Shelving put to good use in new book storage facility

Shelving put to good use in new book storage facility

Every household and business needs to store certain items. In some cases, there may just be a few items that have to be housed using shelving and racking, but in others, there are many.

One institution that has proved it needs a considerable amount of such storage is Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

According to a report in the Independent, it has had to commission the construction of a custom-built facility that is capable of keeping millions of books.

The publication noted that the Book Storage Facility (BSF), which was completed in October, contains 153 miles of shelving and racking.

It pointed out that the collection of books, which it described as "arguably the country's most famous library", comprises more than eight million tomes.

The reason why it is so vast is because the collection has a historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in Britain.

First opened to scholars in 1602, the Bodleian Library has been expanding ever since. Although the process was slow at first, it has since sped up and over the last 150 years, the pace at which books are added has risen considerably.

Indeed, such was the demand for space on the shelves of its storage facilities that it had to use part of a former salt mine in Cheshire for a while.

However, now it is able to transfer its books to the warehouse near Swindon, which has the capacity to continue taking on items from the library for at least the next 20 years. Such was the scale of the project that it cost 26 million to complete.

Over the course of the next year, more than 1.2 million maps and almost six million books will be delivered from Oxford to the BSF.

Commenting on the solution, head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas said: "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian.

"We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years."

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