he added.

The University of California library system maintains two of these high-density storage facilities, and Herkovic said Stanford engineers visited the facilities “to learn from their mistakes” and produce a newer, more advanced design.

The cavernous rooms are refrigerated according to sophisticated atmospheric controls, and an automated fire suppression system is in place as a last resort in case disaster strikes. The building even maintains its own water reservoir for this contingency.

Because no researchers will ever physically browse the shelves, the principles behind cataloging are naturally different.

“The materials are grouped by size and date of storage,” Herkovic said. “They’re in no intellectual order, and only stored for maximum density and maximum retrievability.”

Everything that enters and exits the facility is processed by computerized inventory software that can pinpoint the exact physical location. A truck transports requested materials from the library on a daily basis, and the transit time is one business day.

“It’s only a minor technicality that these goods are stored off-campus,” Herkovic insisted.

When asked by The Daily for the third time where the facility is located, Herkovic chuckled and paused before replying.

“We have a very good security system,” he said. “The fact that I’m not going to give you the address has something to do with that.”