Hopes and sighs: the Swiss Cooperative Storage Facility

The purpose of this paper is to present the Swiss Cooperative Storage Facility, a high bay, high density, automated, and oxygen reduced off-site storage facility which serves five research libraries from the German speaking part of Switzerland; it opened in February 2016.

It describes the complete process of evaluating and planning this innovative facility.

It explains the way the cooperation of the five libraries in highly federalist Switzerland was achieved, what principles guided its organization, and how the libraries prepared their holdings for this off-site storage. It shows the construction as an ecologically driven green building with economical advantages.

The project seems to be the second automated and oxygen-reduced library storage facility worldwide, after the British Library’s Additional Storage Buildings, and the depth and detail of the evaluation phase is new.