GEEK'S GUIDE TO BRITAIN The Botanic Gardens, Sheldonian Theatre, Museum of Natural History – there’s plenty to see in Oxford. Off limits, however, was the New Bodleian Library, arguably the city’s greatest treasure and jewel in the nation's academic crown.
The Bodleian is home one of the world’s oldest and greatest collections of books, maps and documents dating from 1602. These include the largest number of books printed before 1500 held in a university library, manuscripts from medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire, and one of the largest concentrations of modern British political manuscripts.
It is principal library in the Bodleian libraries system and these works were largely shielded from public view, with the Bodlean offering just a tiny exhibition space across the road where it's based on Broad Street.
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That all changed in March, with the New Bodleian’s re-opening renamed as the Weston Library following a three-year, £80m transformation.
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The building retains its distinctive, honey-coloured Deco-style exterior and the only obvious sign of change is a new glass front on the ground floor.
Go inside, though, and the extent of the change is laid out. The massive book store that occupied the centre of the building was removed above ground level. In came the atrium that now welcomes the public, free of charge.
It is finished in glass, steel and wood, a modernist church to learning finished with narrow, high windows. In, too, came 40km of storage facilities above and below ground that house works.
With the atrium is a café and gift shop – and two galleries, which will now house exhibitions based on at least some of the works that cemented the Bodleian’s reputation. The inaugural exhibition was Marks of Genius that ran until September 20 that could be subtitled Now That’s What I Call a Library, giving you – as it does – a peek at some of the Bodleian’s greatest treasures. A permanent, smaller exhibition of treasures will open in December 2015.
To get to the galleries, I enter through the new glass doors up steps from Broad Street. Before the refit this was a blank wall; now, anyone can stroll in via that atrium. There’s a glass-walled corridor of bookshelves above three of its sides, part of the working library for students and academics. Animated screens illustrate the library’s history. It’s very far from being dusty.
At the back of the atrium are the galleries, currently featuring many examples of genius that are beyond price. There are a few wry additions – such as Philip Larkin’s university careers service record card – demonstrating the difficulties of spotting genius at the time.
Larkin’s unflattering profile is in the smaller Treasury gallery, which also features a battered First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, which the Bodleian bought, sold, then reacquired in the 20th century; an early copy of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, in which someone has appended “More absolute trash was never written”; and handwritten manuscripts of The Wind in the Willows and Frankenstein. Kenneth Graeme has very neat handwriting. Mary Shelley, less so.
The larger ST Lee gallery includes JRR Tolkein’s own cover artwork for The Hobbit – green forest, blue mountains, dragon-ridden skies and a note telling the printer to ignore the pink sun as printing another colour would cost too much – and the script for prime minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960 ‘winds of change’ speech, condemning apartheid in South Africa, with the key words added in pencil to the typewritten draft.
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There’s the astonishing Gough Map, a large, detailed reference of Great Britain showing 650 cities and towns, created in the 13th or 14th century for purposes unknown. This is a good place for cartophiliacs: the gallery also features a 1612 map of Virginia, and Ptolemy’s Geographia atlas printed in 1486. Out in the Blackwell Hall atrium hangs the Sheldon Tapestry Map, created in 1590: a beautiful wall-sized map of Worcestershire and surrounding counties.
The ST Lee gallery also features one of the Bodleian’s four copies of the Magna Carta, agreed by Bad King John 800 years ago and – essentially – the source code of liberty. Like much old code, it’s a pain to read (it’s in Latin) and most of it is obsolete (although the best bit is still part of English law). But there it is in front of you: one of the founding documents of freedom.
It isn’t ancient documents that grant visitors the freedom to see all these treasures: it is modern technology. Until 2010, what is now the atrium of the building was out of bounds to all but a few staff, as a “closed stack” – an 11-floor warehouse holding some five million books, surrounded by reading rooms to which the books were delivered.
The New Bodleian Library, as it was known before becoming the Weston, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, also responsible for Battersea Power Station, the red telephone box and Cambridge’s University Library. The phone box and the central tower of Cambridge’s library have a certain family resemblance.
In the early 20th century, both Oxford and Cambridge had a library space crisis. They aimed to solve it by building libraries that could store the millions of books that both universities continue to receive through legal deposit, entitling them to a copy of every book published in the British Isles, as well as their own extensive purchases.
Cambridge built its new library on playing fields across the Cam from the centre of town, letting it cope with expansion by building a new wing every few years. Oxford built the New Bodleian opposite the original library, right in the middle of the city, with opening planned for 1940.
That didn’t happen for obvious reasons; after military use in the Second World War it finally opened in October 1946. Apart from a roof extension in the 1960s for the Indian Institute library, the New Bodleian wasn’t extended. Without building on some of Trinity College’s extensive lawns, there was nowhere to go.
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The New Bodleian had 88km of shelves, and it wasn’t nearly enough. Items were stored in the grounds of an 18th century manor house in rural Oxfordshire, now used as the headquarters of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, and in disused salt mines in Cheshire, from where retrieval took several days. (Imagine every Mills and Boon novel ever published, down a salt mine, yearning to be set free by an Oxford student.)
Furthermore, this being Oxford, the New Bodleian became a listed building, despite having been compared by travel writer Jan Morris to a municipal swimming bath.
Something had to go: specifically, the closed stack. The library drew up plans for a £29m, 20-metre-high state-of-the-art warehouse on the Osney Mead industrial estate, on the edge of the city. Just three floors of upgraded underground storage would remain in the New Bodleian, and its interior would be rebuilt. The city council allowed the rebuilding, but this being Oxford, it refused planning permission for the Osney warehouse.
Which is why the bulk of the collection of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford is located on the Keypoint distribution estate on the edge of Swindon, 27 miles away on the end of the A420. Forget honey-coloured colleges: it is surrounded by Honda factories, a branch of Sainsbury’s and the headquarters of Wiltshire Police.
If you look north from the lorry-thronged A420, you might catch a glimpse of a tasteful block covered in stone and wood: the dreaming spires’ out of town big box book warehouse.
Oxford has the history, but our ability to see some of the most important pieces of paper in Britain relies on what is effectively a software and barcode-driven warehouse in Swindon. It’s here I head next.
Officially known as the Bodleian Library’s Book Storage Facility (BSF) this is home on the day I visit to 8,328,367 books – around two-thirds of the library’s total collection, as well as some 1.5 million maps. The fact that its staff can calculate this number is down to a multi-year programme of IT and logistics that has given Britain’s oldest university one of its most modern libraries.
Filling the BSF was a huge task. All of the items in the New Bodleian were “decanted”, in many cases barcoded for the first time, with all but the most valuable items sent to Swindon. Where necessary, card catalogues were digitised. The BSF slowly filled, as the New Bodleian was hollowed out and rebuilt as the Weston. Starting last autumn, the Weston was gradually refilled – or “recanted” – though with fewer books than before.
The BSF’s low-roofed processing hall is relatively quiet. This is where it accepts new items, sorts returned ones for refiling and readies items for the vans that take orders into Oxford twice a day, in the closable plastic crates often used for office moves.
Anyone ordering a book before 10.30am can get it delivered to the Bodleian reading room of their choice that afternoon; otherwise, it will arrive the next morning. The BSF sends out around 6,500 items in a busy term-time week, a total of 234,655 in 2014. Apart from the abstruse nature of the stock – a book in Polish, a set of essays on yoga – it looks like what it is: a warehouse’s processing section.
With a high-vis jacket, a member of BSF staff and a press officer, I progress through a roll-up metal door into Chamber 3, one of the four windowless rooms that hold the actual stock. And my sense of scale breaks.
I am facing a city of books, housed on metal shelving units, each more than two dozen shelves high. Each aisle looks like a triumphal Communist avenue in East Berlin – uniform and many storeys high – but with a road width from old Amsterdam. I am eye to eye with the fifth storey, but still feel dwarfed by the 11-metre-high shelves. Despite the sight of a distant far wall, the aisle appears to carry on over the horizon. Like the Grand Canyon, photos don’t really do it justice.
We walk down one of the BSF’s 31 aisles. The chamber is sealed, and quiet at the entrance; within the aisle, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of books, there is near silence. If we were to stay still long enough, the lights would go out as they are on a timer. The Bodleian’s press officer notices some curious two-foot long boxes on one of the eye-level shelves used to store items that don’t fit in the trays. So we open the box ...
Of course, this is a Tibetan blockbook relating to that country's religious tradition of Bön. Note the clockwise swastika, symbolising the sun and the god Vishnu – the Nazis used the anticlockwise version. Still, you might find almost anything on these shelves; almost everything, in fact.
So how does it work? The trays were filled purely by size – otherwise, distribution is random, although there is a plan to move more popular material to the front of aisles. The BSF relies on barcodes, on every item on these shelves, every cardboard tray and every shelf location.
And the barcodes rely on the BSF Information System, provided by Generation Fifth Applications, a modified version of software used in equivalent warehouses run by Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities.
“The one time we had a glitch with BSFIS, we had to down tools,” Boyd Rodger, storage and logistics manager for Bodleian Libraries, tells me. Adds Andrew Bonnie, chief of digital operations: “If we lose IT, people can’t find the resources, they can’t request them, they aren’t able to pick them. We’ve got them all safe and sound, but we can’t do a lot with them.”
BSFIS accepts incoming orders and works out an efficient route for staff to move along one side of an aisle and back along the other. Staff do not use really long ladders, but computerised forklift trucks from Jungheinrich, which owe something to Ripley’s warehouse suit in Aliens.
Potential recruits are taken up to the heights as part of their interview, to see if it puts them off. When working, they average one book a minute. Guides in the aisles stop the forklifts from hitting the shelves; computerised control was considered, but as humans would still be needed to pick and replace books, it was decided they might as well drive the trucks too.
The technology doesn’t end there. A building management system keeps the BSF at 17.5 Celsius, plus or minus one degree, and 52 per cent humidity, plus or minus five percentage points, the ideal levels to preserve paper.
Systems sniff the air for fires – although dust sometimes triggers a false alarm. Fortunately, the 15,000 water sprinklers are individually set off only by high temperatures nearby; it is much easier to restore a drenched book than a burnt one.
The Bodleian has developed alternatives to sending books from the BSF to Oxford. For £4.75, library members can ask staff to scan a section of an item and send them a PDF. A picture of Adam Ant, which had been stuck to the scanning equipment used for what is called the Scan and Deliver service, has sadly been removed.
Between 2004 and 2009, Google scanned some 300,000 out of copyright Bodleian books, mainly from the nineteenth century. As part of the deal, the library got its own copies of the scans to use in perpetuity, and these are accessible free to anyone as PDFs, through the library’s online catalogue Solo.
Solo, a version of Israeli library software firm Ex Libris’ Primo, is also used to enable readers to order items from the BSF, with the actual catalogue held in a system from the same supplier called Aleph. (Like BSFIS and other software introduced in recent years, the Bodleian shunned writing its own software. It prefers, well, off the shelf.)
Solo is also used to gain access to an increasing range of e-resources; a couple of publishers are moving their legal deposit of books from print to electronic formats and more will follow.
Despite a shift to electronic publishing, the Bodleian expects to need another BSF chamber by 2020. Fortunately, it already owns 17 acres of land, providing plenty of space for expansion: “We can add more chambers as we need them,” says Rodger.
And, if it eventually needs more land – this is Swindon, more relaxed on big boxes and the work they bring than Oxford.
Unlike the Weston Library, the BSF is not open to visitors. Very few library members visit; there isn’t much point unless they need to go through a long series of books. But without the BSF, there would be no Weston Library, no fabulous new galleries.
Rather than reflect on this outside the BSF’s local Sainsbury’s, you are better served back in Oxford.
When you’re done with the Bodleian, Oxford is a good place to wander around, but the university also runs some great museums. The Museum of the History of Science is on the opposite site of Broad Street to the Weston, and is open midday to 5pm Tuesday to Sunday.
Also in the city centre: the Pitt Rivers Museum (archaeology and anthropology, 10am-4.30pm Tuesday to Sunday, midday-4.30pm Monday); the Museum of Natural History, (including dodo remains, 10am-5pm daily); and the Ashmolean Museum (collections from Ancient Greece and Egypt as well as art galleries, 10am-5pm Tuesday to Sunday).
Oxford also has the odd pub or 200. The King’s Arms right opposite the Weston, with decent food and pictures of the royal family drinking and pulling pints, is a good choice. The highly historic Turf Tavern is on the right off Holywell Street.
It is one of the ironies for visitors to Oxford that they often only see the outsides of buildings that have made the City’s name – those university buildings.
These are, after all, places of work.
Thankfully, the Bodleian has found a way to open up with its new Weston Library, and let those visitors in to see some of its most treasured items. Whatever you do while you’re there, though, just don't forget Swindon. ®
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Car: Parking in central Oxford is limited and difficult. There are a few on-street pay and display spaces on Broad Street, 50m from the Weston, but only for up slots of up to an hour. There is pay and display parking on neary by St Giles, too. It's best to park at one of the five cheap park and rides that surround Oxford and catch the bus in. Public transport: the Weston is about 20 minutes walk from Oxford’s train station and about 10 minutes from the main Gloucester Green coach station.
Marks of Genius is open 10am-5pm Monday to Saturday, 11am-5pm Sunday until 20 September 2015. The Weston galleries will display a permanent collection of treasures from December with temporary exhibitions. Entry is free.
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