Visitors to Ely may spot a new landmark on the city’s horizon aside from its famous 1,000-year-old cathedral –a vast, new state-of-the-art storage facility for millions of books belonging to Cambridge University Library and other university collections.

The £17m Library Storage Facility, which will be officially opened today (June 27) by Councillor Mike Rouse, the Mayor of Ely, as well as Cambridge University Librarian Dr Jessica Gardner, has been built to provide a perfect, climate-controlled environment across 65 miles of shelving (the distance between Cambridge and the Houses of Parliament) for its least-requested books – those deemed ‘low-use’.

Each row of shelving reaches a height of 11.5 metres, around the height of two adult giraffes.

The first book placed into the store was Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the nearly definitive edition, introduced by Richard Dawkins and Nick Harkaway (London, Heinemann, 2014).

Adams was a former student at St John’s College, Cambridge.

As a Legal Deposit Library since 1710, Cambridge University Library has been entitled to claim a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland for more than 300 years – and despite the introduction of electronic legal deposit in 2013 is now full to bursting point.

The vast scale of the University Library collections, which encompasses around nine million books and manuscripts, more than one million maps and 2.5 million titles on open shelving (the largest open access library in Europe), has been recently brought into focus by its Tall Tales exhibition – where highlights from the million-strong Tower Collections have gone on display for the first time.

However, it is not only the University Library which is set to benefit from the opening of the new facility at Lancaster Way in Ely – the new store will also help to solve overcrowding at many of Cambridge University’s departmental and faculty libraries, as well as help those spaces develop with the needs of students.