TOP-SHELF PRODUCTS
OKC firm sells shelves to hold 1.8 million books
BY HANNAH PIKE Business Writer hpike@oklahoman.com
Will Williams started his oneman, Oklahoma City-based storage solution business two years ago, and a work crew just finished installing his tallest sale yet — 35-foot-tall shelving for the University of Arkansas.
The shelving, designed for the university’s new offsite library storage facility, will house 1.8 million books and cost the university about $2 million, including freight and installation. It consists of 14,550 shelves that would stretch 12 miles long if laid end-to-end, said Williams, storage specialist at Design Storage Solutions.
Williams said he heard the University of Arkansas would be building an offsite storage facility over two years ago, and he really wanted to “get it” because he was born in Arkansas and his daughter went to the school.
“This project is really near and dear to my heart because it’s my home state, and I’ve always been a Razorback fan,” Williams said. “It just makes me feel very proud to kind of be able to put a stamp on Design Storage Solutions. To be a local Oklahoma company and to do this in Arkansas is really extremely special, extremely special.”
Lora Lennertz, data services librarian at University of Arkansas Libraries, said the university chose the shelves because they are well-known, standard and “won’t get messed up really fast.”
“We want to ensure that the books that we’ve purchased — and we’ve purchased them over the years, some of them — we’re one of the few people that have
these items,” Lennertz said. “So we want to be sure that ... we can have those available to our researchers and other researchers in the country for a long time.”
The university decided to build the facility so it could update its “very old” library, which has asbestos, and create collaborative spaces, she said.
“The building is really important for two things,” Lennertz said. “Both to enable us to create user space and user services that are more up-to-date, but also to maintain the materials well and in steady conditions.”
The move of the books from the University of Arkansas’ Mullins Library and current storage facility to the new facility began this week and should take about three months. While filling five semi-trucks worth of boxes, they will move about 1.4 million books and materials to the facility at a rate of more than 20,000 items per day, Lennertz said.
It required 35 53-foot trailers to transport the shelving pieces from the manufacturer, Montel, in Canada to Fayetteville, Arkansas. The unloading and installation of the shelves required 20 hours per day of work for 40 days, Williams said.
That much work might sound like a headache to some, but Williams said he finds the industry “fascinating” and “fun” because it is different every day.
“I always look at other businesses — what else would I want to do?” Williams said. “The beauty of this business is the types of markets I get to play in. I’m doing a book move like this, I’m working at a police station, I’m working at an athletic facility ... working with hospitals, working with governments. So I get to touch a lot of different areas of people’s storage issues.”
Williams has been in the storage solution business for 35 years and has always been based in Oklahoma City, he said. His company services museums, libraries, police stations, universities and “anybody that needs storage” in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and North Texas.
“Anybody that has stuff on a shelf, we can help them save space,” he said.