Lysa, Shannon, Micah, and I took a tour of the MLAC caverns. TIm McClusky was kind enough to show us around and to share his incredible knowledge of the construction and the collection. The caverns were dug out of the St.Peters limestone than runs under the entire twin cities. There are two caverns, two football fields long. Preformed concrete arches line the walls of the cavern and the ceiling is comprised of the limestone bedrock underneath the West Bank. We were 85 feet below the surface and it was chilly. Here are some pictures. They're really blurry, I blame my cheap camera.
This is the MLAC cavern. The other cavern is for the archives collection. Seventeen foot ceiling.
Books are arranged by size, not by subject, and are kept in blurry boxes that can be pulled out by pickers. No really, they look blurry in real life, I swear.
The cavern walls outside the stacks.
The loading dock. Several full length semis can fit in here at a time. Huge.
Exposed sandstone cavern wall.
The archives cavern. Supposedly, somewhere in there is a jar of pickled pigs feet that have some historical value. Why? They have a lot of odd, fascinating items in the archives collection.
This is the world's largest book, according to Guiness Book of World Records. It's hard to judge the scale, but believe, it's big. Like four feet tall. We conjectured that it was made by giants, that's why such a large book would be created.
This is the actual street sign from the famous address of Sherlock Holmes. The archives has the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes related materials in the world.
Overall, it was really cool to see the collection and the caverns. We even saw the room where the Google Book project is taking place and the "black op" book trucks that Google uses. They're big trucks covered in black tarp covers. They're all about the secrecy. I would've taken a picture, but I feared Google agents would show up with cease and desist papers.
Leave a comment