And in what is perhaps his most controversial plan among faculty members, De Gennaro has already moved books from the Yard altogether, and will continue to do so in the future.

Colossal Widener Library, which has stood in the Yard for most of the century, is too small for today's collection. At present, Widener holds 700,000 volumes beyond its working capacity.

Faculty members have in the past considered ways to compensate for the collection's rapid growth rate, currently at 120000 volumes per year. In 1989, a fierce Faculty debate erupted over the construction of the Inn at Harvard on a plot of land that could have held Harvard's next openstack library.

But a new library, many say, would be a bandaid rather than a cure--and an inadequate bandaid, at that. Indeed, when Pusey Library was built in the early 1970s, it was filled nearly immediately, and had to incorporate unpopular storage techniques like movable stacks.

"When people saw Pusey and what happened there, it was clear that building more libraries was not a solution," says Professor of English and American Literature Philip J. Fisher.

Enter De Gennaro and his solution, which had the added advantage of making use of a facility that had already been built. It was the Harvard Depository--a sophisticated, climate-controlled building in South-borough, Mass., about 35 minutes' drive from campus.

The depository unit, which had a capacity for two million volumes, had been used mainly for archival storage. De Gennaro built a second unit, which can also hold 2 million volumes. The Southborough facility has the capacity for eight more such buildings.

What began when De Gennaro arrived was the touchy task of determining which books should be sent to Southborough, and thus out of the immediate reach of scholars and students. Depository books must be ordered a day in advance, though library officials say that as depository use increases, the number of trips made there per day will also increase.

To help involve faculty members in the decision-making process, De Gennaro instituted what he calls the "dotting project." Prime candidates for the depository that hadn't been checked out in five years were marked with round, colored stickers, and professors were invited to pore through the stacks and remove the stickers from books they thought needed to remain on the shelves.

Since De Gennaro's arrival, 200,000 volumes have been sent to the Harvard Depository, he says. But because of the library's rate of growth and the overcrowding of Widener, the move only "bought us about a year or two year's time."

Over the next four years, De Gennaro says he plans to ship about a million volumes to Southborough.

Assistant Director for Research Resources Kenneth E. Carpenter spearheads the continuing project of selecting books for the depository, and works closely with faculty members to examine and identify candidate collections.

Faculty members have been very helpful, Carpenter says, and have even suggested books for storage that he would have hesitated to send away.

"I think initially there was some anxiety about it because everyone is worried that it's precisely the books that he needs that are going into storage, but that isn't the case," Carpenter says.

But Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Luis Fernandez-Sifuentes says he has difficulties coping with rapid changes in book availability.