When borrowing your uncle's truck just won't do: Wichita prepping to move main library

If you think moving your house or apartment is a pain, try moving a major municipal library.

As Wichita's new Advanced Learning Library building nears completion, attention is turning to moving more than half a million books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, maps, microfilm, photographs, schematics and who knows what all else.

About six weeks from now, the moving vans will show up and begin emptying out the current Central Library and carting everything over to the Advanced Learning Library at 345 N. Sycamore near Second and McLean.

Library staff is planning a 13-day move. It's scheduled to start in May with a goal of finishing right at Memorial Day weekend, said Cynthia Berner, director of the Library Department.

There's a lot more to this than throwing everything in a truck and unpacking when you get there.

The new library has been under discussion for the past 12 years and under construction for the past two.

Most of the public attention has been riveted on amenities and technology upgrades. The new library will have a coffeehouse cafe, an auditorium, gigabit-speed internet and about 100 public computers, compared to about 30 in the old library.

But along with the new will be a lot of the old — repackaged to be more accessible and easier to use.

Right now, the library staff is in the process of figuring out where everything is in the Central Library and where it should go in the new building, Berner said.

The goal "is to close for as short a period as possible," she said. "There are some things we can do in advance of the movers coming on site, but then they will be cross-checking our dimensions and what goes where and really prepping so that when they start to move, that will go on a quick pace."

On Tuesday, the City Council is scheduled to approve a $192,000 contract with Hallett Movers, an Illinois company that specializes in library moving. A crew of city officials picked that company from among eight proposals because it was the only finalist promising to use only its own personnel, who are trained to move a library without damaging often fragile books and materials.

It's not just a move, it's also spring cleaning.

One of the services in the moving contract is dusting. "They vacuum (books and materials) so they're dust-free, that sort of thing, and then help us cross-check for damage," Berner said.

The movers also will help with the mapping so there's a place for everything and everything in its place.

"What they do is make sure they know exactly the linear feet of shelving we need for each one of our collections — and we have dozens of those — and then they balance those out when they go over to the new locations," Berner said. "Unlike here, where we have a shelf that's very full and then we have a shelf that's half full someplace close by, they'll balance all of that space out for us, which then means that it will be much easier for our staff in the weeks and months to follow."

One of the problems with the current library is that over the years — 51 of them — collections have grown and ended up getting shelved wherever the librarians could find space. In some cases, that means the jump from one Dewey Decimal System number to the next goes across floors.

"We have reference materials across all the floors of the building," Berner said. "The biggest change that people will notice when we get to the Advanced Learning Library is that our non-fiction collections for adults will all go into a single area."

Librarians are currently consolidating the reference, genealogy and historical collections so they'll be grouped together when they get to the new library, Berner said. That's one of the advantages of going from the current four-story building to the new two-story library, she said.

One special challenge to moving a library is that at any given time, thousands of items are checked out. All those will need to be accounted for in the move.

Otherwise, the library would run the risk of filling up a shelf and later finding out there's no place to put a book when it's returned, Berner said.

Librarians are winnowing out obsolete materials, like outdated travel guides and the few remaining VHS and cassette tapes that most patrons no longer have equipment to play.

The only significant collection that won't make the trip is a set of framed reproduction art prints, Berner said.

Decades ago, "there were 'picture ladies' who would borrow these from the library and they would go out into schools and do art appreciation sorts of things," Berner said. But that program ended a long time ago.

It also used to be popular for people to check artwork out of the library to see how it would look on their home or office wall before buying a print of their own.

But, "over time, people have just kind of moved away from that, and it's a very expensive collection to maintain," Berner said.

The new library will have all new shelving and mostly new furniture. Unlike your average home move, the garage sale will come after the move.

"Once we are out and open for business (at the new library), then we'll still have work we'll be doing in this building to surplus the things that we don't use in the new place," Berner said.

This story was originally published March 26, 2018 at 5:19 PM with the headline "When borrowing your uncle's truck just won't do: Wichita prepping to move main library."