n., pl. cubic feeta volume of space that is approximately 12 × 12 × 12 inchesShelley 1949, 110For the one and a half million cubic foot section, Jameson estimated a ground area of 40,000 square feet to a height of 40 feet. The ultimate four million cubic foot structure would require a ground area of 100,000 to 120,000 square feet for the building to a height of 40 to 50 feet.Horn 1953b, 316Storage equipment in the center consists of steel shelving units of five shelves, on each of which 12 one-cubic foot corrugated cardboard boxes are placed two-high.Gondos 1964, 475A multifunction building not infrequently results in a complicated plan, as in the case of the Virginia State Library; and a complicated plan may well cost more per cubic foot of space afforded than would a simple and direct solution.Ham 1984, 16Authors of two recent studies claim that personal papers may cost between $32 and $88 per cubic foot before they are finally put on the shelves.Slavin 1991, 221Initially established as a separate program in 1974, the program has grown from a one-room collection of historical papers to a 73,000 cubic foot storage facility located in the government’s secretariat compound in Islamabad.a measure used to indicate the quantity of materials, commonly used to describe the size of archival or records collectionsMitchell 1960, 182–183According to its own statistics Portland, for example, has filmed approximately 2,200 cubic feet of records at a cost of $63,826. Thus Portland has spent between $25 and $30 to film each cubic foot of records. This expenditure can be justified only if it would cost more than $25 to $30 to store the same cubic foot for the required period of time in its original form. The cost of storing a cubic foot of records for one year varies considerably, but a cost of $1 to $1.25 can be used as a rule of thumb.Poole 1962, 219Since there were 360 boxes, each containing a cubic foot of records, their mass had to be reduced to store them in any space available.Jones 1968, 149In the first place, as Robert L. Brubaker’s study indicates, of the approximately 800 libraries whose holdings are included in the Hamer Guide, at least 540 have fewer than 1,000 manuscript items—no more than an average of 1 cubic foot each.Fenn 1979, 439Acquisition efforts have garnered more than 150 collections of personal papers, ranging in size from mere fragments of less than one cubic foot to lifetime accumulations of papers totalling hundreds of cubic feet.Abraham, Balzarini, and Frantilla 1985, 39The processing time for all accessions averaged 1.25 weeks, or 25.2 hours, per cubic foot (see Table 3). The processing time ranged from 2.25 weeks, or 47 hours, per cubic foot for photograph and oral history material to .8 week, or 16 hours, for university archives.Greene and Meissner 2005, 244Though we are not going that far, it would not be wholly unreasonable to assume that researchers can muddle through a cubic foot of completely unfoldered, unorganized material; the point is that it is not worth organizing that foot of material to the item level.Miller 2013, 527Processing rates vary tremendously. The Beinecke Library at Yale provides a table of estimated processing times based on the origin and time period of creation. Looking at the time to process a cubic foot of post-1900 collection materials, it estimates 1.1 days for state government records, 1.25 days for business records, 2.25 days for local government records, 3.5 days for personal papers, and 3.25 days for mixed types.
Notes
A records center box is generally counted as a cubic foot even though it is slightly larger.
