The Five College Consortium has opened a $14 million library annex in western Massachusetts.
The 35,000-square-foot building located off I-91 in Hatfield has space for 2.5 million items.
Consortium Executive Director Neal Abraham said the climate-controlled conditions will preserve single copies of rarely read books from the collections at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass.
"This will get us at least 300 years of viability for acid-free paper, so it is suitable for the kind of long term preservation that we are interested in," said Abraham.
The annex will temporarily store much of the collection of Smith College’s Neilson Library during a major renovation.
