The Weston places its special collections at the heart of the library — that is to say, its core treasures of rare books, manuscripts, archives, music, ephemera and maps.. State-of-the-art fire suppression and climate control systems have been installed so the building is fit to store these precious documents. These items were previously stored in different locations across Oxford and beyond but they are now in the same place for the first time.

This allows students and researchers more contact with original material. Academics can book teaching rooms in the Weston Library and request that a manuscript is brought up for a lesson.

‘The Weston Library could change the way we teach,’ says Nicholas Cronk, professor of French literature at Oxford and the Director of the Voltaire Foundation.

‘I can ask a curator or conservator to talk about a particular manuscript to a class of graduate students. In the past libraries were a little like supermarkets. Now they are more like laboratories — you can go in there with students to research and teach from the special collections.’

‘Teaching students how to handle the collections has never been possible in this way,’ says Dr Martin Kauffmann, who heads a team of curators who specialise in the Bodleian’s Early and Medieval manuscripts. ‘Generations of students here have studied the Chanson de Roland — one of the great works of French literature — without realising that we have the earliest manuscript to survive in our collections.

‘Now we have students in their first term here turning the pages of books from the 16th Century. Whether they are inspired to become academics or they become venture capitalists, it is a really valuable experience.’

Could this endanger the books? ‘The handling is supervised but actually you tend to find that undergraduates are incredibly careful with the books because they are scared of damaging them,’ Martin says. ‘There is probably more danger from world-renowned professors who are so comfortable and familiar with the manuscripts! A lot of libraries worry about the over-handling rare books and manuscripts but the danger of under-handling is just as great.’

When it became possible to cheaply reproduced paintings and drawings in books and magazines in the early 20th Century, philosopher Walter Benjamin predicted people would no longer feel the need to visit the original Mona Lisa. The opposite happened. ‘I hope the more material we digitize online, the more people will be drawn into the library to see the physical things for themselves,’ says Christine Madsen. ‘It is really important that people still have access to the original physical material and that it doesn’t become for the elite.’

A short film from about digitisation at the Bodleian

Nicholas Cronk is determined to pass on his enthusiasm for original manuscripts to the next generation of researchers. ‘I recently came across a scan of a Voltaire play from the 18th century and I could not understand the writing,’ he says. ‘So I went to an archive in Paris to see the original and it turns out Voltaire simply wrote in black ink and someone responded to him in red crayon. The scan I had seen was in black-and-white.’ There are other advantages to seeing the original. Being able to feel the page not only gives a sense of the cost and quality of the paper, but it can also reveal whether or not a page has been replaced, which might suggest the original was censored. ‘It is vital that we do not lose these skills,’ says Nicholas.