An industrial estate in West Yorkshire may not seem like the obvious home for a treasure trove of British literature, yet it’s the little known home of 75% of the British Library’s entire catalogue of books.
The unassuming building is located in Boston Spa, near to Wetherby, and houses around 127.5 million books, spread across the equivalent of 373 miles worth of shelving. Unlike a traditional library, the storage facility is more akin to an Amazon warehouse, with robots picking boxes from the shelves to fulfil book requests from across the country.
Speaking to The Times, Alasdair Bruce, a manager at the British Library recently spoke about the facility and how it was needed in order to store the books the British Library acquired, as it traditionally keeps a copy of every single book, newspaper and journal that is ever published in the UK.
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“Without us intending to, it’s been a bit of a secret,” explained Bruce. “There’s a finite amount of storage space that we have for all this, but an infinite amount of material.”
It’s this need for space that actually lead most of the collection being moved North to Yorkshire, as it costs just £4 a meter here, compared to £26 in London. The most prestigious items, such as the Magna Carta and early newspapers dating back to 1621 are still kept under lock and key in the capital, but everything else has moved to Yorkshire.
Around 550 people currently work on the site at Boston Spa and among the day to day running and cataloguing of the country’s growing book supply, but plans are currently underway to redevelop the site, in order to expand it’s capacity and add a further 137 miles worth of storage space. This should then be enough to keep up with demand until the middle of the century.
Alongside the increased shelf capacity, a new viewing gallery is also being planned, so that members of the public can watch the robots hard at work as they pick and pack books that have been requested by libraries and readers across the country.
While the high-tech solution may seem a little excessive, it actually serves a very important purpose for preserving the books, as the storage rooms are kept at a low oxygen percentage of 14 per cent, to help protect the books from fire.
If engineers need to remain in the facility for any longer than 30 minutes they must wear special breathing equipment, as it isn’t safe to continue breathing such low oxygen air. However, the low oxygen level does mean that even if you were to strike a match in the vaults, they wouldn’t be able to ignite, and in turn, this protects the books.
A cafe and reading room are also included in the redevelopment plans, with a square full of plants to help make the site more green.
