The knowledge store

But university vice-chancellor, Prof Andrew Hamilton, will be marking a new chapter in the 400-history of the Bodleian when he clambers on to a forklift truck today to officially open the library’s new £26m book storage facility.

Over the next year, almost 6m books will be moved to South Marston. They will arrive from a salt mine in Cheshire, a store in Nuneham Courtenay and of course Oxford, (mainly from the 11-storey book stack in the New Bodleian and the underground bookstore between the Radcliffe Camera and the Old Bodleian) in what will be the biggest book move since the Bodleian first opened its doors to scholars in 1602.

Maps, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and microfilm will also be stored in a vast purpose-built modern warehouse, equivalent in size to 1.6 football pitches, close to the A420. To hold this vast quantity of material has required creating 153 miles of shelving — and crucially, with space for 8.5m volumes, it will provide a solution to the space problems of a library that receives about 1,000 new books every working day, requiring an additional three miles of shelving every year.

The need to find storage space became increasingly urgent when the Bodleian’s carefully worked out plans to build a giant book depository at Oxford’s Osney Mead estate was voted down by Oxford City Council, on the grounds that the planned building would be “overbearing and have adverse impact on a conservation area.”

Opening a depository to hold the bulk of the Bodleian’s books was viewed as central to the Bodleian’s ambitious £78m scheme to transform the New Library on Broad Street, to be renamed the Weston Library, allowing some of the library’s treasures to be displayed, with an new entrance hall and glass frontage facing out on to the Broad.

There were worries too about the fast-deteriorating storage conditions in the out-dated New Bodleian. Bodley’s Librarian Sarah Thomas is delighted at the speed of events, when instead of thinking outside the box, the Bodleian began to think outside the Oxford ring road.

Dr Thomas said: “One of the most satisfying things over the last few weeks has been encountering people from across the university, who asked, ‘Have you started building the new storage facility yet?’ It’s marvellous to be able to say, ‘It’s done. We are about to begin filling it up’. It’s very exciting to have done something that people thought could not be achieved.”

But members of the university taking the 30-mile trip down the A420 today will be left in no doubt that the new storage facility is ready, within budget and on time. The ground breaking ceremony took place exactly a year ago.

The invitation carries facts and figures that indicate the scale of the giant book store. There are 31 aisles, totalling 3,224 bays with 95,000 shelf levels. The area of shelf surfaces equates to 120,666 sq m or 16.5 football pitches. More than 600 map cabinets will hold over 1.2m maps and large format items, while the structure is made up of 2,196 tons of steel, held together by some 25,000 nuts and bolts. Staff are still awaiting the arrival of the first book. But wandering around the vast empty warehouse, through the narrow aisles, with 11m-high shelving towering above, you feel for whoever is faced with the job of barcoding 745,000 storage trays.

For Dr Thomas the giant storage facility has served two important functions. “It 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.

“Now we can look to the future with confidence that we are preserving one of the world’s most complete records of the written world in state-of-the-art secure archival conditions.”

The building has a design life of 100 years, and it has been developed to allow the building to be extended in years to come with minimum disruption. But the decision to move millions of books to the edge of Swindon, has also forced Dr Thomas and her colleagues to reorganise one of the world’s great collections. She said: “Our staff have always taken great care of the collection. The difference is that now we are not dependent on memory of the people here as we have for 400 years. We have moved to a zone where there is a degree of automated control.”

To maximise the use of space, books are organised according to size, arranging them according to subject apparently would reduce the warehouse storage capacity by 40 per cent. Items will be traceable in the warehouse via an integrated library system and retrieved by library staff using “high level order” picker forklift trucks.

The decision has also been made to send only lower usage items to Swindon from the library’s collection — a major difference to what had been proposed at Osney Mead. For in response to readers’ wishes, more popular books will remain on book shelves in Oxford. As part of a £5m facelift to the Radcliffe Camera, the underground book store under Radcliffe Square is to be refurbished, allowing the creation of two floors of open stack library space.

It has also been decided that the Swindon store will only hold post-18th-century material. Treasures of the Bodleian such as the Gutenberg Bible (one of only eight surviving), Magna Carta, the Shakespeare first folio and Tolkien’s drawings will all remain in Oxford stored in a secure vault, and hopefully sometimes displayed, at the new Weston Library, which is due to open in 2015.

Nevertheless, it is anticipated that some 200,000 requests a year will still be received at South Marston from readers. A twice- daily book-delivery service will run to Oxford by van or via scanning and electronic delivery to readers’ desktops.

Romantics may reflect that the warehouse, created by Scott Browning, hardly rivals the great medieval library that Yeats described as the most beautiful in the world. But perhaps it is worth remembering too that many still agree with travel writer Jan Morris’s damning verdict of the pre-war New Bodleian, which she said brought to mind a municipal swimming bath.

And if the book store has delighted Swindon Borough Council — at the ground breaking its leader Rod Bluh provoked laughter by expressing delight in being able to “solve Oxford’s planning problems” — the warehouse is also doing a great service for Oxford too. “It means that we can go on to redevelop important buildings within central Oxford from book fortresses into welcoming library spaces for readers, and exhibition halls where we can share our treasures with a broader audience. This storage facility is just the first major milestone in a five-year transformational project of the Bodleian.”

But does she not have any regrets about overseeing such an important part of Oxford’s heritage, representing one of the city’s greatest contributions to western civilisation, heading out of Oxford. “Would it have been desirable to have completed it a year earlier and to have our books stored a few minutes away? I would say ‘yes’. There would have been advantages with Osney Mead.

“But I’m not sad about what happened. We’ve ended up with a solution that I’m happy with.”

She will be happier still if the vice-chancellor is able to perform his opening duties with a little less difficulty than George VI at the ceremonial opening of the New Bodleian Library in 1946. When the king turned the silver key in the building’s “front door”, to everyone’s embarrassment, it broke. History surely cannot repeat itself in Swindon, not on the Keypoint business park.