Bodleian Libraries’ Aisles of Knowledge

Bodleian Library’s new £26 million storage facility in Swindon, Wiltshire, will ultimately store more than 8 million volumes of books and maps for Oxford University’s world-renowned library. Built to the British Standard for Storage of the Archival Document — BS 5454:2000, the 127,900 sq2 warehouse has 31 aisles of shelving, providing more than 153 miles of storage capacity. During the next year, nearly six million books and more than 1.2 million maps will be transferred from Oxford to the storage facility.

SSI Schaefer worked with other members of the design team, led by Scott Brownrigg architects, logistics consultants Total Logistics, and building contractor MACE. Once the internal racking structure layout, specified by SSI Schaefer, was agreed, the building was then designed around it. The Bodleian Library needed to develop a new storage strategy to move and safely store more than 8 million items — including the special storage of hand-drawn maps, dating back to the 14th and 15th Century. This became more urgent with the decision to renovate and redevelop the New Bodleian, which had previously been the major book storage building, as a Special Collections Research Library, with rooms for public exhibitions. The £78 million project, currently underway, will be completed by 2015, when it will re-open as the Weston Library.

The challenge was to store away material in a location that was easily accessible by road networks, and then facilitate the retrieval of material, as and when needed, within 24 hours following publication requests from Scholars and students from all over the world. The material would then be viewed within Bodleian’s famous Reading Rooms. In less than 25 weeks, SSI Schaefer designed, supplied and installed a bespoke High Rise, High Density Narrow Aisle Shelving Structure, standing at 11.4 metres high, providing 3,224 bays and 247,000 linear metres of shelving. The 15 metre high building — of which 90% of the total capacity cube is utilized — also houses a four-level multi-tier walk-on racking structure, supporting 600 new tailor-made steel cabinets, which will hold more than 1.2 million maps and large format items. With 38 shelf levels from the ground up, the system provides more than 690,404 storage tray locations, all items transferred to the site will be individually bar-coded and put into five different sized cardboard trays, double and triple deep, which fit well within the standard 1283 mm wide shelf locations.

The ventilation system is designed to push and pull airflow — the design temperature, humidity and air filtration is automatically controlled to protect the books from sudden changes in temperature. The new facility has now been completed on time, allowing the book move task to start. From November 2010 throughout 2011, 6.5 million books, manuscripts and periodicals will be moved from Oxford to the new site in Swindon. The new facility should meet the Bodleian’s growth requirements for the next 20 years.

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