With over eight million books, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is now the proud owner of a shelf that is 153 miles long.
As the University has a copy of every book published in the UK, it had understandably started to run out of storage space.
This week the collection has been moved into a massive warehouse in South Marston which has the capacity to offer enough storage space for the next two decades.
The facility is so large that the floor area is on a par with 1.6 football pitches while the shelving is almost ten times this size due to its high density.
Moving the books has been no easy feat however as they have been kept in storage far underground in a former Cheshire salt mine. Now almost six million books and 1.2 million maps will be transported to their new home over the next year.
Although this new storage facility offers a large space to store books, the University has chosen to only store its books that are not often requested in this new facility.
Students have been given the guarantee however, that if they request a book from the facility before 10am, they will be able to collect it in Oxford at 3pm the following day. That said, the University are only expecting around 200,000 requests of this nature each year.
Among the books that are to be retained in Oxford are the four original manuscripts of the Magna Carta treaty from the thirteenth century.
Speaking to The Independent, head librarian Sarah Thomas admits that this solution could not have come sooner.
She 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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