The £17m LSF was built to house low-usage material and currently receives between 7,000 – 10,000 items for storage each week. Since 1710, the University Library has been one of six ‘legal deposit’ libraries entitled to receive material published in the UK and Ireland.

In the past, this material has been shelved around the Library, including its vast 17-storey tower and, despite electronic legal deposit being introduced in 2013, the library has been operating at near capacity for some time.

While most of the items in the LSF are legal deposit titles, Robin notes that another essential element of the project was to help relocate collections from Faculty and Department libraries with a shortage of space, and support University building projects that required the downsizing of a library.

The Ely store is currently receiving, on average, 58 requests a week for LSF items from readers - and requests are monitored to deem whether an item should be labelled as ‘low-usage’ or returned to general circulation. The LSF has a team of 30 working both in Ely and at the West Road site, helping to solve the enormous jigsaw puzzle of moving the vast amount of material selected to be housed at the LSF.

With valuable space in the library stacks slowly becoming available, the aim is to make the collections housed at the Library more accessible and current while allowing academic and other significant collections the space to grow. The project also plans to remove temporary cases that have been added over the years to restore the architectural integrity and aesthetics of the 1934 Giles Gilbert Scott building.

“In a Legal Deposit collection as large and nationally significant as Cambridge University’s, some of the collection will inevitably be considered lower use today” added James. “By proactively managing collections and moving this material to a dedicated off-site store, where full access can still be granted, the Library is able to respace those collections in greater use, increasing access and currency, and to repurpose space across libraries in Cambridge to directly support teaching and learning”.