Of all the nooks and crannies in the Northwestern Library system, this might just be the one that holds the most knowledge. Brandon Kondritz and Mika Ellison have the scoop on Oak Grove Library Center, the library system’s most mysterious branch.
This story originally aired as part of the Nichewestern: Nooks, Crannies & Corners Special Broadcast.
MIKA ELLISON (on tape): Okay, so where are we going?
BRANDON KONDRITZ (on tape): We’re going to Oak Grove. (laughter)
ELLISON: When you think of the libraries at Northwestern, you think of Main, Deering, maybe even Mudd.
KONDRITZ: But there’s one library nobody really knows about.
[music fades in]
KONDRITZ (on tape): From my understanding, Oak Grove is this like amorphous storage facility that has a bunch of materials in it that don’t fit in the normal library. They don’t get checked out enough to like stay in the normal library. And it’s like a climate controlled facility. There’s a van that goes there, picks books up. No one ever goes there. No one knows what Oak Grove is.
ELLISON: Northwestern describes Oak Grove Library Center as “a high density shelving facility with state-of-the-art climate and temperature controls.”
KONDRITZ: Tucked back in a nondescript office complex on the outskirts of Chicagoland, the unassuming building houses roughly 2.7 million books, archived items and secrets.
ELLISON: I work at the library circulation desk. Every day, the Oak Grove van shows up, picks up some books, drops off others, and then leaves. But I’ve always had so many questions: how many people work at Oak Grove? How big is it? What’s in there?
ELLISON (on tape): Rumors abound about Oak Grove. I’ve heard that you have to have biometric access to get in. I don’t know who told me that. And also, I heard that there was a boat.
KONDRITZ (on tape): A what?
ELLISON (on tape): Someone said a boat or an ark, which I think an ark and a boat are possibly different.
KONDRITZ: To get some answers, we sent Oak Grove’s coordinator, Chris Karch, an email. Eventually, after some back and forth with Northwestern Libraries, we got this back:
[natural sound: email ping]
ELLISON: “We are happy to have you and Brandon visit the Oak Grove Library Center. I want to make sure you understand that the facility is located in Waukegan, Illinois, about a 45 minute drive from campus. You will need to provide your own transportation. You should allow about 3 hours for your entire visit.”
KONDRITZ: So what do you think we did?
ELLISON: We rented a car, and we went.
[music fades in]
ELLISON & KONDRITZ (on tape): Yeah, we’re doing it for content. The things we do for journalism and content. And we’re behind a garbage truck now. That’s how early we are out. Oh, yeah. Slow down to get around. Got it.
KONDRITZ: Before we knew it, we were there.
ELLISON (on tape): It’s Oak Grove Avenue! Stop!
ELLISON: Just like we thought, the building wasn’t much. There weren’t many cars in the parking lot, the entire building was painted the same shade of grey, and only a small Northwestern sign signaled that we were in the right place.
ELLISON & KONDRITZ (on tape): So there’s a front door that I can kind of see. It looks very nondescript. Like, that’s how I would describe this building: nondescript. There’s nothing. I literally almost missed it. I would have missed that. It’s just a gray building. This is so crazy. Ok, let’s do it. Should we go? Let’s do it.
[music fades in]
KONDRITZ: Chris welcomed us inside to, again, an unassuming building: tile floors, fluorescent lights, and a few tidy workstations. We met two of his three employees, Fernando and Matt, and Chris started our visit with a little history.
KARCH: I’ve been here since 2011, I call it 2012, usually, because December 2011, Fernando’s been working here as long as I have, and Matt has been here for 7 years.
ELLISON: Oak Grove was built in 2011, and it sits on 5 acres of land, most of which are still undeveloped. Although its crew may seem tiny, what they do is no joke: they currently have the capacity to move 300,000 items into storage each year.
KONDRITZ: Obviously, they were working on the morning we chose to visit, so they showed us how an item moves through the facility and finds its forever home, on the shelf. Among the items they were cataloging that day included a simple music theory book and a plate from the Ming Dynasty.
ELLISON: It all starts on the transport van.
[natural sound: van door opening]
KARCH: So here’s the van. There’s plenty of room, we can fill it up with huge carts.
KONDRITZ (on tape): So I’m curious, what’s on the cart right now?
KARCH: This is a Mudd Library request. It’s just a standard, going to Mudd Library. This is going to Law.
KONDRITZ: The dropoffs for the day had already been taken off the van. They were waiting to be dusted by a special machine that looks like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a table saw.
[natural sound: dusting machine whirs]
KARCH: The idea isn’t to vacuum every page, it’s just simply to give the book a once over to get any of the dust that’s on the outside of the book. Clear it off.
ELLISON: Then the books are measured, they get a barcode stuck on their outside cover …
[natural sound: barcode scanner beeps, printer whirs]
ELLISON (on tape): Ooh!
ELLISON: … and they get plugged into the comprehensive system that runs Oak Grove.
FERNANDO OLMOS: We attach the book to the tray. And then later on, he’s going to be attached to the shelf.
KONDRITZ: It’s a two-step process: initial entry and verification. The two are always done by separate people because this step is serious business. If an item is miscategorized or assigned to the wrong shelf, it’s literally lost. Forever.
ELLISON (on tape): I assume that this happens less, because at the library everyone has access to the shelves so things can get messed up. But do you ever like, lose things?
KARCH: No. We’ve never lost anything.
ELLISON (on tape): Oh.
KONDRITZ: The books are placed in their assigned tray, which goes onto a regular library cart.
ELLISON: Once the cart is full, there’s only one more place to go: the shelves, which the crew refers to as the Modules.
KARCH: Okay we’re going in back.
ELLISON (on tape): Airlock?
KONDRITZ: Yes. It was an airlock.
KARCH: So now, in order to get into the Module, you need your Wildcard, and it needs to be set up for it through the lock shop. And you need your fingerprint setup through me.
KONDRITZ (on tape): That’s that biometric access, Mika.
ELLISON (on tape): Someone said biometric access, and we were like, “No way.”
KONDRITZ (on tape): It suddenly got very c-
[natural sound: airlock door opens]
ELLISON & KONDRITZ (on tape): Oh my God, are you kidding me? This is insane. What? What? Whoa, this is crazy. This is so deep and it’s so tall.
ELLISON: Module 1 was built first, and Module 2 followed about 5 years later. All told, each Module has 8 aisles, is 30 feet tall, and 220 feet long. They’re always kept at the same exact temperature.
KONDRITZ (on tape): Always 50 degrees on the nose?
KARCH: Always. 35% relative humidity. Always.
KONDRITZ: The effect is like a gigantic, book-filled Costco freezer section. Oh, and they have a forklift. That’s how they get the books on the shelves.
ELLISON: The weight of the books alone, which are over a million volumes strong in each Module, would make a regular floor buckle. Luckily, the floor and shelves of the Modules were built to withstand that pressure and ensure the staff’s safety.
KARCH: For us, like I said, it’s not it’s not a problem, we have a super flat floor. Literally, that’s what it’s called.
KONDRITZ (on tape): Super flat floor. Very technical.
KARCH: This is called the super flat floor, I know. So that will minimize, when you’re 30 feet up, if your floor isn’t level, then you’re not going to be level. And obviously, the higher up you go, the bigger chance of anything tipping. And those things are even designed where they won’t go up if it’s too heavy.
KONDRITZ: At this point, Chris encouraged us to take a deeper look. So we took off and wandered the aisles for a little.
[natural sound of Ellison & Kondritz chatting]
KONDRITZ: Until …
ELLISON (on tape): There is a boat!
KONDRITZ (on tape): The boat!
ELLISON (on tape): Holy sh**! No way, no way, no way.
KONDRITZ (on tape): We found the boat!
ELLISON (on tape): So everything was true.
ELLISON: We found the rumored boat. Turns out we were in an aisle full of artifacts. We found everything from a giant atlas to a bass drum to a wooden chest from the Chicago Tribune.
ELLISON (on tape): This is just the coolest place I’ve ever been like, I’m not even going to lie to you.
[music fades in]
KONDRITZ: Although Oak Grove isn’t known to many on campus, it’s truly a crucial piece of Northwestern infrastructure. Its crew works hard to make sure everything inside is preserved for future generations to enjoy.
ELLISON: Fernando was the first employee to be hired at Oak Grove. When he started, his first job was getting what was then a huge, empty Module 1 ready.
OLMOS: I was the person who was putting all the stickers, the barcodes on all the shelves.
KONDRITZ (on tape): I was wondering that as we were walking down, I was like, I wonder what that was like having to put a sticker on literally every single shelf.
OLMOS: That’s what I did. It took time. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. (laughter)
KONDRITZ (on tape): So what has it been like to watch the shelves get filled up over the years?
OLMOS: Pretty good, you know, actually. Fulfillment. Because when you see it seems like it will be almost impossible to fill them up. But once you start seeing through the years, man, it’s a good feeling.
KONDRITZ: But the best part about Oak Grove is that its millions of books can be borrowed by anyone in the Northwestern community. And through the Inter-Library Loan system, which lends out materials to other universities across the nation.
KARCH: I mean, the idea of, of sort of collecting all you can, and almost like hoarding it to yourself is pretty much gone in library in the library world, right, we’re more about sharing the items that we have, which is a much better approach than than just trying to collect as much as you can.
ELLISON: Ultimately, by definition, libraries are meant to share and distribute information, not keep it locked away. 2.7 million books is more than most people could read in a lifetime, or two or three. And Oak Grove, through Northwestern, is charged with keeping that incredible amount of knowledge safe.
KONDRITZ (on tape): What do you think this says about Northwestern?
KARCH: I think it says we definitely care about the longevity of not just what we have, but also the future of the University, of teaching and learning. It’s gonna preserve these books for 300 years or so, I’m told. So I think it says a lot about commitment. And also, like I said, there’s more, there’s more land here than I think the libraries could use. And in a lifetime, or two or more, that opens up the university to having other options as well.
KONDRITZ: And for Chris, who has been with Oak Grove since the beginning, it’s more than just the books that keeps him coming back to work every day.
KONDRITZ (on tape): What’s your favorite part?
KARCH: My favorite part? Of this the entire thing? My staff. Yeah, actually. I enjoy working with them. They’re excellent. They’re just, I mean, they’re the hardest working group of people in the libraries, I think, that could ever ask for and just, kind and polite and they’re just like, that’s my favorite part. Sounds cheesy.
[music fades in]
KONDRITZ (on tape): This is legendary. This is absolutely everything I wanted.
ELLISON (on tape): Oh my God. I’m so happy. I feel like I met a celebrity.
KONDRITZ (on tape): On a Monday morning.
KONDRITZ: For WNUR News, I’m Brandon Kondritz.
ELLISON: And I’m Mika Ellison.