Most of the community is aware of the planned development for Stanford’s Redwood City Campus. What few of you may be aware of is that four departments from the Stanford University Libraries (SUL) moved out to Redwood City three years ago. We have been working out of 425 Broadway which is one of the buildings slated for demolition. The development of the new campus necessitates SUL’s relocation from 425 across the street to 500 Broadway – the former home of AMPEX.

The four units moving are: Stanford University Press, Conservation Services, Stanford Media Preservation Lab, and Technical Services branch of Special Collections. SUL staff in these four units have been working for over a year with SUL’s Facilities Department on planning for this interim space. I say interim, because in another 2.5 years, we’ll be moving back onto the new campus. 

In fact, the move is underway already beginning with the first group -  the Stanford University Press – which starts moving out tomorrow; they should be in place before the end of September.

Conservation Services is the second group to move over to 500 Broadway. We are in the final stages of completing conservation, repair, and rehousing for work currently in the lab. The collection materials should all leave 425 Broadway by September 23, 2016 at the latest. The lab will be dismantled and packed during the final week of September. And everything will move over to 500 Broadway the first week of October. We hope to be in place and starting our unpacking on October 10. We look forward to accepting new work into the lab shortly after that. 

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab — part of DLSS’s Digitization Services — is the third SUL unit to move from 425 Broadway to 500 Broadway. This month we are wrapping up project work and slowly beginning to dismantle to our systems. Come October, we will be busy uncabling and carefully packing our equipment in preparation for a target move date of October 19.  It will take several weeks to re-install our systems in the new location. The audio studios are expected to come online first, followed by video. We expect to be 100% fully installed and operational before the winter break. We very much look forward to resuming our reformatting work in our new spaces!

And, last but not least, the Redwood City contingent of the Department of Special Collections will be the last SUL group relocating across Broadway. The Technical Services branch of Special Collections is comprised of rare book and manuscripts cataloging staff as well as manuscripts registrar, acquisition and processing staff. We are in the final stages of preparing recent acquisitions, collections in our backlog, our forensic lab, and staff for the move. From now until late fall, collections listed in SearchWorks as “in process” will be unavailable for paging to the Special Collections reading room in Green Library until after the relocation is complete and we have settled into our new space. While the actual physical move for Special Collection will conclude by November 4^th, the department will be busy for the subsequent weeks unpacking everything. We anticipate being open for requests for “in process” materials after Thanksgiving at the earliest and accepting new acquisitions sometime before or after the winter break.