Inside the Bodleian: Building a 21st Century Library

but I think there is no organization like the board lien it's a very special place it has 50-plus libraries within the system and then you have all the college libraries so you can think of it as the library system for a small smaller country like B Denmark packed into one town it's it's a huge system it's very rich system in terms of resources available in physical initiative one of the most amazing things about the history of the BOD lien is that almost from its foundation in 1602 our buildings have failed to keep up with the growth of our collections almost 10 years ago now when we had completely run out of any space restored over two and a half million books in salt mines in Cheshire we were able to build a new storage facility 25 miles to the west of here just outside of Swindon to the most exacting standards and that building has been available to us for two years now we have just under 8 million books stored in it and between two and three thousand books a day travel in each direction between the storage facility and the central Oxford libraries and managing it is a yes it is it quite a huge logistic task can think of it operation like a DHL or something like that we have people in town while ordering things we have trucks running between Sweden and here twice a day delivering to the different libraries so for example we're able to scan material from the book storage facility directly to the desktop of our users and so it's part of a continuing innovation in service which you still need the physical infrastructure to do because we have a new book storage facility we no longer need to keep so much material in central Oxford so that's given us the opportunity to reuse some of that space to give access to not just the community inside the university the citizens wanted more generally and also the many fast walks with more space that building which has been known for 80 years as the new body library that will become the Western library was really designed by Charles Gilbert Scott as being essentially just a place for storing collections and it was deliberately designed to keep the public and indeed to keep the scholars out of that building and of course we're in a different phase of development for the Bobbie and now if you go to the libraries you will see students are not necessarily interacting with the books and journals the digital materials but using the library as a space to learn and the same is true for research so what we need is to provide flexible spaces and open spaces so this new blend of storage preservation and research that will give us a new opportunity to reshape our services to meet the demands of the contemporary age over the past 20 years the world of information has changed dramatically with the explosion of digital information and there have been doom doom mongers throughout that period predicting the death of the book and the death of the library and the death of the librarian but of course that has been completely disproven by the reality of what's happened which has being a complete you'll in the role of the librarian and to some extent a reconfirmation by users that libraries continue to be not only important but essential parts of the information environment and the librarian continues to adapt and to develop their skills to meet those new demands

Channel: University of Oxford

Views: 136,328

Keywords: University of Oxford, Oxford, University, Library (Building Function), Bodleian Library (Public Library), Librarian (Occupation), Weston, BSF, Architecture (Professional Field), Building, Design

Id: v8r96cZC2lY

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2013