As one of just five legal deposit libraries in the UK, the UL is entitled to a copy of any book published in the UK since 1710 Simon Lock

by Matt Gutteridge

This article is 7 years old

Work has begun on a new £17 million off-site storage facility for less used University Library (UL) resources.

The site, located north of Cambridge in Ely, is designed to relieve pressure on the main UL site, which has suffered from what Acting University Librarian Professor Chris Young has called “chronic overcrowding” in recent years.

The plan was first proposed last July, amid warnings from one academic that it would create much longer waits for students trying to access certain materials.

As one of five legal deposit libraries in the UK, the library is entitled to request a copy of any book published in the UK since 1710. As a result, it receives around 100,000 new items a year, much of which material is only used infrequently. It is hoped that by relocating some of the UL’s 98km of ‘low-use’ resources to Ely, space at the central UL will not again become critical before 2030.

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“The new store will ensure that we fulfil our responsibilities as a national repository of research material, by enabling us to house the publications in suitable conditions and make them available to future generations of researchers and library users.”Speaking to Cambridge News, Professor Young said “The off-site storage will also help the University Library support teaching, learning and research by allowing us to plan new spaces and rethink our existing facilities and services. Only very low-use material will be considered for ingest for which there is little expected future demand.

The new development will be the largest relocation of UL resources since the 1930s, when the library moved to its present location, on the site of the former “First Eastern General” military hospital used in World War I, after outgrowing the Old Schools site, on Trinity Lane.The first books are expected to arrive at the new site early in 2018; however, it will be 2025 before the facility will be fully operational. Students and fellows will be able to request resources online, which will be retrieved daily

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