Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves 130
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
Re:Don't put all your eggs in one basket.... (Score:3, Informative)
Inevitably an uncontrollable fire will break out and wipe out the entire collection, it's just a matter of time.
They should start donating their collection to other libraries around the world, maybe on a loan basis so that each year or two the books can move around the world and more people can get to read them.
You don't want to end up like the Library of Alexandria, what a loss.
Both the British Library and Cambridge University library have similar collections*, if a fire was to break out the only things that would be truly lost would be rare ancient items unique to the Bodlean which will have already been extensively studied, copied and transcribed - just the one-off item would be lost, and there's not much that can be done about that until we invent replicators.
*Like the Bodlean they also receive copies of every book published.
Re:Entitlement (Score:3, Informative)
Is that everything published, even foreign works published in the UK or just things that originated in the U.K.
AIUI, it is everything that is published in the UK. This includes foreign works in cases where there is an organisation acting as a publisher in the UK, but not if the publisher is outside the UK and retailers import directly from them.
If so, why does that sound so small?
Because unlike the US Library of Congress or the British Museum, the Bodleian only gets the stuff they specifically request, which appears to be around a quarter of the total that is actually published from what I can work out.