In the basement of our office building is something called the Document Store. It is a secure area of course but I needed to go in it today because some telecoms cabling passes through there.
It has a large mass of shelving that I hadn’t really paid too much attention to before but I did today because some of them were in the way of an access panel that needed to be removed.
The system is known as a high density storage system, similar to this but much more utilitarian. Each shelving unit is maybe 25′ long and 10′ high, about 4′ deep, double sided and kitted out with numbered shelf bays. You can load the units up to 3 Metric Tonnes (3000Kg) and a gentle turn on the end handle causes the whole edifice to trundle smoothly and effortlessly along the floor track, despite being forty years old. Ours is a tiny system of course compared to the systems in the British Library.
This all pales into insignificance though with the mechanical marvel in the basement of the former Halifax Building Society Headquarters in Halifax, a building I came to know very well indeed after doing a lot of work there. In a vast basement cavern could be found the deeds store where all the documentation for houses on mortgage was kept in secure storage. If you wanted to access a particular deeds pack, the computer would instruct the mechanical handling system to go and rescue the deeds box from whatever vault it was contained in. As it was a 1973 system it wasn’t particularly state of the art 25 years later in that it delivered a box to the operators who then had to scan the individual pouches to find the one required. It was still pretty impressive though although the occasional sight of pouches on the floor through the vault inspection windows was a reminder that all mechanical systems occasionally go wrong!
