Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries are a collection of approximately 40 libraries that serve the University of Oxford in England, including, most famously, the Bodleian Library itself, as well as many other (but not all) central and faculty libraries. Together, the libraries hold 11 million printed items, as well as numerous other objects and artefacts.

A major product of this collaboration has been a joint integrated library system, OLIS (Oxford Libraries Information System), and its public interface, SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), which provides a union catalogue covering all member libraries, as well as the libraries of individual colleges and other faculty libraries, which are not members of the group but do share cataloguing information.

Its busiest library is the Social Sciences Library, which, at its peak, serves 7,500 visitors in a period of approximately nine weeks.

Founded in February 2000 as Oxford University Library Services (OULS), the organisation was renamed on 2 March 2010.

The group now cares for some 11 million items on 117 miles of shelving, and has a staff of over 400. It is the second largest library in the UK (behind the British Library). The continued growth of the library has resulted in a severe shortage of storage space. Over 1.5 million items are currently stored in locations outside Oxford, including a disused salt mine in Cheshire. In 2007 and 2008, in an effort to obtain better and more capacious storage facilities for the library’s collections, Oxford University Library Services (OULS) tried to obtain planning permission to build a new book depository on the Osney Mead site, to the southwest of Oxford city centre. However, this application was unsuccessful and the new Book Storage Facility was instead constructed at a site on the outskirts of Swindon. This Book Storage Facility, which cost £26 million, opened in October 2010 and has 153 miles (246 kilometres) of shelving, including 3,224 bays with 95,000 shelf levels, and 600 map cabinets to hold 1.2 million maps and other items.

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