The 33,000 square feet of library space, on two floors of the Armand Hammer Building on the Columbia University Medical Center campus, was needed for new classrooms scheduled for completion by 2010.

But to John T. Oliver, Reference and Instruction Librarian, the challenge was not so much in removing approximately 475,000 volumes from Hammer as it was in finding what he calls "the natural fit" between any necessary disposal and an environmentally responsible way to accomplish it. In other words, besides more traditional approaches like book sales and giveaways, it was necessary to find new opportunities for reuse and recycling.

These combined efforts will ultimately divert more than 30 tons of materials from landfills, with well over half that weight living on as recycled paper products.

Oliver says the process began last summer, first by librarians sorting through the entire 500,000-volume collection to find and remove duplicates that were either in the Health Sciences Library collection or elsewhere in the Columbia Libraries system. "These were volumes that were good enough to keep," he says, "but not good enough to have two copies."

Then came the book sales, for which Oliver was responsible. But in the end, he says, "I just wanted to reuse them responsibly, so I started giving them away." Meantime, however, a lot remained unsold and "vast numbers were obsolete and inappropriate for reuse."

At this point, Oliver told himself "there's no way all this paper couldn't be useful to someone." Yet his initial concern was what to do about the book bindings - non-recyclable in New York City. He admits to having toyed with the idea of a binding-cutting party.

That worry became unfounded when Oliver began dealing with Chambers Paper Fibres, a Brooklyn company in business since 1897 that buys and sells paper. Charlie Rotante, a Chambers manager, says his company stacks up from four to 10 discarded books at a time, and at the press of a button, a knife slices off their bindings, "guillotine-style."

The, Rotante says, their employees separate the paper from the covers that are recycled into grey cardboard such as that used for shirt packaging. The paper is recycled for bathroom tissue and paper towels.

Chambers picks up the discarded volumes from the HSL and, Oliver says, no money changes hands between the company and Columbia.

Approximately 55,000 bound volumes of selected core biomedical journals have been shipped to the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, the only public university for health sciences in Tanzania. According to the CUMC newsletter "IN VIVO," "the donated journals will double the library's holdings, which at 50,000 volumes, is already the country's largest collection of health and medical materials."

Besides the Tanzania donation, HSL has recently given away or recycled about 30,000 volumes.

Back at CUMC, the 25,000 books left on site will be mostly recent and highly used items. HSL will keep books on site if they have publication dates within the last four years or if they have been in high demand.  The library will also keep on site the last seven years of several hundred journals not available electronically.

The rest will move off campus to ReCAP (Research Collections and Preservation Consortium), a joint venture of the Columbia University Libraries, the New York Public Library and Princeton University. The consortium shares the expenses of the site near Princeton, including climate control.

Oliver points out the advantage of the ReCAP arrangement, which doesn't bind research to a physical location. A student, professor or staff member who needs material from a volume located at ReCAP need only submit an on-line request, and the article will be scanned and e-mailed in return.

Oliver came to the Health Sciences Library in 2006. He admits that he was the "green noodge," who first proposed the idea for the Health Sciences Library book recycling project. But, he says, the project would surely have failed without the countless hours of help he received from HSL staffers.

He says he's very interested in environmental issues on the horizon for libraries and librarianship. "At this early point in my career, they don't share a lot of real estate in my brain," he says.