Even if dreams of digital libraries do come true, few librarians trust technology enough to throw books away. And there's always the fear that digital copies could become unreadable in the future and vast amounts of knowledge would thus be lost. Initially, Harvard's depository stirred controversy among faculty members. But administrators say many skeptics have been won over by the service record of the depository. Book-laden vans make two trips a day, stopping at several campus libraries.
Most people get the books they've requested the next day.
Perhaps the greatest concern about the warehouse method of storage is that books might get lost. Since they aren't stored by topic, no one reads through the stacks to make sure that all the books are shelved where they belong. If a book were misplaced, it might never resurface. So when books enter or leave Harvard's storage library, their bar codes are separately scanned by two people. That and other precautions seem to have been effective so far.