Collection Moves News Bulletin
February
Periodicals embargo to
begin in June
As reported in previous issues of the
Collection Moves Reader Bulletin,
the large scale moves of hard copy
newspapers and periodicals from the
site at Colindale to storage facilities
in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, will
begin in earnest later this year.
The sequence of moves has been
phased to minimise the amount of
time that large parts of the collection
are unavailable – but given the scale
and complexity of the moves, some
disruption is inevitable. Each move
will be preceded by an embargo
period to allow the collection to
be prepared for moving.
The embargo period for the vast
majority of periodicals – around
24,000 titles – will begin on 10 June
2013. These items will then be moved
to the Library’s existing Additional
Storage Building (ASB) at Boston
Spa. The move is expected to take
around five months, after which these
periodicals will become available for
ordering at St Pancras.
A small number of high-use
periodicals will remain available at
Colindale for several months, until
the autumn. At that point, the next
phase of the embargo is expected to
begin: high-use periodicals, microfilm
collections, print newspapers and
Newspaper Reading Room reference
collections will be embargoed, prior
to large scale moves. It is at this stage
that the Colindale Reading Room
will close.
Stewart Gillies, Information Services
Manager at Colindale, said, “The
Colindale collection includes a
wide range of periodicals,
predominantly those published weekly
and fortnightly. These are mainly titles
at the popular end of the market or
titles related to trade.”
“The collection includes general
interest magazines, women’s
magazines, sport and leisure journals,
fashion magazines, TV listings
magazines, cinema and theatre
magazines, comics and trade papers.”
“While the bulk of periodical titles
we hold will be included in the
June 10 embargo, a list of around
a hundred titles classified as ‘highuse’ will remain available until the
autumn,” Stewart adds. “A full list of
these ‘high-use’ titles is available on
the website; Readers should assume
that any periodical title not included
on that list will be unavailable from
June 10.”
The list of ‘high-use’ periodical titles,
along with more information about
the moves programme and previous
issues of this newsletter, can be found
at: www.bl.uk/newspaper-moves
First glimpse inside the
Newspaper Storage Building
Tours of St
Pancras for
Colindale users
Just before Christmas, Culture
Minister Ed Vaizey MP, along with
a range of regional and national
media, was invited inside the new
Newspaper Storage Building (NSB) at
Boston Spa. The visit offered the first
– and possibly the last – look inside
the state-of-the-art storage facility
in advance of it being filled with
automated shelving over the course
of the coming months.
Are you a regular user of Colindale,
but haven’t yet been to St Pancras?
Later this spring we are offering
the first in a programme of regular
tours of the St Pancras building to
allow Colindale users to familiarise
themselves with the location,
collections and procedures of the site
in advance of the service moving
there later in the year.
The newspapers moving into the
NSB later this year will include more
than 300 years of local, regional and
national newspapers, totalling an
estimated 750 million pages. When
complete, the facility will have full
temperature and humidity control and
will enable the British Library’s print
newspaper collections to be kept in
archival standard conditions for the
first time ever.
The store will be dark and levels of
oxygen in the airtight storage void
will be reduced to eliminate fire risk.
No staff will enter the void, instead
relying on an automated storage
system to deliver items through
airlocks to an adjacent retrieval area.
The exterior of the building was
completed at the end of November
and the installation of the 20-metreshigh automated racking will continue
until Easter 2013, after which the
system will undergo extensive testing.
The first newspapers are expected to
go into the building in autumn 2013.
The national newspaper collection is
currently housed in the Newspaper
Library at Colindale, north London,
which is far from ideal as a storage
facility, having no temperature or
humidity control. Once the print
newspapers have moved to Boston
Spa, access to newspaper content will
be via microfilm or digital copies
made available in a dedicated Reading
Room at the Library’s main St Pancras
site. Where no copies exist, it will be
possible to request the print originals
from Boston Spa.
The Newspaper Storage Building’s
design is based on that of the
Additional Storage Building, which
opened at Boston Spa in 2009. Its size
and characteristics make it one of the
most remarkable library buildings in
the world:
•T he main storage void measures 24
metres high by 24 metres wide by 64
metres high;
• W hen complete, the facility will
store 33 linear kilometres of
newspapers;
• T he move from Colindale will
involve 290,000 bound volumes of
newspapers travelling to Boston Spa
over seven months, at a rate of three
articulated lorries per day;
• Temperature in the void will be a
constant 14 degrees C, and 55%
humidity to lengthen the life of
fragile newspaper;
• Oxygen levels in the void will be
reduced to 14.6% to eliminate the
risk of fire.
By stabilising the condition of the
collection, the Library will be able
to digitise many millions more
pages and make them available
online. Through its partnership
with online publisher brightsolid,
some six million pages have already
been made available via the British
Newspaper Archive website at: www.
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk. The
ten-year partnership will see up to 40
million pages digitised and put online
by the end of the decade.
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey MP tours the
NSB with British Library CEO Roly Keating
photo: © Kippa Matthews
A visit to the St Pancras site also
offers users the opportunity to
upgrade their current Newspaper
Library Reader Pass to a British
Library Reader Pass, which will
be necessary for them to have full
access to the collections held there
– including, from winter 2013-14,
newspaper collections.
You can find full information about
registering for a British Library
Reader Pass at: www.bl.uk/reshelp/
inrrooms/stp/register/stpregister.html
- we strongly recommend that you
pre-register online before your visit
and check that you have the necessary
documentation with you to be able to
register on the day.
“Regular users of Colindale might
not be aware that when the service
moves to the Library’s main reading
rooms at St Pancras, they will need
to upgrade to a full British Library
Reader Pass,” says Stewart Gillies,
Information Services Manager at
Colindale. “The tours offer them
the opportunity to do that, well in
advance of the move, while also
providing an introduction to all the
collections and facilities they’ll have
access to when we get there. Users
who have focused primarily on our
newspaper collections will find it very
useful – and, I hope, a bit of an eyeopener.”
The first tours of St Pancras will
take place on Tuesday 9 April 17:30
and Thursday 9 May 14:30. To book
your place, please write to:
[email protected] the Newspaper
Reading Room Enquiry Desk.
If you have any enquiries, please contact: [email protected]. The next issue of
the Collection Moves News Bulletin will appear in April 2013.