Students and faculty at Colorado State University will be reading publications from the stacks at Cornell's Mann Library for the next year or so, in a special arrangement to help the Colorado school deal with a devastating flood that destroyed many of its library's holdings.

During that time, articles requested at a library desk at the Fort Collins, Colo., campus will be served up from Ithaca, N.Y., via the Internet.

"We are blessed with a superb collection and dedicated staff, and it seemed appropriate in CSU's time of need to share our riches with them," said Sarah Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. "The thought of a student body and faculty prevented from access to materials supporting learning and scholarship is too much for us to bear."

On Monday, July 27, eight inches of rain fell on Fort Collins in 24 hours, creating a "500-year flood" that swept away homes and killed five people. At CSU, water poured from nearby Spring Creek into a tiny stream known as Arthur's Ditch, building into a wall of water 4 feet high that surged across the campus. Books, computers and furniture were swept out of buildings onto lawns and years of reference and research materials were destroyed.

In a cruel irony, the university's Morgan Library was undergoing renovations, so some 450,000 books, periodicals and monographs -- about one-fourth of the library's holdings -- were stored in the building's basement. The onrushing water literally broke down the basement wall, washed documents off the shelves and filled the basement with 8 feet of water.

"We actually had staff in the basement just moments before," recalled Julie Wessling, assistant dean for public services in Morgan Library. "Fortunately, they heard the groan of the wall and ran upstairs."

Once the water subsided, library staff and volunteers worked around the clock to package the soggy volumes and send them to cold storage to retard mold and mildew.

Slowly, the materials will be salvaged by freeze-drying and other restoration techniques.

"We expect to recover a significant portion," Wessling said. But the restoration process will last up to two years. In mid-August, Camila Alire, CSU dean of libraries, put out an urgent call for assistance from other libraries. Cornell responded almost immediately.

"As a land-grant university, we have a strong collection in priority CSU teaching and research areas," Thomas explained. CSU is Colorado's land-grant university, and like Cornell is its state's agricultural college. Cornell's Mann Library, the library primarily responsible for supporting the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Human Ecology, has one of the most extensive collections of agriculture and related social sciences materials in the nation, including at least 8500 periodicals. The Mann and Morgan libraries have a long history of collaboration through inter-library loans, Thomas added.

Although many libraries offered to help, CSU was especially pleased to hear from Cornell because of the depth of its collection, Wessling said.

"A man from NPR was here to interview [dean of libraries] Camila Alire at the time we heard Cornell had agreed to help out," she reported. "We let out a cheer that went out over the air and, as I understand it, some people at Cornell heard it. I'm glad that they knew we were truly pleased with their participation."

Cornell ended up being one of six sites assisting CSU. Others are Arizona State University and four schools in Colorado.

The operation will be an inter-library loan on a grand scale, according to Howard Raskin, document services librarian at Mann Library, who will oversee the day-to-day operation of the project at Cornell. While there may be a few real books traveling back and forth, the emphasis will be on supplying articles from academic journals and other periodicals, Raskin said.

When a CSU library patron requests an article, the Morgan Library staff will look up the periodical in Cornell's online library catalog via the Internet, obtain the call number and transmit a request directly to Mann Library. A Cornell student employee will get the periodical from the Mann Library stacks and bring it to a special scanning station. A scanned image of the article will then be transmitted over the Internet to Morgan Library, where it will be printed out and delivered to the patron.

Some material also will come from the library of the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine and a few other libraries on campus, Raskin said. CSU also has a veterinary school.

"We are doing this only with titles we have already purchased, so there is no copyright problem," Wessling noted. "It comes under the heading of materials that are 'temporarily unavailable.'"

CSU is providing funds for each helper institution to purchase an Ariel workstation, a system used by many libraries which consists of computer, scanner and special software that combines scanning and transmission in a single package. Colorado is also funding 80 hours per week of student labor at Cornell.

"What we are really contributing is supervision," said Jan Olsen, director of Mann Library. "Eighty hours a week is a lot of student time, and it does take a lot of supervision of the students to maintain the quality of the scanning and make sure that this is an excellent service."

Raskin estimates that his staff will be handling at least 150 document requests per day.

Wessling estimates that Morgan Library will be putting out as many as 1,000 requests per day to all six helper institutions and will try to spread them evenly so as not to overload any one institution.