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Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves
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.
"We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years."
I wish my problems allowed for 40 years of procrastination!
they sent their poets to the salt mines, ... in the UK we sent their poetry there instead!
I have read some of the modern poets, a salt mine seems like the best destination for much of what they produced ....
Wikipedia claims 21 million volumes in the LOC, so this would be roughly 0.27LOC. 6 Million volumes is not particularly large - even now it will only hold half of the current Bodleian collection.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
One of the things the British Library is interested in is keeping books, not data. Books are valuable not only for the content but also may be of interest to future generations because of their typography, layout, binding, other aspects of their physical construction. Also it takes a lot more time and money to scan a book rather than putting it on a bookshelf.