Five College Consortium Opens $14 Million Remote Storage Facility in Hatfield, Massachusetts

From MassLive:

The Five College Consortium is celebrating the opening of its $14 million annex in Hatfield with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday and tours of the 35,000-square-foot facility.
The annex provides shelf space for up to 2.5 million items from the Five College Repository Collection and from libraries of the campuses of the consortium –Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That frees up space on the campuses for new materials and other academic needs.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: Additional Info About the New Facility
See Also:  Construction Begins on Five Colleges Library Annex in Hatfield, Massachusetts (September 18, 2016)
UPDATE May 30, 2017: Five Colleges Library Annex Set to Take 2.5 Million Volumes (via Greenfield Recorder)

The 26,000-square-foot storage module is a concrete-floored room with 24-foot-high green shelving, where the books will eventually be stacked, waiting for students and researchers to request them from the building’s depths. The property has enough space for the construction of up to four future modules of similar size.
The sheer weight of the room — tens of thousands of pounds of concrete, 1 million pounds of steel shelving, plus the weight of 2.5 million volumes — meant that engineers had to make sure the ground beneath was sturdy before beginning.

Filed under: Libraries, News, Open Access