In our first visit outside of Cambridge, last week the trainees travelled to Ely for a tour of Cambridge University Library’s remote storage facility (LSF). The LSF is a large (but surprisingly difficult to find) warehouse with over 100 kilometres of shelving, designed to house books from the UL’s collection which are deemed both low use and low value. As a Legal Deposit Library, the UL is entitled to a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland, many of which are unlikely to be regularly consulted by readers and so are sent directly to the LSF (particularly non-academic monographs such as children’s fiction and cookbooks).

The LSF receives hundreds of books by van from the UL every day, which enter the facility via an airlock system to ensure the temperature inside the warehouse remains stable and cool enough for the books. There are currently 6 members of permanent staff at the LSF, one of whom is a librarian, and all of whom are warehouse operatives. On receiving the books they categorise them by size (shelving books according to size maximises space efficiency) and pack them into acid-free trays, which are then taken into the main part of the warehouse to be shelved. Here the trays are loaded onto cherrypickers so that staff can drive to the correct part of the warehouse, and reach even the highest shelves (the height of two adult giraffes!).

It was fascinating to see a library facility which functions so differently to our own college libraries, and to meet the team who work so hard to ensure that students both now and in the future have access to all the books they need, regardless of their obscurity.