Millions of books from the World famous Bodleian library are to be sent up the A420 to a gigantic purpose built warehouse that has just opened on the outskirts of Swindon.
The new £26m book storage facility on a 15-acre industrial estate in South Marston boasts over 150 miles of shelving, the racking equivalent of 16.5 football pitches, and can house up to 8.4 million books.
In an operation that is being dubbed "the largest movement of books since the British Library moved to Bloomsbury", over 6.5million books, 1million maps and 1,600 miles of microfilm will make the 28 mile trip to Swindon.
With the Bodleian collection expanding at a rate of 5,000 books per week and shelf space at a premium in Oxford, it is hoped the move to the vast new 'Swindon Bodleian' will resolve the library's storage problems for the next 20 years.
Boyd Roger, the BSF Manager said: "We're getting over 1,000 items every working day which means that we need the equivalent of three miles of shelving each year just to cope with the growth."
Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodley's Librarian agrees: "We've been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years but now we can look to the future with confidence."
Although the library's rarest and most valuable books including four copies of the Magna Carta, a Shakespeare First Folio and the original manuscript of Frankenstein won't be moving to Swindon...
...nearly 6.5m of the library's "low-demand" books will be transferred and with a daily van run from Swindon the books can be available in Oxford within 24 hours of a request.
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