I was talking to Aura about cool cavernous archives and libraries for reasons, and it reminded me of the stacks at the City of Toronto Archives where I worked for a summer in school. A lot of archives have dense offsite storage, but Toronto's special in that the storage is onsite. So you just look out the window from the top floor and you get this: three storeys of boxes, and a forklift. Sometimes you even get little things outside boxes - I have vivid memories of seeing an entire diorama, out of its box, visible hanging out on a third storey shelf where no one can touch it. If you want something from the archives, someone goes out with the forklift to get it for you.
Of course, this means that there could be forklift certified archivists. As a mere grad student, I wasn't one of them. When I needed something from the stacks for the work I was doing, I had to get someone else to go out and get it for me.
(The reasons being, of course,)
Spoiler
Firmament chapter 2 in Fallen London(Photo by Rrburke under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
