Kansas University’s nine libraries that house 4 million volumes are about to become less crowded.

Watson Library employee Sam Richardson, a recent KU graduate from Lawrence, cleans up bookshelves in the east stacks. The KU libraries are working to build an 8,000-square-foot building on west campus to house 800,000 lesser-used volumes, making room for more working space in the libraries on the main campus.

“There’s not enough space for human activity,” said Bill Myers, library development director. “As we add more computer work stations and need more group study space and individual work space, we need to move materials to make room for it.”

This fall KU will begin building a storage facility for lesser-used volumes, which will free up library space.

The 8,000-square-foot facility will be on west campus, just south of the Facilities Operations warehouse on Westbrook Street. It will house up to 800,000 volumes.

The building has been on KU’s list of proposed capital improvements for nearly a decade, Myers said, but it became more of a priority last year when KU began leasing storage space for 80,000 volumes near 23rd and Haskell streets.

The books in the leased storage space — and those that eventually will go in the new campus building — aren’t often checked out, based on library records. Myers said, for example, engineering journals from the early 1900s don’t get much use.

“We’re not going to just throw them away,” he said. “They’re part of the body of knowledge in those fields.”

Students who want to use the off-site materials must make a request for them, and library workers retrieve them within a business day.

The Kansas Board of Regents will be asked to approve the building plan during its meeting next week. Construction would begin this fall, with completion set for sometime in the spring, Myers said.

The $5 million it will take to complete the building initially will be provided by the KU Center for Research, which is a separate entity from KU and has a reserve fund that earns interest.

The university will reimburse KUCR using money from tuition increases, at a rate 2 percent higher than it would have received on its investments.

Lindy Eakin, vice provost for administration and finance, said the rate still would be less than it would have been for KU to sell bonds and pay them back for the project. It’s a unique scheme that will allow the library building to be completed more quickly, Eakin said.

“This is the first time we’ve used KUCR as a financing vehicle,” Eakin said.

KU libraries thrive in digital age KU libraries